Rating: 
Summary: What struck me is the hypocricy
Review: A friend of mine warned me I could not handle this book, but I read it, anyway, and I found I could not only handle it, but I had much to gain from the insights. First, of course, is the obvious juxtaposition between youth and old age, the fleetingness of one and the wisdom (or perceived wisdom) of the other. But what caught my eye was all the hypocricy. (Hypocrisy? Darn the spelling!) For example, David Kepesh, our narrator, bemoans the fact that his beautiful and youthful Consuela has had other lovers, then blythly reveals that even as he is seeing her, he is seeing someone else. (After all, HE can have the freedom the 1960s promises, but what about everyone else?) As for his son, the hypocricy is so glaring, I'll let you read about it for yourself. For a small book, this packs a powerful punch, and I especially like the powerlessness of Kepesh when he is on his knees in front of Consuela, but again, you'll have to read that for yourself.
What is not clear, though, is why Consuela holds so much power over him. She may have a perfect body, but Kepesh seems to want something more from his women. Then again, maybe he is that shallow.
Rating: 
Summary: The return of David Kepesh: Eros v Death
Review: A noteworthy feature of contemporary American fiction was the resurgence of Philip Roth. Eight marvellous books in a row. His trio of experimental novels: The Counterlife (that gives post modernism a good name); Deception; and Operation Shylock; the intensely moving biography, Patrimony; for this reader the finest novel of the 1990s, Sabbath's Theater, a nihilistic masterpiece of sex, death and despair; and the new Zuckerman trilogy dissecting post war America, American Pastoral; I Married a Communist; and The Human Stain. Could this great run continue? Sadly, not. The Dying Animal is a disappointment. Written in a first person narrative it reintroduces David Kepesh, a Professor of English. Kepesh is the man that transformed into a breast in Roth's Kafkan fable, The Breast; and detailing the sexual life of a literary academic in Professor of Desire. Kepesh is a creation of the 1960s, and this new novella indicates that kepesh has not progressed very far. In order to beat off notions of his mortality Kepesh seduces students (although in a concession to the passage of time, Kepesh no longer seduces them when students, having the decency to wait until they pass through his class). This brings a whole new meaning to the concept in modenr education of the Staff-Student Liaison Committee. In his monologue, addressed to a listener revealed only in the final paragraphs, Kepesh remembers various lovers concentrating on Consuela, a Cuban emigree. The intense relationship between the two, and Consuela's subsequent absence and the effect on Kepesh, forms the crux of the novel. The novella is very readable. Roth remains a wonderful stylist. But, as he has been subject to on previous occasions Roth is criticised for pronography. This novella is not in my view pornographic. Certainly there are passages that are explicit, but far more pornographic is Kepesh's relationship with Birgitta in The Professor of Desire - Birgitta, like The Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint, being a girl that would do anything. The abusive nature of that relationship is pornographic. The relationships here are not like that (although the ostensible power imbalance inherent in sexual relationships in some recent Roth novels remains). While sex plays a role in the novella it is not its main focus. Kepesh is worried about growing old, worried about death. One Scottish poet, Norman MacCaig, said the thing that upsetted him most about growing old was that all his friends were dying. Ditto, for Kepesh, and so Roth - as he did in The Conterlife and Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain, wrestles with death. Sexual activity is used as a means of keeping mortality at bay. Love is not what keeps Kepesh going, sex is. This not only underpins the septugenarian Kepesh's life, but also the lives of his friends, even to the death bed. Kepesh's stroke-ridden friend, a serial adulterer, gropes his wife in his last concerted physical act. One interesting theme developed in the novella is the relationship between Kepesh and his son (another of these father/son relationships beloved by Roth's writing - see the first Zuckerman trilogy - and his reading - such as his praise of John le Carre's A perfect spy). The son's stumbling path into adultery (based on love) acts as a neat counterpoint to Kepesh's serial philandering. I think this book merits discussion, much thought. Roth is a serious writer after all. But, why the relatively low rating? For me, there are two principal reasons. This novella simply revisists themes he has explored before, in more depth, with more rounded characters. Kepesh's trials here mirror those of Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath's Theater. Roth is not giving us anything new here. The second reason relates to the ending. The return of a character, and their motivation for returning to visit an old man is absurd and lacking credibility. The absurdity of the final pages serves to undercut the power of some that has gone before. If you enjoyed this novella try Sabbath's Theater, a funnier, angrier, darker take on similar themes.
