Reviews

• 読んで損なし

  少々前半はスローで、最終的に何の関連があったのかしら？というような話がでてくるが、途中からはどんどん読める。多少各々の人物に作者の意図するキャラクターを入れ込みすぎ、典型的人物になりすぎているきらいもあるが、メッセージを送り込むためには必要なことだったのかも知れない。 ともあれ、アメリカ社会の断面 人間の性 どうしようもない事が存在する人生を成功したユダヤ系一家におこったできごとをとおして描いた好著である。 尚、原著の英語は、難解な単語 文語体が度々でてくる難しいものである。

• Ik heb het geprobeerd, maar kwam echt niet door die eerste hoofdstukken heen. Heb het boek dus netjes teruggelegd. Wie weet, voor later.

• BELLO ANCHE IN INGLESE

• Philip Roth’s Pulitzer prize-winning American Pastoral is beautifully written, deeply disturbing and at times offensively misogynistic. It is also bitter, angry, sharply incisive about the frailty and illusion of the American Dream – and, heart-breakingly tender about the ties that bind us, particularly the love of a parent for their child, however wayward, however lost. And, as well as all this, it is a fascinating series of challenges about the nature of writing and the nature of the writer. Roth throws down the gauntlet from the start, asking us not to forget that one of the central characters is his continuing alter-ego , Nathan ‘Skip’ Zuckerman. The story we reading, presented by Zuckerman, into the life of Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, Zuckerman’s childhood hero, is possibly Zuckerman’s invention. Certain events happen to Levov, but the reason they happened, the psychoanalytical unpicking of them, may be only the writer in the book (not to mention the writer of the book) shaping a chimera. Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, whose story Zuckerman tells, was a gifted athlete, an inheritor and emblem of the aspirational dream of America’s European immigrant community. Looking like a WASP, he is Jewish, his family, a generation or so back, by hard work, dedication and talent, rising in the Promised Land. Swede’s success at football, basketball and baseball, and his upright, hard-working personality have made him envied and adored, a kind of hero to others. One of whom is the slightly younger Zuckerman. Meeting again, in late middle age, it is now Zuckerman who has achieved fame, as a writer, and he is long past a time of adulating the seemingly much more simple character of a former sporting hero. Zuckerman in fact perceives the apparently settled straight as a die, unthinkingly patriotic, successful businessman, husband and father that Levov has become as a bit of a simp. The writer rather takes a position of intellectual, metropolitan, sophisticated arrogance. Though written in 1998, there are definite pointers and echoes here of the roots of our divided nation – both here and in the States, between the cultural intelligentsia and those who ‘seem’ as if they inhabit and engage with nuance less. Zuckerman indulges in various fantasies and theories, trying to worm behind the simple, satisfied persona Swede seems to represent. There are several writerly inventions Zuckerman engages in, each of which, again and again, proves wrong. Finally, Zuckerman, sophisticated in his cynicism, dismisses Levov “There’s nothing here but what you’re looking at. He’s all about being looked at……..He always was…..You’re craving depths that don’t exist……The guy is the embodiment of nothing” And then Zuckerman finds out how wrong, how very wrong he has been, and how he knew nothing of Swede, nothing of his life. Swede had reached adulthood and maturity shortly before the end of the Second World War. Enlisting as a marine, trying to meet the manly, right, patriotic challenge of the war, he was still going through boot-camp training when the bomb was dropped at Hiroshima. He took his desire to serve his country into the post-war world. A model citizen, her worked hard, had a developed awareness of social responsibility, married his childhood sweetheart, Dawn, entered and successfully ran the family glove-making business, and fathered a beloved daughter. Meredith, the daughter, was a teenager in the 60’s, at the time of the Civil Rights movement, resistance to Vietnam, and she became intensely radicalised, revolutionary. Merry, the apple of Swede's eye, committed a shocking and violent act whilst still at high school, and then went on the run, hunted as a terrorist. Swede’s family, marriage, business and life suddenly shattered. Belatedly discovering these events, Zuckerman then weaves this into story. He creates a narrative of motive, a narrative to ‘explain’ how this normal family, and privileged, loved child could have so violently changed. However……because of the constant reminders earlier in the book that narrator Zuckerman was inventing stories and sub stories which were wrong, Roth is reminding us that this too is narrative, story, invention. We know certain facts happened, but the interpretation of why Swede, Merry and Dawn got to where they did, may not be right. Zuckerman ‘blames’ a childhood event for Merry going to the bad – but the event is Zuckerman’s imagined narrative, and may never have happened. Going forward, to after Merry has gone underground, is a deeply disturbing, highly misogynistic section in the second part of the book, with the introduction of a young Jewish woman who may have been responsible for Merry’s violent radicalisation. This is a section distasteful to read, and highly unsettling – are we being shown an unconscious misogyny, particularly towards Jewish women, which comes from Roth himself, through his alter ego as Zuckerman – or is the author placing himself firmly and consciously on a slab, for the reader to dissect Roth himself? And then, at the point where the reader might think they have been able to negatively ‘get’ Roth himself, as the creator of all this, comes a section, where, after many years of searching for his vanished daughter in hiding from the law, Swede finds her, living in utter degradation, weirdly, most weirdly, transformed. This is a section of utter heartbreak, riven tenderness and almost unbearably painful humanity. Roth took my breath away in this raw exposure of all our suffering, poor, magnificent, broken complex humanity. Like Zuckerman with Swede, we get it wrong with each other, again and again. American Pastoral rightly won its Pulitzer prize. It is not in any way an easy book; it is a greatly, painfully challenging one – by turns horrible, horrific, stony, violent, hating and hateful – and full of compassion and suffering. Published in 1998, looking back over a roughly 50 year sweep, it is far from dated, and seems horribly pertinent today. I shall for sure, of Roth’s later work, though I am still, months after finishing this one, processing it.

