About this title: The bestselling author of "The Plot Against America" now turns his attention to one man's lifelong confrontation with mortality. From his first glimpse of death during his childhood through his vigorous, seemingly invincible prime, Roth's hero is a man bewildered not only by his own decline but by the unimaginable deaths of his contemporaries and those he has loved.
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Description: Very Good. 061873516X *HCDJ * SHIPPING WITHIN 24 HOURS! ** QUESTIONS ANSWERED QUICKLY ** THANKS ** HARDCOVER BOOK WITH DUST JACKET. read more
Description: Fair. Purchasing this DVD supports the North Central Regional Library. Thriftbooks and NCRL have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Library ID found on DVD and case. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Purchasing this DVD supports the North Central Regional Library. Thriftbooks and NCRL have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Library ID found on DVD and case. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Purchasing this book supports the King County Library System Foundation. Thriftbooks and KCLSF have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Almost in new condition. Book shows only very slight signs of use. Cover and binding are undamaged and pages show minimal use. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: First Edition. date on title page
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: 2006-04
ISBN-13:9780618735167ISBN:061873516X
Description: Very good. Very minimal damage to the cover (no holes or tears, only minimal scuff marks), in some instances dust jackets are not included, no missing pages, minimal to no highlighting/under. read more
"When the little-known German writer Herta Mueller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, American critics fussed that their countrymen were being overlooked by a Eurocentric committee. One of the names they waved as worthy of that Nobel was Philip Roth. Roth is one of the foremost American men of letters, and his 27th book, Everyman, cements his position as my favorite working American author. Like Indignation, Roth's 29th offering, Everyman is short-182 pages-and I read it in a few hours last night. It's succinct and impeccable. As in Indignation, the reader knows of the protagonist's death from the beginning. Yes, everyone dies, but it's clear that everyman will die within the pages. Roth tells the story of a death, not a life, a body's dissolution rather than its growth. Roth keeps the book focused relentlessly on the physical, chronicling hospitalizations as carefully as failed marriages. Everyman seems almost unnaturally aware of the centrality of his body to the narrative. "There are only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us," says the narrator in his rejection of religion. "If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it-he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body." I have parents approaching the age of Roth's everyman as he crumbles, and I expected the book to inspire dread. Instead, it's not at all depressing. The resignation of starting the book with everyman's funeral gets the mourning over with early, so that when death arrives, the reader faces it clear-eyed, with empathy but without the agonizing feeling that it could have ever been different. Death will come to all of us, and in this reminder of our mortality, Roth positions himself as a realist on the most basic level. The jacket cover tells the reader the book's central theme straight-out: "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." In the last pages, this summoning becomes increasingly clear, but I won't spoil that calling for you. Roth's 30th book, The Humbling, came out this fall, and his 31st, Nemesis, is due next year."
"Roth's everyman rejects religion yet his observation of nothingness, oblivion, death, is filled with a solemn awe as well as dread. His everyman is gone, but remains as memory in those who survive him. His liturgical enumeration of medical procedures as his body deteriorates parallels the procedure of prayer, and offers solace in iteration even as society's treatment of illness turns shabby and impersonal. His insistence on acknowledging the plain ordinariness of life-"he had done what he did the way that he did it"-and its ridiculous imperfection (especially found in lust) nears transcendence. In an interview, Roth pays homage to the medieval morality play from which he drew his title: "Everyman's answer is the first great line in English drama: 'Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.' When I thought of you least." Roth realizes he, too, is inadequate to the task of coming to terms with death. "I have no taste for delusion," he has said. All he can do is recognize its immensity in deep and beautiful language in this dark little meditation."
"You can finish this book in under two hours. You will anxiously burn through the pages waiting for something meaningful to happen. It never will.
That's kind of, I think, the point.
Even so it will break your heart and you will not be able to sleep all night and you will call your grandma and tell her you love her and you will spend the next week slow-breathing yourself out of an ever-on-the-verge-of-overwhelming-your-sensibilities panic attack.
At this point you may wish you'd never read it. You probably still should."
"For its first half, "Everyman" reads a bit like a condensed version of an earlier Philip Roth novel, something that could be titled "The Anatomy Lesson: Only the Medical Parts." "Everyman"'s initial focus on its protagonist's health problems, almost to the exclusion of everything else, recalls the earlier book's concentration on Nathan Zuckerman's illness.
"The Anatomy Lesson," however, had a much wider scope than "Everyman" initially seems to. About two-thirds the way in, though, "Everyman" becomes more of a typical Roth novel. The story isn't told chronologically, and Roth eventually finds his way back to his protagonist's sexual adventures earlier in life. This is Roth, after all, so there is a lot of sex, and it's inevitably with attractive, young women who throw themselves at our hero.
"Everyman" does depart from the Roth formula by giving his protagonist a happy, almost problem-free childhood, and a good relationship with his parents. It's in his relationships with his own children, particularly his sons, that the typical Rothian family strife kicks in. Roth gives little space over to these problems and speaks of them mostly in generalities though, so they lack the specificity of the conflicts in his earlier novels.
It's this lack of specificity that is "Everyman"'s biggest weakness. It's no secret what Roth is trying to do here -- he doesn't give his protagonist a name, and the "Everyman" of the title refers both to the name of the jewelry shop owned by our hero's father, and to our hero himself -- but that doesn't mean the tactic works particularly well or was needed. The device ends up calling a lot of attention to itself, while adding little to the novel's story or its messages."
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