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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dena's Complaint,
This review is from: Portnoy's Complaint (Paperback)
I haven't read such a disappointing book in my life (this year so far)! It started off interesting, funny, meaningful - I thought he'd go somewhere with it. Off the deep-end? Absolutely NOTHING was accomplished with this novel and I don't feel I've gained anything from it. The main character, Alexander Portnoy, simply recounts a series of sexual encounters - with women, glass milk bottles, pieces of raw meat - the whole book just turned into a farce, needling in on the same obsession over and over. Does everyone with an overbearing mother sexually assault raw animal flesh? If this is definitive Jewish-American literature, something is seriously wrong and a re-assessment should be in order. This garbage is going directly to my bird's cage. Better lining than literature. Philip Roth has to be the greatest self-loathing Jewish man alive, or at least one lucky enough to make a career out of it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
BORING,FLAT AND NOT AT ALL FUNNY,
By A Customer
This review is from: Portnoy's Complaint (Paperback)
Roth's style remindes me of occasions where people speak out loud to themselves when they are angry with a situation.It was very tiring for me to read a book thats written enntirely in this style.the impression you get is that this guy is hitting his head with a hammer to get ideas to fill the pages of this book instead of visiting a psychiatric and talk about his childhood.all those details about Jew families,thousands of horrible lines about sex that are supposed to be funny....writting diaries not for publication would be better for this writer.it was his only book i read and i dont intent to read more
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Too Many Complaints Here,
By
This review is from: Portnoy's Complaint (Paperback)
Like Charles Dickens, I had great expectations for this book. Well let me clarify that, Charles Dickens was fairly dead before this book was written and had he been alive, he may or may not had the desire to pick Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint", so let me qualify. Hearing the glowing reviews and seeing the listmania lists placing Roth's "Complaint" as a must read had me fairly in a frenzy to read this one. Does it stand out as a truly unique must-read from all the more than mediocre literature out there? I don't think so. That's not to say it has achieved mediocrity, it is somewhat above that. What a reader gets from "Portnoy's Complaint," is a window inside the psyche of a Jewish American boy come boy-man smothered by a truly overbearing mother and plagues throughout life by a sexual obsession that keeps him from being committed to a human relationship. His commitments seem to be centered around desires emanating somewhere about his mid-region and early on seem to be mostly of the self-satisfactory kind. This translates into adulthood to a dogged pursuit of shallow relationships with WASP-ish women. So, there is plenty of Freud infused throughout. And interestingly enough it transmogrifies into Jung, with Alexander Portnoy grasping the collective unconscious of his Jewish ethnicity getting back at the established American gentility through sex. If any of this makes you squeamish, you may want to steer clear. It was a book that definitely pushed the boundaries of the time in the 1960's but then again there was a whole cultural movement all about pushing the boundaries back then. However, like most boundary pushers of the times, we seemed to have lowered our tolerance for the racy and compared to literature today of the same ilk, Portnoy is fairly tame. Do you have to be Jewish to really "get" this book? Well, I'm not and there was probably 10% of the book that went right over or around my head. Yiddish references were completely lost on me, but through repeat word usage most readers can probably get the gist. Portnoy's is kind of like a mix of Woody Allen and Henry Miller. It's short and written with an inner voice of a psychotherapy recipient spewing forth from the coach of self-analysis. It's a good piece of literature, but I'm not so sure about a great one. Read this is you are interested in what it may be like to be a Jewish-American man growing up in an oppressive family atmosphere. Read this if you want a good chuckle at sometimes raunchy but talented writing. If these things don't appeal to you at this time, move on to other reads on your list of literary desires.
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