Rating:
Summary: Art Does Not Die
Review: After reading "Portnoy's Complaint" a few years back, I felt that I had developed a new perspective of things, having been put into the mind of a developing boy, and a Jewish one at that. Now, with "The Dying Animal," I've been placed into the mind of an old, and what might be considered perverted man - a professor (and local, cultural expert) - who refuses to be just what he is, old and nearer to death than he would like to believe. It is in this denial - the disregard of mortality - that creates what he is: a sexual animal among women, preying on the fresh, young flesh that are his female students, a result that he blames on the sexual revolution of the 1960's. In telling of his first seductions, he - ironically -portrays himself as the victim, as though he were sucked into sex by an irrefusable vacuum of temptation. It is as if he is saying, "that was the decade, that was what had to be done." But, if one reads further, there will be an understanding to why he became what he is and why he abandoned his wife and son during that decade. In the simplest of explanations, he refuses to share with a woman, it is a power struggle; he must have authority over all things. He can easily copulate with a female, but fears the deeper intimacy that goes beyond the touching of her skin. That would require him to be a more vulnerable man and he would rather be the animal. That is, until he meets Consuela. Rather than tell of their whole affair, I will simply write that the most beautiful passages are dedicated to her. "The Dying Animal" reads like a love letter to his beloved Consuela. The reader sees that even the most indignant creature has a human weakness. As Roth states, "The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open." Read this book.
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Summary: Philip Roth's Dark Universalism
Review: Art is protean. Post-modernism didn't discover that "meaning" in "texts" is perfectly subjective. It's a proverbial insight--"one man's meat is another man's...oh, baccala." But what about when the disposition of the subject--me, in this case--my very attitude toward the text, swings back and forth? I wind up with more than one view, don't I? It's not unusual to enjoy a work of art, an artifice, after all, at different levels or dimensions. Hence a Dickensian prelude: The Dying Animal is the best of books, the worst of books. A fierce book, an insipid book. Visionary, jejune. Universal, hideously particularistic. Thrilling, disgusting. Soaring, gutter-dwelling. The sum of all these dichotomous parts, and more, is that protean art as literature. Roth packs a lot into 156 very tiny pages. Art can be both brilliant and banal. Roth is characteristically, luminously courageous in describing a dark truth lurking in the center of the "demonic male" (pace to Wrangham and Petersen). He borders on banality with the heavy-handed irony of Consuela Castillo's predicament in the final quarter of the story. Moreover, "the dying animal" (pace Yeats, who raises the phrase twice) in an incomplete metaphor for the dirty old man David Kepesh has become. As perceptive as Roth is in having Kepehs identify MEN as in the end but simple denizens of the animal kingdon, the author makes a pointed choice of ducking the biological working out of Kepesh's logic. Roth focuses on animal lust and (the slightly more elevated) longing and IGNORES the procreative evolutionary biological compulsion that makes sense of lust and longing: no lust, no rise, no act, no species. In that light, things like family, responsibility, accommodation, and human empathy--all of which Kepesh pushes away, violently--pose new and compelling dilemmas that don't get treated here. If Roth's antiheroes are going to continue to be primordial alpha males driven by Ur-urges, Roth will have to reflect anew and assume on fresh stance on what makes David (and Nathan and Peter and Alexander and Mickey...and...and...) get up in the morning. Roth would have fun doing it. No writer loads more ideas, unobtrusively, into his work. One of Roth's most cunning devices in The Dying Animal is to have David Kepesh colorfully recount the tale of the Morton-Bradford-Merry Mount controversy, which to Kepesh shows that S-E-X has been woven into the warp and woof of American life since year zero in the New World. In such passages--and also when narrator Kepesh propounds his hedonistic American univeralism--The Dying Animal becomes a short coda to Roth's American Trilogy (like the Prague Orgy is a coda to the Zuckerman books). In all, bravura writing, familiar themes, moral dilemmas, classic Roth. Our greatest living writer. It's a book that interrogates you under a naked 150 watt lightbulb, probing for discomfiting points of resonance. Read it and decide for yourself whether there's more than a little David Kepesh in you or someone you know.
