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The Counterlife
 
 
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The Counterlife (Paperback)

by Philip Roth (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 21.00
Price: CDN$ 15.33 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
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Product Description

From Amazon.com

The saga of Henry and Nathan Zuckerman continues, 13 years after novelist Nathan Zuckerman first appeared in Roth's 1974 effort, My Life as a Man. In The Counterlife, the dentist Henry suffers an unsettling--and for Roth, a predictable--side effect to his heart medication: impotence, which leads him to undergo an ill-fated operation. The multi-layered plot line travels from New York to London to Israel, while the characters undergo a series of surprising transformations. In the words of Nathan, a change in one's life causes "a counterlife that is one's own anti-myth." It's vintage Roth.

From Library Journal

One of Roth's "Zuckerman" books, The Counterlife follows protagonist Nathan Zuckerman from New York to Israel to London. "Along the way, monologues, eulogies, letters, interviews, and conversations ponder Judaism and Zionism, the nature of personality, the competing claims of imagination and life, and sex" (LJ 2/15/87).
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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The Counterlife
79% buy the item featured on this page:
The Counterlife 4.5 out of 5 stars (13)
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Customer Reviews

13 Reviews
5 star:
 (10)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
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1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars "An Australia for Jews" - a sad core amidst fine satire, April 4 2003
By A Customer
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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2.0 out of 5 stars Excessive, in a good and bad way, Sep 20 2003
By T. Graf (New England) - See all my reviews
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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4.0 out of 5 stars Slice of Life with a Twist, Nov 26 2002
By Dorion Sagan (East Coast, USA and Toronto) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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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 		 Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Universal Piece of Literature- A MUST READ
The Counterlife - By Philip Roth My review: By Aglae Mizrahi.

I encountered Philip Roth's genius of intellect and understanding of social behavior by way of "The Counterlife",... Read more

Published on July 11 2002 by Aglae Rodríguez de Mizrahi

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting technique, and moving as well
In the Counterlife, Roth manages both to play with the concept of the novel while still creating interesting, believable characters. Read more
Published on Sep 3 2001 by R. H OAKLEY

5.0 out of 5 stars metafictional masterwork
This playful and profound installment in the Zuckerman trilogy took me entirely by surprise. Seemingly out of the blue, the novel transforms from the usual Roth to a deeply... Read more
Published on Oct 13 2000 by Al Kihano

2.0 out of 5 stars Dull. Vulgar. Tries to be clever. Fails.
One of the problems with metafiction is that once you realise you're reading a novel featuring the clever gimmickry of characters meeting their authors and so on, it all becomes... Read more
Published on May 19 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars His best ever
This is a work of pure genius, a literary three-dimensional chess game. His best work ever.
Published on April 20 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars Roth's Best Book
Though PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT still hits me on a more personal level, I think I can state without hesitation that THE COUNTERLIFE is his finest work. Read more
Published on Sep 20 1999

5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Universal Piece of literature. A must for everyone.
The Counterlife - By Philip Roth My review: By Aglae Mizrahi.

I encountered Philip Roth's genius of intellect and understanding of social behavior by way of "The... Read more

Published on Aug 7 1999

5.0 out of 5 stars Philip Roth's The Counterlife - A Quest for Identity
Philip Roth is one of the most highly acclaimed Jewish-American writers of our time, and The Counterlife confirms his skill as a craftsman and a philosopher on Jewish matters... Read more
Published on Nov 30 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars This is the best book I have ever read.
I have read The Counterlife three times. It is the best work of fiction I have ever read. Philip Roth is at his best. The book is magical.
Published on Nov 30 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars A book about loss of innocence
The Counterlife is a splendidly written and multi-layered book, one that forces the reader to refocus its reading as the book expands its meaning in deeper and larger territories... Read more
Published on Nov 16 1998

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