As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes'. Little does he realise how prophetic this motto will be - or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of his childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremely intelligent, affecting and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire. (19950608)
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Review
A thoughtful...elegant novel...A fine display of literary skills (New York Times Book Review )
No one writing can juggle the somber and the ludicrous more adroitly than Roth (The Time )
Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism (Milan Kundera )
A profound and commanding book... There is great beauty in it, humanity and tenderness (Sunday Telegraph )
He writes so well. His prose is both elegant and furious. It can be witty, tender and brutal in a single paragraph (Melvyn Bragg ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
No one writing can juggle the somber and the ludicrous more adroitly than Roth (The Time )
Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism (Milan Kundera )
A profound and commanding book... There is great beauty in it, humanity and tenderness (Sunday Telegraph )
He writes so well. His prose is both elegant and furious. It can be witty, tender and brutal in a single paragraph (Melvyn Bragg ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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A deceptively simple story that raises profound questions about love and loss.
--This text refers to an alternate
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
I have read most of Philip Roth's books and I come to each one with a feeling of dread that this time, maybe he won't live up to my ever climbing expectations. This book is however, as ever, truly exceptional. Deceptively simple, a story of one man and his relationships it manages to ring true and bring a depth to the characters, events and thoughts it raises that few other recent books I have read can match. Well no other philip roth books actually. Read it and enjoy.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Written in 1977, this is the second book by Philip Roth featuring David Kepesh, here a young man who is starting his career as a literature professor. As he pursues different women in different continents, the question always in his mind is if he should settle for marriage and love or for sex without commitment. A side trip to Prague is not only a homage to Kafka but one of the best passages of the book. By the next installment of Kepesh in the Dying Animal, written almost a quarter century later, he is a man in his sixties, who has chosen to live without a commitment and therefore now feels lonely and vulnerable to young women. Roth's stream of consciousness style is sometimes infuriating but often illuminating about the conflict between love and desire after the sexual revolution. Reading Roth can help you develop a quite realistic understanding of many aspects of the contemporary world, even if you find such aspects quite appalling.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.1 out of 5 stars
12 reviews
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An homage to Franz
19 April 2000
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Philip Roth's 1972 novella, "The Breast", a take-off on Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis", introduced us to David Kepesh, a professor of Literature, who one morning wakes to find himself transformed into an enormous mammary. David Kepesh reappears as the title character of Roth's 1979 novel, "The Professor of Desire". Besides borrowing characters from the earlier story, Roth works in lots of references to Kafka, includes a long episode describing Kepesh's pilgrimage to Kafka's grave in Prague, and at one point compares Kepesh's relation to his body to K.'s relation to the authorities of "The Castle":
". . . I can only compare the body's single-mindedness, its cold indifference and absolute contempt for the well-being of the spirit, to some unyielding, authoritarian regime. And you can petition it all you like, offer up the most heartfelt and dignified and logical sort of appeal - and get no response at all. If anything, a kind of laugh is what you get."
I wasn't able to buy all this Kafka business. To me it seemed pasted-on and extrinsic to the spirit of the rest of the novel. But this is quibbling. "The Professor of Desire" is a delightful story, in which Philip Roth exuberantly displays his many quite un-Kafkaesque gifts. First among them is a magical gift for characterization; it seems that every character in this novel, and there are many, springs effortlessly to life as a complete individual, from Herbie Bratasky on the first page to Mr. Barbatnik on the last.And then there's Roth's eerie gift for dialogue. His characters' words seem always to flow from their own personalities, not the author's, and their speeches are often masterpieces of comic invention.
Though perhaps it falls short of Roth's best, this is a wonderful book. I heartily recommend it.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Finally, a Roth novel I like!
2 Aug 2005
By JR Pinto
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
This is the first novel by Philip Roth that I actually like. Portnoy's Complaint was a good hundred-page novella, spread out over a three-hundred page book; the other pages were filled with the dross of his political opinions, and his kvetching about his parents. Operation Shylock was also too pre-occupied with pushing a political agenda (but just what agenda, we are never sure). This is Roth's primary fault as an author - he is too didactic. I find that I really don't care much about what Roth's political opinions are. Ironically, this is probably one of the attributes that make him a critical darling - it shows that he thinks "deep thoughts."
The Professor of Desire is blessedly free of politics. In it, Roth sticks with the subjects he knows best: sex and relationships. Young David Kepesh is a sexually frustrated young student. That changes while studying abroad in Swinging London, where he finds that what they say about Swedish girls is true. Things take a turn for the worse after the end of his disastrous marriage finds him crushed by loneliness in New York. With the help of a psychiatrist, Kepesh tries to discover if he will ever be able to commit to anyone or experience happiness.
The Professor of Desire finds Roth at a more mature place in his career. Gone is the odious kvetching about his parents that polluted so much of Portnoy's Complaint; the parents in this book are treated with sympathy. At one point, a character points out to Kepesh that there is no point in mining the workings of a Jewish family for his fiction anymore. He is also less homophobic in this novel - but not much so. There are still things about Roth's style that take getting used to; I don't think there's anything profound in his refusal to offset dialogue into separate paragraphs - it just makes it harder to keep track of who is speaking. However, The Professor of Desire is a short, lyrical novel that is the best of anything I've read of his so far.
The Professor of Desire is blessedly free of politics. In it, Roth sticks with the subjects he knows best: sex and relationships. Young David Kepesh is a sexually frustrated young student. That changes while studying abroad in Swinging London, where he finds that what they say about Swedish girls is true. Things take a turn for the worse after the end of his disastrous marriage finds him crushed by loneliness in New York. With the help of a psychiatrist, Kepesh tries to discover if he will ever be able to commit to anyone or experience happiness.
The Professor of Desire finds Roth at a more mature place in his career. Gone is the odious kvetching about his parents that polluted so much of Portnoy's Complaint; the parents in this book are treated with sympathy. At one point, a character points out to Kepesh that there is no point in mining the workings of a Jewish family for his fiction anymore. He is also less homophobic in this novel - but not much so. There are still things about Roth's style that take getting used to; I don't think there's anything profound in his refusal to offset dialogue into separate paragraphs - it just makes it harder to keep track of who is speaking. However, The Professor of Desire is a short, lyrical novel that is the best of anything I've read of his so far.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A must-read for Roth enthusiasts
23 April 2003
By "andybudo"
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
David Kepesh, the aforementioned professor, towards the end of "Professor of Desire," contemplates the introductory lecture he is to deliver to his class on comparative literature:
"Indiscreet, unprofessional, unsavory as portions of these disclosures will surely strike some of you, I nonetheless would like, with your permission, to go ahead now and give an open account to you of the life I formerly led as a human being. I am devoted to fiction, and I assure you that in time I will tell you whatever I may know about it, but in truth nothing lives in me like my life."
This passage may as well be an introduction to this book, one of Roth's most potent and stirring novels from his earlier days. Through the chronicles of David Kepesh's early life, Roth examines the paradoxes of love and desire, the bridges between literature and life, and our nearly-lunatic search for identity.
In this book, we follow Roth's familiar character David Kepesh from his childhood in the Catskills hotel owned by his parents, to a post-college year of sexual freedom in Scandinavia, to a tempestuous/disastrous marriage to Helen Baird, followed by a winter of despair, and concluding with his relationship with Claire Ovington, marked by a love that is blemished by waning desire.
In the end, although more questions are posed than can ever be answered, Roth's novel can resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with the mysteries of love and self-discovery - namely, everyone. And along the way, the reader can revel in the wit, wry humor, and intellect adored by every Roth fan.
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4.1 out of 5 stars
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