The Counterlife

Rating:
Summary: Excessive, in a good and bad way
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting technique, and moving as well
Review: In the Counterlife, Roth manages both to play with the concept of the novel while still creating interesting, believable characters. Far too often writers interested in stretching the form of the novel forget how to tell a story. Roth's Zuckerman, who appears in a number of his earlier novels, is his most memorable character. This may be the best novel by one of America's two or three best living novelists.

Rating:
Summary: Philip Roth's The Counterlife - A Quest for Identity
Review: 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. Roth creates perfect environments for the scrutiny of a subject one frequently encounters in his work: The intellectual secular Jewish male's search for and affirmation of his identity.

This theme is woven into each of the novel's five chapters, which are authored in first-person narrative by the fictional writer Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman defines identity by weighing secularity against religious fervor, masculinity against femininity, potency against impotency, and Jewish awareness against anti-Semitism.

While the novel is set in Zuckerman's fictional world, the chapters each tell separate stories. The situations Zuckerman creates vary, and thus three forms of Jewish identity between which he seems to be caught are examined. Zuckerman experiences the identities of the secular son of traditional Jewish parents, of being a militant Jew's brother, and of the son-in-law grappling with his mother-in-law's anti-Semitism which causes the failure of yet another attempt at family life.

Similar themes can be identified in Roth's other works, such as Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint. However, the post-modern structure of The Counterlife allows for their juxtaposition within one novel, thereby offering the reader a spectrum of the protagonist's issues of identity.

Roth's prose is explicit, witty, and even funny, making the novel a truely enjoyable and engaging read. In the interest of authenticity, he does not recoil from using obscenities. He mocks Jewish-American militancy and pseudo-religiosity by the creation of Ben-Joseph, the author of the "Five Books of Jimmy," who really misses baseball in Israel and later hijacks an El Al plane for hopeless ends.

Nevertheless, Roth does not lose sight of the danger inherent in this militancy. Zuckerman finds his brother's carrying a gun alarming. He detects a loss of "Henry's [his brother's] Henriness," and wonders whether Henry has "developed, postoperatively, a taste for the ersatz in life".

A well-rounded novel, and certainly a must for those interested in Jewish-American writing.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Universal Piece of literature. A must for everyone.
Review: 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", actually the unique of his titles I read. Moreover, I admit, the finest publication I have obtained.

Roth enchants with utterly well endowed vocabulary and prose. In addition, simultaneously conveying completely dissimilar philosophical perceptions, religious attachments, and life experiences. Line by line he describes Jewish people, in particular, The American Diaspora characteristics.

Seems as if Roth desire is to convey ideas about Jewish Secularism: American Jewish in particular.

He attains this by positioning side by side the extremes: Diaspora's Secularism against Zionism, meaning of real Jewish beliefs to American's or European's Anti-Semitism,ethnically self contemp against ethnic,and a lot more.Actually he tricks the reader. He leads one to think is only a Jewish title.

He is a universal writer. Everything told applies to theso well known compulsion into stereotipizing all people into this or that psychological category. This is universal. It relates to whites, Afro-Americans, Catholics, Hispanics, etc. It is a world tendency. Even to me, native of a country were prejudice does not go further that the semantics, since we are all creatures of a cocktail of very distinct groups of society.

The more one tries to hide what one is, the more propensity one is to fall into the stereotipized world. Using the Jewish example, the more secular Nathan, amid his principal characters, the more he says not to be observant, the more it bothers him to have a son uncircumsized. The Brit Mila has to be perfect. Moreover, the Bar Mitzva grandiose, even if the kid doesn't comprehend anything.

Isn't it right that there is an abnormal tendency to cataloguize us all into Freudian or not Freudian misbehabiour, self compulsion is universal in late generations.

I am certain the hint to the success of antidepressants around, all self compulsive persons, with thousands of drugs claiming to be the panaceas for us all is actually self hatred. Does not the media blinds or Brian-washes us to be perfect, beautiful, sexual, virile, thin, etc.

No wonder each and all of us desires to escape, and that is what "The Counterlife" brings us in each of his five chapters, escapism from reality.

Philip Roth employs sarcasm, irony, jokes, satire, euphemisms, and all grabbed to conceive this important peace of literature, That has to be read more than once. It owns magnetism and Excellency. I recommend it an open and honest hearth.

Excellent Piece of Literature, If it could be I would put Ten. Excellent read for anyone, and also for the price since one gets enchanted by this title. Buy it. It is also worth the money.

I have already become a fan of Roth, he has utterly beguiled me, I have got to get all his titles.

Aglae

Rating:
Summary: Choices
Review: The Counterlife opens with Henry Zuckerman, Nathan's dentist brother, who dies during a heart operation which will rid him of impotence-causing medication. Henry chooses surgery not for his wife and family, but apparently for an ongoing affair with his dental assistant Wendy. Yet in the second chapter, "Judea," we find Nathan in Israel searching for a very-much-alive Henry who survived the heart-surgery only to abandon his family for... Israel? What happened? I found myself lost? I struggled but managed to maintain some perspective. What happened to Henry? Did he suddenly turn fanatic on us? Why? How is it that he is alive? Nathan's trying to figure out all this, and bring him home. Yet a question will challenge the reader: What was the first chapter all about if the second chapter is real? Not that is moot but the story is more complicated than all that. The settings of this book range from Newark to London to the West Bank. Wherever the characters find themselves, they remain tempted by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate � or their �counterlife�. The Counterlife speaks of the different paths that a life can take, of the motivations behind the choices that individuals make, and of the repercussions of those choices. It also delves into the Diaspora and the reality of being a Jewish American. Filled with pathos, the book delves into questions of identity that are too complex to write about in this short review � and I won�t so I don�t give the story away. This almost Kafkaesque novel combines the ridiculous with the sublime and asks us to ponder through a solid sense of irony, about life, choices, and identity. It deserves to be (no actually demands to be) read twice.

Miguel Llora

Rating:
Summary: One of his most interesting books
Review: This is not the very best Roth, but it is in the second tier . It is a very interesting book. The whole business of exploring alternative paths of life for different characters, of understanding that each of us might have had another life, a counterlife is interesting. One however negative effect of this is that it makes the reader understand the character as something less than real, as a toy, a game being played. Nonetheless Roth plays the game with great skill and verbal magic. And he is especially good at showing us the troubles and tribulations of middle age or late middle age. I found also his consideration of the Jewish situation quite interesting, and his arguing for the superiority of the Diaspora to life in Israel a true provocation. For as one who has lived in Israel for years and believes it to be not only the only Jewish state but the one place in the world where Jews are making their communal history I was in some sense angered and offended by Roth's parodying of ' the settlers' and Jewish nationalism in general. Yet while I was offended by what to my mind is a superficial reading of Jewish history and Israeli reality I could not help laughing at certain sections of the book carried off with a comic brilliance which so far as I know is unequalled by any writer today.

Rating:
Summary: "An Australia for Jews" - a sad core amidst fine satire
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: metafictional masterwork
Review: 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 metafictional yet never stilted story of death, belief, and life. It reminded me of a Robt. Coover, minus the dead-weight gimmickry.