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Sabbath's Theater - Couverture rigide

Roth, Philip

 
9780395739822: Sabbath's Theater

Synopsis

Roth, Philip. Sabbath's Theater. Advance Reading Copy. Boston / New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995. 15.5 x 23cm. 451 pages. Original softcover. Excellent condition. This is Roth in full sardonic, outrageous cry - a sort of Portnoy for a later generation, gonads miraculously intact, but with an overlay of hard-won wisdom, celebration and regret. Mickey Sabbath is an elderly relic of the diabolical young puppeteer who was once arrested for coaxing a young Columbia student's breast out of her blouse with the sheer effrontery of his insinuating performing fingers. Now, living in obscure poverty in New Hampshire with a wife who's in aggressive recovery from the alcoholism to which he has driven her, he is reviewing his life - and continuing to act on his remarkable principles, which exemplify what one of his few remaining friends calls a remarkable panegyric for obscenity. Not, one would think, a sympathetic subject, and at first Mickey's overwhelming misanthropy and obsessive eroticism make the reader uneasy. Soon, however, Roth's insidious skill at deeply involving the reader in a seemingly alien world begins to work its magic. Mickey's memories of the death of his cherished older brother in WWII and his growing up on the Jersey shore; a visit he pays to a centenarian uncle; and the way he picks out a grave in the ratty Jewish cemetery where his family is laid - these are passages that could only be the work of a master novelist, profoundly funny, poignant and human. By the time Mickey has said goodbye to Drenka, in one of the most moving - and perverse - deathbed scenes in literature, then been arrested by her policeman son for lovingly urinating on her grave, it is clear there is nothing Roth cannot accomplish - and somehow turn into a seriocomic affirmation. [From Publishers Weekly]

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Biographie de l'auteur

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 PEN’s 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’. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.

Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.

Présentation de l'éditeur

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. At sixty-four Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

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