Word: roth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Philip Roth makes readers skeptical of his new novel from the outset. "For legal reasons," he says in the preface, "I have had to alter a number of facts in this book." In the preface, Roth the author is already mixing it up with Roth the character, confusing what is real and what is fictional, what is altered and what is hallucinatory. Operation Shylock: A Confession plays a steady game of doubled identities and Roth the author supports the truth of the volume "out of uniform," so to speak, in interviews where he claims again that the whole thing...
...confusion starts with the author himself. This tale of doubled and redoubled identity swarms with Philip Roths. There are so many of them floating around these days that it's hard to keep track of who is talking and who believes what. The New York Times annotated an interview with the author with subscripts (Roth 1, Roth 2 and Roth 3). Other reviewers have had to explain clearly who they mean by Philip Roth the author, Philip Roth the character and Philip Roth the imposter. The opening of the story explains that Philip Roth the character (and the author...
During his recovery, Roth the character learns from his friends in Israel that there is an imposter giving lectures and interviews around Jerusalem who lets himself be identified in the press as the author of Portnoy's Complaint and The Counterlife. This Philip Roth looks exactly like the original--he wears the same outfit down to the worn-at-the-elbow tweed sports jacket and worn-at-the-heels brown loafers. In a fragile mental state, Roth the character decides to go to Israel to chase the man down, still wary that the imposter is a latent drug-induced hallucination...
...Philip Roth the imposter, however, seems to exist. Roth the character calles him Moishe Pipik (Moses Bellybutton) in a mock Yiddish epithet. Chasing Pipik around Israel. Roth finds out that the double has been spreading a gospel of "Diasporism"--he counsels Ashkenazi Jews to return to Eastern Europe to avoid another Holocaust at the hands of Arabs. Pipik had already met secretly with Lech Walesa and was trying to meet with the Pope using Roth's name...
...regularly strikes deals for his filmmaker clients. CAA represented Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing when they worked together until a few years ago as independent producers; now they run Paramount, against whom CAA continually negotiates deals. CAA is also a regular bargainer with 20th Century Fox, which Joe Roth ran until late last year, when Ovitz helped him negotiate an astonishingly sweet producer's deal with Disney. And Mike Eisner, who runs Disney, is one of Ovitz's best friends. The beneficiaries of such coziness, of course, have no problem with the blurry roles; it is simply the way business...