Word: shylocks
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...governments and replace them with toadies. In Mahathir's play, the pound of flesh has already been torn away. Like its neighbors, Malaysia lies bleeding, but when Korea, Thailand and Indonesia eagerly gulped down $150 billion in IMF bailout loans, Mahathir wanted none of the West's medicine. Shylock, after all, was no healer...
...native Israeli). Many American Jews like to play down the differences between themselves and Israelis, but the New York intellectual will never be of the same mind as the organic kibbutznik. Philip Roth, this year's recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, makes exactly this point in Operation Shylock, in which the lead character named Philip Roth encounters his double, also calling himself Philip Roth, in the streets of Jerusalem. While the one Roth is enjoying the country as a tourist/researcher, the other is plotting a Jewish exodus from Israel ("diasporization"). Together, the two halves of the single Roth...
Roth's three previous books--Patrimony, Operation Shylock and Sabbath's Theater--won leading literary prizes, which is no small achievement in the contentious world of book awards. American Pastoral could make Roth's record four for four...
...Leavitt tells Ben near the end of the novella. "The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives." This is not quite true. Paul Theroux offered an invented autobiography last year in My Other Life, and Philip Roth did much the same in 1993 in Operation Shylock. The Term Paper Artist is as playful as those works and every bit as good...
Wrongheaded and tortuous as this Merchant sometimes is, the updating is witty and apt. The "news of the Rialto" becomes fodder for a pair of gossip reporters on a happy-talk TV newscast. Shylock's trial is presided over by a mumbling, superannuated judge who could have stepped right out of Court TV. With a few exceptions -- Elaine Tse's overwrought Portia, for instance -- the actors strike a nice balance between Shakespeare's poetry and Sellars' stunt driving. For the rest of us, it's a wild ride...