The Breast
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Product Description
Book Description
'Roth is a living master' Harold Bloom
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth's richly conceived fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis—a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is one of my favourite Roth fictions and has the sort of funny, mad, energetic exuberance of Portnoy's Complaint, while being much more absurd and surreal in its premise. There is nothing else quite like it in Roth's oeuvre. From the opening line 'It began oddly.', you are drawn into a first-person story told by David Kepesh, a literary professor (and the principal character of two subsequent and much better known fictions by Roth, The Professor Of Desire, and The Dying Animal). It is wonderfully comical, addresses both serious and fantastical issues, and all the while is utterly intriguing and intelligently done.
David Kepesh, as the title of the novella makes clear, finds himself turning into a human breast, '[...] an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; [...] weighing one hundred and fifty-five pounds [...] and measuring, still, six feet in length.' The story deliberately and knowingly plays on two classic stories of the absurd: Kafka's most famous and brilliant, The Metamorphosis (Dover Thrift), in which Gregor Samsa struggles, denies, and agonises over coming to terms with his turning into a beetle, and Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, an equally absurd tale, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, where the character, Major Kovalyov, finds his nose abandons his face one day, and begins to assume a life of its own, much to Kovalyov's chagrin.
While Roth could have made this story simply absurd and comical (and it succeeds on those levels alone, especially the relentless, obsessive sexual fantasies and agonies Kepesh experiences, wanting to have intercourse and oral sex using his nipple), what is impressive is the serious, angst-ridden, matter-of-fact way in which Kepesh tries vainlessly, and painfully, to rationalise his situation, believing at one point that he is simply dreaming, another that he is suffering some terrible mental breakdown, and even that, because he believes he taught Gogol and Kafka's work with such conviction, it resulted in him becoming a breast (a lovely satiric dig at Kepesh's/certain academics' belief in their own brilliance and their ability to make an impact on their world through teaching).
Highly recommended for fans of the absurd, fantastical, and joyfully original fiction. The only caveat - frankly, a gripe - is the cost of this novella (as well as other paperback editions); after all - 96 pages for £7.99 RRP, admittedly generously discounted by 30% by Amazon to £5.59. Ok, perhaps it's not the 'quantity', but the 'quality' that counts, but I would normally hope that, for this sort price and paltry number of pages, you'd expect a beautiful physically object/high-quality edition, such as those by, for example, Hesperus Press and Europa, with their French wrapper jackets and quality paper. But please don't take this moan as a justification not to purchase the title - it really is such an original, terrific read, it's still worth the price, as far as I'm concerned!
David Kepesh, as the title of the novella makes clear, finds himself turning into a human breast, '[...] an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; [...] weighing one hundred and fifty-five pounds [...] and measuring, still, six feet in length.' The story deliberately and knowingly plays on two classic stories of the absurd: Kafka's most famous and brilliant, The Metamorphosis (Dover Thrift), in which Gregor Samsa struggles, denies, and agonises over coming to terms with his turning into a beetle, and Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, an equally absurd tale, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, where the character, Major Kovalyov, finds his nose abandons his face one day, and begins to assume a life of its own, much to Kovalyov's chagrin.
While Roth could have made this story simply absurd and comical (and it succeeds on those levels alone, especially the relentless, obsessive sexual fantasies and agonies Kepesh experiences, wanting to have intercourse and oral sex using his nipple), what is impressive is the serious, angst-ridden, matter-of-fact way in which Kepesh tries vainlessly, and painfully, to rationalise his situation, believing at one point that he is simply dreaming, another that he is suffering some terrible mental breakdown, and even that, because he believes he taught Gogol and Kafka's work with such conviction, it resulted in him becoming a breast (a lovely satiric dig at Kepesh's/certain academics' belief in their own brilliance and their ability to make an impact on their world through teaching).