Rating:
Summary: The Braid of Dominance
Review: As with all (or recent) Philip Roth novels, this struggles somewhat to avoid identification. It is like a beast caught within a sack half its size. You try to hold it - you want to keep it within the sack after all - but you quickly realise that whatever you do - however much you slam the sack against a wall or attempt to keep your hands together around the lip of the bag - sooner or later, the thing in the bag will get out and then where will you be? The beast metaphor is sort of apposite too. In the opening maybe thirty pages, the beast is a snake. It comes as something of a shock after the last three novels (the collossal genius of "American Pastoral", "I married a Communist" and "The Human Stain"), all voiced by the (now) retiring Nathan Zuckerman, to hear David Kepesh. Salty snake-like David Kepesh. The first thirty pages (at least) slip round you in a way that makes you shudder. The words are oily. Naked with a dirty kind of honesty, sexual flagrancy. You don't like David Kepesh. He is a vulgar erudite snake. He is a sexual predator. He is a kind of celebrity (in the way that, say Frasier Crane is a celebrity), regularly appearing on a Sunday morning culture programme on the TV. We know David Kepesh. We have met him before, in "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire". And yet and yet. He has an affair (only the latest in a long line but different and dictinct for all that) with a young student Consuela Castillo, a girl who does not understand art (who questions her relationship to Picasso, for example, in a way that suggests she puts too much thought into what she perceives, and how she is perceived). Unlike his countless previous conquests, though, Consuela unseats Kepesh and leaves him floundering. He is riven with jealousy. He wants to possess her in a way she has never been possessed before. He dissects the position of dominance within their relationship: yes, he is dominant, because he is 62 years old and knows more than her, but, at the same time, she is dominant because she is young and beautiful: the relationship is described by Roth as a "braid", and the braid - when mentioned - remains with you throughout the first reading. To combat this reliance, he takes up with another former student, a student he had an affair with years before who he meets by accident one day. Kepesh also ruminates upon his relationship with the son that hates him and blames him for the way that life has turned out. Still, the affair with Consuela continues, only to be abandoned over something and nothing. Kepesh admits that it takes him three years to get over her. Three years to get out of the desperate need for her, the reliance upon the habit of her. There is a sense of Kepesh, within the pages of this short book, as a man keenly aware of loneliness, wanting company every second of his life, whilst at the same time desperate to be free of any kind of emotional shackles. David Kepesh is a twenty five year old (not wanting to settle down, not wanting to be lonely) in the body of a seventy year old. What is important - and what slips within your reading alongside the braid of dominance - is the title. As with "The Human Stain" the title offers as much in the way of a challenge as the actual book. It's called "The Dying Animal" after all. Just who is the dying animal? The most obvious choice would be Consuela, who phones Kepesh on New Year's Eve, 1999 (over three years after the end of their affair) to tell him that she may be dying. At the same time, however, the animal is Kepesh, giving into that braid of dominance once more. You can extrapolate further: the dying animal is sexuality, a certain kind of sexuality, a certain kind of masculinity. All these readings braid together, twisting and turning with the reality of smoke or fog. As ever, it is a compelling ride. As ever, even in a short book, you can't help but feel cowed by the enormity of a person's talent. As ever, there are parts of the book that appal you - but that feeling, that being appalled, is part of what makes reading Roth novels so exhilerating. As ever, the specific becomes magnified. As ever, you can only read and re-read and over-read and over-complicate, and succeed in complicating and confusing the story. As ever, this is a story. To be enjoyed and shocked by. To be exhilerated by. As ever, once finished, you can but look to what comes next.
