Everyman
Ratings14
Average rating3.6
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. The terrain of this powerful novel -- Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century -- is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.
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Roth has a way with writing characters. Every single one of them is a complex piece of art for better or worse. In other novels, characters are sympathetic or not. In Philip Roth novels, they just exist in their worlds. So much detail goes into their thoughts, motivations, and actions that it can be hard to believe they're not real.
In Everyman, Philip Roth spins a meandering yarn about a man who has it all until he realizes he doesn't. Themes of love, sex, family, religion, and especially death are seen throughout. While the book can get a little confusing because of all the back and forth and no real plot, this is a beautiful examination of death and the willingness to live and the acceptance (or lack thereof) of the inevitable.
E' difficile esprimere un giudizio su questo libro. La storia di un uomo comune (Everyman) negli ultimi anni della sua vita. Riflessioni sulla morte, sulla malattia, la solitudine e gli errori fatti e ormai irrimediabili. Tuttavia non mi ha preso. Sarà che mi sembrano tematiche ancora cosi lontane o per la poca empatia con il personaggio. Da rileggere tra una decina d'anni :-)
I thought I'd reviewed this, but my review is gone. A short book, as Roth seems to do these days. This book is all about one man's life and death. Funny at times, and sad at many others, I found this book to be a moving look at one individual's life. Not the best Roth book out there, but still better than almost every book out there, and on par with many other good books I've read recently.
