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2 internautes sur 2 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
5.0étoiles sur 5
"An Australia for Jews" - a sad core amidst fine satire, Avril 4 2003
Par Un client
This is a funny, satirical literary novel about the clownish mid-life crisis of a typical suburban Jewish New Jersey dentist - yes, it's Roth country! But at it's heart, in the Israel section of the book, the farce suddenly dies away: I found the sad, powerful tale of the character "Shuki" unexpectedly moving: Shuki, one of the original European settlers of Israel, who enthusiastically built Israel and fought in the front line through all the troubles, is now an exhausted, world-weary man. He sees all the talented Jews of the world settling in places like the USA, Canada, Britain and France, whereas forty years of unrelenting war have turned Israel (he says) into "an Australia for Jews," a place where the first rate don't emigrate to anymore, only the most hopeless come now, those without the skills or talent to get them into the First World, who must experience a day to day tension so profound it's like a recreation of the pogroms of Russia. Roth's stunning departure from the farcical aspects of his story and Shuki's blunt assessments hit the reader like a succession of boxer's blows, the reader lulled previously by all the fine satire and good story telling. Luckily, the farce returns quickly, and we're off for more crazy adventures with the suburban New Jersey dentist and his writer brother, but this is a unexpectedly a very powerful book, and though it came out a few years ago it is, of course, especially moving right now in these troubled times.Don't miss Roth's other novels if you like this one. I also recommend Dawn Powell's *The Golden Spur*, Simon Raven's *Alms For Oblivion* series, Sandor Marai's *Embers*, the poetry of Philip Larkin and Paul Theroux's *Kowloon Tong*. And all of Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen.
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2.0étoiles sur 5
Excessive, in a good and bad way, Sep 20 2003
Another book about Roth's Zuckerman characters (I haven't rad the others), The Counterlife is described on the back cover as "Roth's most radical work of fiction to date - about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them even willing to risk their lives to alter their destinies." Indeed, the book is 371 pages of characters analyzing and navel-gazing and dissecting ... the shiksa, Jewish identity and Jewishness, and the type of life they want to lead. Roth gets carried away with this subject-matter (he is at least saying too much if not overwriting), and if you're not one to find postmodern Judaism-and-Jewishness particularly interesting, then look elsewhere for a good read, but on the other hand, it will make you think, and you may also be carried away in the sheer excess of it all.
The book's structure is something else, multi-layered, self-referential and self-parodying, a story within a story. It is basically told in the first person, with some passages being the narration of the protagonist and others the writing of that protagonist, and the line between the two is perhaps blurry because he writes about himself. And letters, eulogies and diatribes abound. But I'll leave that to you to figure out.
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4.0étoiles sur 5
Slice of Life with a Twist, Nov. 26 2002
This meticulously observed slice of life showing the writer's motivations is Roth's Bildungsroman of a fresh new writer (a young Roth, no doubt) who has recently won an award studying for a few days in the country at the feet of his hoary idol (Saul Bellow?). But it is apparently Roth whose nature is incorrigibly promiscuous. The older writer has not only a devoted but aging wife but a young female houseguest chronicling his life along with the protagonist. Literary conversations alternate with veiled references to the erotic frustrations of matrimonial imprisonment combined with the lure of the fetching houseguest. The protagonist is told by the older writer ("It's like being married to Tolstoy," he says following his dejected wife out into the snow after an argument) that one does not simply leave a woman after thirty years because one wishes to see a new face while drinking his orange juice in the morning. Roth's literary erotic imagination goes to work in the book's middle after hearing snippets of a conversation that leads the reader to think, and him (or his protagonist Zuckerman) to imagine, that the fetching woman is the most famous Jewish writer of all time. And, no, he is not referring to God. A clever literary coming-of-age novel with a highly imaginative twist (I won't reveal it here) as well as the usual Rothian semitic and sexual obsessions-a slice of life with a twist.
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