Rating: 
Summary: Oeuvre Smoovre
Review: David Kepesh is the aging, Porsche-driving professor who alternately brags or obsesses over his conquest of a beautiful 24 year-old Cuban-American student. "Everybody's defenseless against something," David declares, "and [female beauty] that's it for me." Consuela, his conquest, is likened to Modigliani's painting, "Reclining Nude." "The accessible dream girl. One long undulating line, she lies there awaiting you, still as death." Kepesh critiques a previous girlfriend and we notice his obsession with age too. "Still beautiful...though beneath the pale gray eyes the biggish sockets were now papery and worn." The professor has a resentful forty-two year old grown son, Kenny, as well. He was traumatized at age 8 when his parents divorced. In college Kenny wrote his thesis paper based on his hatred of his father. "A depraved sensualist. A solitary old lecher." "Put him anywhere near me and the wound begins to hemorrhage," the elder Kepesh reflects. This ceaseless emotional attack came before Kenny graduated and took up his profession as an art conservator. "Before he cauterized the wound by turning himself into a prig." Ironically, the professor's son now finds himself caught up in his own affair and troubled marriage, frequently spending the night at Dad's pad. David Kepesh blames the 1960's for his divorce. Never mind that Kepesh is just another alter ego for Philip Roth, whose unrestrained 60's novel, "Portnoy's Complaint," fueled the sexual revolution. The "real" weapons of that generation are nailed however. Music, marijuana, and the Pill. "For them there was an arsenal of all-out anti-inhibitors." But the sexual rebellion had more casualties. Rejected mid-meal by her date one evening, an ex-student, Elena, visits her favorite college teacher and comes unglued. "Do you think it's supposed to be like this when you're as successful as I am? Life baffles you and you become a very self-protective person and just say the hell with it." The men, Professor Kepesh analyzes, come in five types: narcissistic, humorless and crude; great-looking and ruthlessly unfaithful; emasculated; impotent or dumb. Is the thinking man's Hugh Hefner getting a little unhip? Maybe not. He tells teary-eyed Elena about a male friend who detested the trap his marriage had become. He finally divorces, and then, at loose ends, marries again, only to begin more affairs. "Deferring, deferring, deferring? Appeasing, appeasing, appeasing: Every other day dreaming of leaving? No, it's not a dignified way to be a man. Or, I told Elena, to be a woman." David Kepesh is no longer the young, surrealist dreamer who narrated Roth's 1970's novella, "The Breast." In that absurdist fiction Kepesh found himself hopelessly imprisoned by his desires. 29 years later the professor still struggles, but for the most part he's contrived a system, or at least a defense, for his unfettered emotional life. He portrays Consuela as if she were a cubist canvas painted by a raging Picasso. She's a tempting collage of erogenous parts until, in a final whirling striptease, she is undone by a grotesque joke. A joke grisly enough to make us perhaps choose to opt out of "The Dying Animal" and all its literary and artistic references. But Kepesh persuades us to hang in there, making us unwitting legatees to the thoughts of this peculiar intellectual. Check to see if you're not part of the will.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Novela
Review: Great Little Novel. Roth's choice of First Person narration makes this work all the much better. David Kapesh combines age and experience to give a balanced view of both himself and the world. Don't let the title throw you.
Rating:
Summary: harry Potter and the Philosophers stone
Review: Harry is in his first year at Hogwarts (a wizarding school) and he has already made two friends Ron and Hermione and they go on a quest to find the Philosophers stone which is underneath the school.
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Summary: A novel or an essay? Roth continues to inquire & provoke.
Review: Here Roth examines the issues connecting sex and death with same vigor that he applied to his most recent trilogy. This short book lacks the scope and the balance of American Pastoral, but instead aims with a laser-like intensity upon its themes. I disagree with some of the other reviewers who argue that the narrator is a stand-in for the author, thought I can understand how you can be swayed by the passion in Kepesh's voice. Here Roth continues to perfect his technique of having the narrator persuasively argue a point, only to have another character give an equally strong opposing argument several pages later. As in the best of Roth's earlier work, he builds and subverts the hero's philosophy with equal force, leaving the reader to ponder the 'truth' or absence thereof. The first-person narrator in this book lets Roth get away with a lot of what could be construed as sloppiness here. Some thinly developed characters, frustrating holes in the timeline, and occasional inability to follow ideas through can all be chalked up to the fallibility of the narrator (if you are feeling generous). Yes, Roth continues to experiment with form and structure. Yes, he continues to dare us to hate his protagonist. And yes, he brings us almost grotesque scenes of sexuality. This book is flawed, and occasionally annoying. Yet, as you can see from my 5 star rating, I feel that the humor, anger, insight and courage contained in its 156 pages are unique and make this book essential, in a way. Besides, it contains what may be the definitive description of New Years Eve 1999.
Rating:
Summary: Written like a private diary
Review: I don't explain plots. Read any other review, you'll get a good idea what the book is about. I'll comment on Philip Roth's writing which is lean and mean. The way he has created David Kepesh reminds me of reading someone's private diary. While reading The Dying Animal I continually thought how simple and pleasurable and complicated life could be. I enjoyed The Dying Animal very much. Philip Roth does not disappoint. He could write about anything and make it good reading.
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