The Dying Animal: Amazon.de: Philip Roth: Englische Bücher

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The Dying Animal is the latest addition to Philip Roth's already considerable and highly celebrated oeuvre. The protagonist is David Kepesh, a recurring protagonist in Roth's work, having been introduced first in the Kafkaesque 1972 novella, The Breast, and again in The Professor of Desire (1979). Kepesh, now a 70-year-old arts critic and lecturer in critical theory, is a sexual adventurer, who feels himself liberated from marriage, children and old school sexual mores by the 1960s sexual revolution, and uses his celebrity and intellectual reputation to seduce the young women that he tutors. Written in the form of a conversational confession, Roth has Kepesh introduce the method of his sexual conquests and then the foil to his method, the beautiful, mannered and busty Consuela Castillo. So begins a description of a descent into the madness of love; "crazy distortions of longing, doting, possessiveness ... this need, this derangement. Will it ever stop?"

. What begins as a chronology of sexual conquest becomes an exquisite meditation on the destructive and addictive nature of love and lust. Notions of social freedom, and sexual emancipation are explored as Kepesh, who for so long has considered himself a free animal, finds himself caged in by his obsession. His journey of sexual discovery becomes one of self-discovery, and as his life journey nears its close he also begins to realise in himself and those around him, "the dying animal" (from Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium"),a different beast to the sexual animal yet still entwined with it through shared flesh.

This is a sexually candid novel, a brave and daring one, a novel that does not blink in the admission that so many of our actions are motivated by the sexual. In this it is reminiscent of the writings of Henry Miller, which are mentioned among the many literary references that populate this book. Every line of Roth's prose brings a desire to read the next; it is brilliantly written, and like the Yeats poem from which it draws inspiration, it is open to much interpretation. --Iain Robinson -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

From Booklist

The tremendous power of Roth's writing is rooted in his uncanny ability to transform thought into a palpable force. Every potently composed sentence of this taut and ferocious tale--a surging confessional rant by professor and critic David Kepesh, whom Roth first conjured into existence in The Breast and The Professor of Desire and who's now a flinty 70--lands in the reader's mind like a grenade. Kepesh is recounting his infatuation with a former student, a salacious recitation that segues into a provocative critique of the consequences of the sexual revolution and a riveting debate about timeless questions of freedom, pleasure, and love. Roth is a masterful chronicler of erotic desire and obsession, and as his hero describes his helplessness before the voluptuous beauty of the well-bred Consuela Castillo, a self-contained 24 to his rapacious 62 when they first meet, he delves into everything from the extremism of the Puritans to whether or not sex is the only time "you are most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself." Along the way, he also examines the claustrophobia of marriage, the "pornography of jealousy," the "wound of age," and, finally, inescapably, death. Kepesh may be selfish and manipulative, but Roth has imbued him with profound integrity and blazing intelligence--his riffs on sexual politics and the inanity of mass culture are not to be missed. Kepesh owns up to the tragic fact that his pursuit of personal liberty cost him his son's love, and, for all his braggadocio, he truly worships women. Virtuosic, riling, and fearless, Roth is the bard of the modern American psyche. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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17 von 19 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Diesmal schmal aber gut... 29. Januar 2003

Von "klaus_schmidt"

Format:Taschenbuch

Ein Roth-Roman der sich auch ohne größere Kondition an einem Stück durchlesen lässt. Das Thema ist sein altbekanntes: Der alte Mann und die jungen Frauen. David Kepesh ist 62, Dozent und Kulturjournalist, als er sich wieder einmal in eine Beziehung mit einer Studentin einlässt. Während der sexuellen Revolution der 60er Jahre hat er sich für ein Leben der "emancipated manhood" entschieden, Frau und Kind verlassen und dem Sinnesvergnügen gelebt, ohne je eine festere Beziehung einzugehen. Das wird mit der Beziehung zu Consuela aus Kuba anders. Und die Wendung macht die ansonsten allzuleichte Erzählerei interessant.
Roths Roman erinnert an Alexander Portnoys Monolog in "P.'s Complaint". Roman? Die Handlung passiert nebenbei, Roth ist es vor allem wichtig, seine Gedanken über die sexuelle Revolution, amerikanische Moralvorstellungen, Schönheit und Kunst loszuwerden. Vielleicht nicht sein bestes Werk, aber allemal ein sehr lesbares...

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Not one of Roth's best books 16. Februar 2009

Von H., Matthias

David Kepesh, protagonist and narrator of this slim volume, is a renowned cultural critic who has weekly appearances on both radio and TV. He also teaches one college class each year, and he usually manages to seduce at least one of his female students. (Ever since he found the sexual harassment hotline number posted outside his office he postpones his overtures until after he has finished grading his students.)
The last of his conquests is a beautiful Cuban-American student by the name of Consuela. Whereas her way of thinking strikes the narrator as rather conventional, her body is the most beautiful he has ever seen; in fact, he considers it a perfect work of art. With this affair, Kepesh has feelings of jealousy and uncertainty that he has never experienced before. When his beautiful mistress dumps him after a year and a half, he makes tremendous (and mostly unsuccessful) efforts to get over her - until, one New Year's Eve eight years later, she suddenly shows up with shocking and unexpected news.
The narrative is interrupted at one point for a lengthy discourse on the nature of the 1960s sexual revolution. Kepesh talks about the first rebellious, sexually liberated students that he had (and, in some cases, slept with); and he goes back and draws connections with 16th century New England and the conflict between the Puritans and the hedonistic settlers of Merry Mount (as recorded in Hawthorne's story "The May-Pole of Merry Mount"). All this is interesting stuff, but somehow, things don't fall into place this time. This may also be because the narrator is a little too smug, and the female character is not very convincing. We see her only through the narrator's eyes, of course, and it is him who perceives her as the "animal" of the title, as opposed to his own more intellectual being. Yet there isn't much in the text that allows us to take a different perspective on Consuela. It seems to me that this book un-self-consciously resorts to the old stratagem of the Romantics: The body of the dying woman allows the artist/narrator to project his own bodily decay onto her and fantasize himself as an intellectually immortal being. So, all in all, not uninteresting, but not one of Roth's best books.

5 von 8 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Tolles Buch mit leichten Schwächen 23. Februar 2004

Von Xiquiripat

Die ersten Seiten diese Buches haben mich wirklich fasziniert: Roth zeigt hier eine Einsicht in die Art und Weise, wie (manche) Männer sich an Frauen heranmachen, die einen immer wieder denken läßt: ja, genau so ist es! Leider schweift der Author dann in den nächsten Passagen auf das - meiner Meinung nach weit weniger interessante - Thema der 60er Jahre in Amerika ab (vielleicht ist das für jemand, der sie miterlebt hat, spannender). Er findet dann aber wieder zu dem Haupthandlungsstrang des Buches zurück und fährt mit der Beschreibung des "animal" im Manne fort - sehr lesenswert!
Wirklich ein tolles Buch mit vielen "Wahrheiten" über das Leben.
Wegen des in meinen Augen schwächeren Mittelteils aber nur 4 Sterne