Book Description

David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York College, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twentyfour, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder and haunts him for the next eight years. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s freed him from his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an 'emancipated manhood' beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years, he has refined that exuberant decade of protest and licence into an orderly way of life in which he is both unimpeded in the world of Eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of this 'newly-hatched' woman - 'a masterpiece,' as Kepesh describes Consuela, 'of volupte' - undo him completely. His worldliness, his confidence, his reason desert him, and on the brink of old age, a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The light-hearted erotic tale with which he began evolves into a poignant, tragic story of love and loss. The Dying Animal is vintage Roth fiction, a masterpiece of passionate immediacy. It is intellectually bold, forcefully candid, wholly of our time, and utterly without precedent - a story of sexual discovery told about himself by a man of seventy.

Amazon.co.uk

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

Book Dimension :

length: (cm)19.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.6

在美国，素有文坛3L(Living, Literary, Legend，意为文学活神话)之称的菲利普·罗斯是获奖专业户，他的作品深受读者和批评家的青眯，获奖颇多，其中包括美国犹太人书籍委员会的达洛夫奖、古根海姆奖、欧·亨利小说奖和美国文学艺术院奖，他本人也在1970年被选为美国文学艺术院院士。其主要获奖作品还有《遗产》（1991）（获全国书评家协会奖），《夏洛克战役》（1993）（获福克纳奖），《萨巴斯剧院》（1995）（获全国图书奖）。 1997年，菲利普·罗斯凭借《美国牧歌》问鼎普利策文学奖。 1998年，他在白宫被授予美国国家艺术奖章。 2002年，他摘得美国艺术文学院颁发的最高奖项——小说类金奖。他还曾两度获得美国国家图书奖和全国书评家协会奖，三度折桂笔会/福克纳奖。 2005年，他的小说《反美阴谋》被美国历史学家协会誉为“描写2003-2004年的美国的绝佳历史小说”。最近，罗斯又获得了笔会颁发的两项最负盛名的大奖：2006年笔会/纳博科夫奖和2007年笔会/索尔·贝娄美国小说成就奖。罗斯的作品还被选编进《美国经典文库》，他是美国文学史上被列为“正典”的作家中唯一还在世的一位并且已连续多年成为诺贝尔文学奖最具竞争力的候选者之一。此外，电影《人性污点》和《挽歌》均由他的畅销小说改编。