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Counterlife
  
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Counterlife (Hardcover)

by Philip Roth (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover
  • Publisher: San Val (Aug 1996)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1417718978
  • ISBN-13: 978-1417718979
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product Description

From the Publisher

'No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation with such a dense load of mediating intelligence-Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly' John Updike, New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1987) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars "We are all each other's authors", 2 Jun 2009
By M. Witcombe "mikethescottish" (Glasgow, Scotland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Counterlife (Paperback)
'The Counterlife' doesn't really 'fit in' to the Roth canon in the same way that a lot of his books do, which is probably one of the reasons it ranks among his best. But let's try...

"Kicking off with a slice of doomed sexual adventure that recalls the abrupt, majestic realism of 'The Human Stain', the novel ends up nearer the manic playful energy of 'Operation Shylock', with a dollop of the character-study astuteness of 'Sabbath's Theatre' thrown in. Oh, and don't forget the cunningness of 'Deception'.

It's odd- as dense as it undoubtedly is, it can also serve as a good all-round introduction to Roth's work."

Confused? I'll try a less referential approach:

"The real genius of 'The Counterlife' lies in its subversive rendering of fiction as biography. 'Operation Shylock', a later novel, takes the idea of the double and takes it to the limit of comic absurdity, whereas 'The Counterlife' multiplies itself indefinately, ending up as an anarchic mess that refuses to be pinned down, that refuses to 'tell it straight'. Yet, somehow, it holds together. It works.

However, this is not a novel for those seeking a linear plot line with stable character and tidy storylines. This is a frustrating novel, a maddening novel. A novel that demands you take it seriously- then laughs at you for doing so. Which isn't to say its without pathos, or richly-drawn characters, or that it simply careers from extreme to extreme. Its playfulness is the consequence of its sense of frustration at the insufficiency of a simple, linear series of events. And the novel's wariness of 'truth' masks a structure as clinical and precise as the operation that becomes its core event."

Both of my attempts may sound like so much literary waffle, but there's no easy way to describe this novel- nothing stable enough to fix praise on. But surely there can be no higher recommendation than being as lost for words as the book itself is lost in them?

Whatever- it's amazing, read it.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Roth lets himself down, too clever and in the end boring., 9 Sep 2009
By Ransen Owen "ranseno" (Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Counterlife (Paperback)
I've read and loved many Philip Roth books, The Human Stain, American Pastoral etc. But this book was disappointing because it was so confusing and "clever". As you read you are never sure if you are reading the invented story or a brother about another brother or the confessions of one brother to another, or lies lies lies.

Which means that, in the end, you don't care what happens.
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