Word: roth
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FICTION: Daniel Martin, John Fowles The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carre -Kingkill, Thomas Gavin The Professor of Desire, Philip Roth Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
...Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré∙Kingkill, Thomas Gavin The Professor of Desire, Philip Roth ∙Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Since Erica Jong overcame her fear of flying, and Philip Roth professed desire, it is a great relief to find a novelist who isn't hiding, naked ego poorly concealed, behind her central character. The Ice Age is not about any one person, but rather a constellation of characters in an historical content, the downfall of their country. Each character, we feel, has his own identity, his own rationale for living, and a small but important fate to be played out against the background of a faltering England. Drabble has the novelistic strength to make the most of her role...
...Professor of Desire, Philip Roth...
...that he is only a victim of his own faults, he curses himself. He tells himself he is not one of those sympathetic lost characters out of Chekhov but the insane amputee in a story by Gogol who places an ad for the return of his lost nose. What Roth succeeds in portraying, though, with all the delicacy and poignancy of the Russian dramatist, is that Kepesh is in fact a figure from a Chekhov novel. Not a warped, disfigured monster but a man whose constant pursuit of love reveals the tragic-comic dimensions of our own lives...