PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Everyman
A spare novel that follows a man's recollections of aging, illness, regret, and death to draw out a broader sense of loss and forgiveness.
Work Information
A spare novel that follows a man's recollections of aging, illness, regret, and death to draw out a broader sense of loss and forgiveness.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Published
- 2006-05-09
- Pages
- 192 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.61 x 1.27 x 19.69 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780618735167
- ISBN-10
- 061873516X
- Price
- 4707 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Literary
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. The terrain of this powerful novel -- Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century -- is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.
In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004. Recently Roth received PENs two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for a body of work of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose scale of achievement over a sustained career places him or her in the highest rank of American literature. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
Reviews
-
プレゼントしました。
プレゼントに買いました。喜んでいたのでよかったです。内容が気になりますね。:)
-
It was time to worry about oblivion.It was the remote future.
荒廃したユダヤ人墓地での参列者もまばらな＜彼＞の葬儀から始まり、＜彼＞の全人生の断片（病と晩年と３度の結婚・離婚と家族）が語られていく。葬儀では娘によって彼の処世訓<There's no remaking reality.Just take it as it comes.>が披露されるのだが。それに相応しい＜彼＞の厳かな晩年が描かれるのか・・・・・ん、何か違うぞ。失敗した３度の結婚に対する無責任な弁明と、幼い頃より敬愛してた健康な兄に対する理不尽な嫉妬、その他あらゆる『負の感情』が軽快なリズムで縦横無尽に綴られる。 ＜彼＞は広告会社でcreative directorとして成功し晩年は海辺のretirement villageに転居。念願だった絵を心行くまま描きながら時に住民のために絵画教室を開きながら一人で悠々自適に暮らしてるはずなのだが。最終的には<Old age isn't a battle;old age is a massacre.>という境地に至ってしまう。どうして？ 幼い頃の＜彼＞は父の貴金属店<通称Everyman's Jewelry Store>でせっせとお手伝いをし店員さんや家族の誰からも愛される。壊れた時計をガチャゴチャいじってる可愛い少年の姿が目に浮かぶ。そんな少年が＜彼＞になるなんて！ 50歳の時に思いっきり「はまった」デンマーク人モデルの＜little hole＞と引き換えに別れたのが正に良妻賢母の２番目の妻と、彼女との子供である心優しい最愛の娘。 悲しすぎると愚かすぎると可笑しくなるし泣きたくもなる、そんな「おとぼけ」の効いた重い想いの染み渡る粋な小品。
-
Commencé au retour de l'enterrement de son ami Saul Bellow, le roman commence précisément par la scène de l'inhumation pour ensuite retracer le parcours de vie de son personnage, petit juif du New Jersey avec des parents aimants et un père exemplaire; c'est dans ces mêmes lieux qu'il achève son existence dans un village pour retraité où il s'est éloigné de la vie plus tumultueuse à Manhattan et des membres de sa famille. Le corps souffrant, la maladie et la mort parcourent l'ensemble de ce petit roman bouleversant qui n'épargne le lecteur que par le presque non-dit d'une vie sociale et amicale bien remplie. Certes, l'analyse sans concession de la vie amoureuse et familiale du narrateur fait entrevoir ses erreurs et ses échecs mais ses bonheurs aussi, avec une fille aimante et lumineuse. C'est seul pourtant, sans prévenir son entourage, qu'il se rendra à l'hôpital pour une ultime opération du coeur, ce magnifique organe qu'il ne cesse de faire réparer; cette fois, il le sait, il ne se réveillera pas.
-
Prodotto perfetto, spedizione veloce.
-
buen libro, reflexivo
-
Still at the peak of literary creation, Roth creates another masterpiece. This masterpiece is a special one. The autobiographical element is tantamount. The experiences related are closely aligned with Roth's real life. The realization and articulation that Roth has Never been happy is interesting and explicit. It makes the novel particularly fascinating as it gives the reader a look at some of the reasons why Roth's fiction is the way it is. Roth finally after 3 divorces and several operations starts to focus on the horror of the last days of his life. He begins to take inventory of the events that have come before him and what he did with them and how he created his world. While he is often unrepentant for what seems like rather selfish motivations; he is also cognizant that much of the anguish he is experiencing and will experience is truly of his own making. It is sometimes said that Roth is careless with his characters. That is as true of this book, as it is of any of his books. Characters are created, loved, used, abused and cast aside. Sometimes, they are even killed off by Roth without a bit of remorse or regret. The focus of the book is Roth, and really ONLY Roth. Yet because of Roth's shocking brilliance as a writer, the reader is compelled to hear and try to understand his story. But the reader is challenged to ignore what now seems to be an immutable fact. Roth is careless with his characters; because he was careless with his own life. This absolutely incredible memoir is so poignant and so graphic as to leave one staring into space every 10 or 20 pages. That is Roth at his usual best. That is Roth taking the reader, even kicking and screaming as the case may be, into his world and showing the reader what he sees. It is important that Roth does this, for regardless of his faults and virtues, he is surely right in one contention at least. Everyman and woman does get old. Everyman and woman does die. He will be no exception. This book is phenomenally written and because Everyman and woman will experience the process in their own way; the book is recommended for every man and woman's reading. It is truly one of Roth's finest works.
-
Mais uma obra prima de Philip Roth. Um romance até que curto, mas que consegue abordar aspectos universais da vida e da morte, sem ser macabro.