Highly recommended for fans of the absurd, fantastical, and joyfully original fiction. The only caveat - frankly, a gripe - is the cost of this novella (as well as other paperback editions); after all - 96 pages for £7.99 RRP, admittedly generously discounted by 30% by Amazon to £5.59. Ok, perhaps it's not the 'quantity', but the 'quality' that counts, but I would normally hope that, for this sort price and paltry number of pages, you'd expect a beautiful physically object/high-quality edition, such as those by, for example, Hesperus Press and Europa, with their French wrapper jackets and quality paper. But please don't take this moan as a justification not to purchase the title - it really is such an original, terrific read, it's still worth the price, as far as I'm concerned!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
16 reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Identifying with the absurd
19 Dec 2006
Format:Paperback
What should David Kepesh make of the fact that he's been transformed into a human breast? That's the premise of this Kafkaesque short novel (perhaps better thought of as a long short story). And of course as Kepesh deals with his own identity crisis (after the to-be-expected "why me!?" outburst, he questions the nature of reality, thinks he might just be insane, and finally is forced to face the fact that he indeed is a breast), other characters must deal with his transformation as well. Some of the most humorous scenes involve his academic colleague sending him tapes of "Hamlet" and his father acting as if his son is just suffering from a temporary illness. Although carrying it too far into the extreme, Roth's point in the book is that nothing in life is a sure bet, and that the totally absurd often becomes one's reality and must be accepted as such. Point well taken, but as a novel there isn't much else going on besides Kepesh accepting and internalizing this single idea, which makes it better thought of as a short story. Good, but not a major Roth achievement.
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Roth does Kafka
28 May 2001
Format:Paperback
More a curiosity than great literature, and certainly not representative of the best Roth has to offer as a novelist. For that, you're better off picking up a copy of "American Pastoral". What works here is the sheer audacity of Roth's style and the effortless flow of his narrative.
"The Breast" is the first in a trilogy completed by the recently published "The Dying Animal". Professor of comparative literature David Kepesh wakes up one day to discover himself in the hospital, having been transformed into a 155-pound female breast. The ensuing 89 pages depict his rationalization for such a sudden and drastic change, his trying to convince himself and others - his girlfriend, his father, his doctor, and a university mentor - that he has only gone insane, and his quest to satiate an ever-present, raging libido.
None of this really amounts to much and it certainly isn't great literature. I kept expecting it all to come to some elevated meaning. It doesn't. But that aside, I did enjoy reading it, found myself cracking a grin or two, and as ever with Roth, I was in awe of the flow of his narrative and the strength of his voice.
It's an hour or two's diversion but by no means much more than that. Bottom line - not bad, but not earth-shakingly good. For that, crack open "American Pastoral", which is in my opinion one of the greatest American novels of the 2nd half of the 20th century.
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Slight but worthwhile
19 Sep 2001
Format:Paperback
Ah, Phillip Roth. The dirty old man of American literature; if he didn't exist, someone would have surely created him. Ironically enough, that someone would probably be one of the people who find him and his work to be terribly offensive. At times, Roth seems to be writing specifically to offend, as if he knows that without his dirty thoughts, a lot of self-appointed puritans would have a lot less outrage to keep their days active. Certainly, The Breast is a book that superficially seems to be designed specifically to offend delicate sensibilities. The book's narrator wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into a huge female breast. The rest of this rather short book (I completed it in a little less than an hour) is devoted to detailing how this one man adjusts to his new life as a breast. Though Roth never goes for any glib explanations as to how or why this transformation took place, one can't help but get the feeling that the narrator -- so obsessed with sex -- finally just transformed into that which he had become fixated. However, one can't also help but feel that this explanation is a result of reading too much into Roth's whimsical, deadpan fable.
Anyway, as for the meat-and-bones of this review, this is a book that I have to recommend to all Phillip Roth fans and to anyone with an affinity for bizarre, off-center satire. If you don't like Roth, you probably won't care much for this book. As well, this is not a book to read if you're looking for an introduction to Phillip Roth. Though amusing, its certainly not anywhere near his best work.
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