• I'm an American-German dual national about to return to my native Germany after 21 years in the United States. During my last couple of months in the U.S., I wanted to read a novel that somehow captured the essence of America and was truly "about" America. So, naturally, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Roth novel called "American Pastoral" came to mind. And I was not disappointed--this novel felt incredibly authentic, and it expressed with poetic intensity and narrative drama something very real and palpable about what this nation is and what became of it between 1945 and 1975 (endpoint of the main narrative) and 1997 (narrative present from which the main narrative is told). What made the novel particularly moving for me was the rich realism: so many details resonated with me. E.g., one of the forlorn streets of 1970s Newark, where two lonely London plane-trees have survived from the days when these typical old-fashioned shade trees were cared for and treasured , when they sheltered pedestrians from the sun in an age when people would still walk the streets of their town. This image of the lone surviving plane-trees captures the death of pedestrian culture as well as the death of the kind of caring, stewardship, and craftsmanship that once pervaded every aspect of American life. I was reminded of the streets of Saint Louis, Missouri, where the sight of a few towering old plane-trees on an otherwise blighted block would sometimes speak to me eloquently of a beauty that has been lost. Or there's the high school athletics and the culture of school pride and the dime novels about baseball heroes, the chicken cacciatore, the Polish, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrant families with their different traditions and cuisines, the Old World Catholicism gradually watering down from one generation to the next, the sterility of a faux-rural atmosphere in an exurban area increasingly dominated by all-American car and television culture, a "countryside" where the old genuine folkways are lost forever, the culture of beauty pageants, the obsessive consumption of news, the noise and din and workings of a traditional factory in pre-Rust Belt America, the devastating pressures of globalization, and more. All of it deeply familiar to me, from the tales my American grandparents would tell me about their own factory days, or even from my own experience, and from my wanderings through the old declining cities of the Midwest, whcih I so love (and which, in some ways, have a lot in common with the declining New Jersey towns depicted in this novel). I was hoping this novel would not wallow in cliches about the supposedly brainlessly conformist 1940s and '50s, and it didn't--the era is not represented as particularly repressed, and its optimism, cultural coherence and relative "innocence" are explored with complex subtlety and with an awareness that the seismic shifts of change were already under way even then. The novel is a frank, honest, sincere, unsentimental elegy for the loss of American hopes and dreams, for an emerging American culture that disintegrated before it fully came into its own, and for all of those formerly proud industrial cities and formerly quaint rural towns that lost their souls and character in the course of the 20th century. The language is poetic and ravishing and carries you along with its vibrant rhythm, sweep and intensity. It is less lavish than, e.g. the poetic langauge of Updike, but that is not a defect--in fact, Roth feels more grounded, more precise, in some ways. And he never appears to ramble--despite its length of over 400 pages, the novel feels tightly and purposefully constructed, unlike the self-indulgently rambling Updike novel "Rabbit is Rich," for example. The 1960s are seen very critically--and, quite frankly, it is refreshing to see the revolutionary spirit of the era not being idealized. And yet, the novel does not come across as reactionary--in some ways, the novel does not let the preceding era off the hook for causing the explosiveness of the 1960s... Incredible novel! One of the truly memorable ones of the late 20th century, I would say. If time chooses wisely, this novel will be among the surviving texts we still read in 150 years...

• Adquiri este livro para aprimorar meu inglês. No entanto, achei a linguagem dele um pouco difícil para quem não tem o inglês como língua nativa. Depois de algumas páginas parece que o cérebro se ajusta e fica mais fácil. O dicionário do Kindle ajuda bastante, mas na próxima vez em que for adquirir livros em língua estrangeira vou pesquisar antes para saber se é adequado ao meu nível de conhecimento daquela língua.

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