Word: nathaneal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three years Roth spent writing The Counterlife have left him satisfied ("I gave it my all") and resigned to the prospect of being misunderstood once again. He expresses hope that Nathan's putative death in the novel will discourage people from reading his fiction as autobiography, but he is not optimistic. "I write about what could have happened," he says, "not what did happen. Why that's so hard to grasp I don't understand. I have once in a while started off just setting down some incident I'd actually gone through and I can hardly get past...
...also possible that Nathan has dreamed up this scene, further slandering Henry by portraying his imaginary outrage at being lied about and exploited in the first place. If Nathan is indeed guilty of such cold, despotic manipulation, then Maria's sense of uneasiness in his presence makes perfect sense. Near the end, she informs Nathan, "I'm leaving you and I'm leaving the book...
...members of creative-writing programs or departments of literature should sit still for another recitative of postmodernism's bag of tricks. The text, you see, is the generator of life, not its transcript; the only real plot that stories convey is the process of their telling. Or, as Nathan writes in a letter to Henry, "We are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other's authors." Or, as Maria observes, "I know characters rebelling against their author has been done before...
...made visits each spring and friends among Czech artists. This experience had literary consequences: The Prague Orgy, a novella recounting Nathan Zuckerman's misadventures in that city, included as the coda for the trilogy published as Zuckerman Bound (1985); and Roth's editorship of a series, "Writers from the Other Europe," which has given Eastern European writers exposure in the West. Roth's access to Prague ended in the mid-'70s, when his visa was not renewed. He had been tailed and questioned there, as had those who associated with him. "After I left one time," he recalls, "the authorities...
...Nathan Zuckerman lives, dies and lives again in Philip Roth's The Counterlife, a novel that explores the truth about fiction...