读书人

Everyman

发布时间: 2010-02-23 23:03:18 作者:

 Everyman


基本信息出版社:Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
页码:192 页
出版日期:2006年04月
ISBN:061873516X
International Standard Book Number:061873516X
条形码:9780618735167
EAN:9780618735167
装帧:精装
正文语种:英语
外文书名:每个人

内容简介 在线阅读本书

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.
作者简介 In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for "a body of work.of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship" and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose "scale of achievement over a sustained career.places him or her in the highest rank of American literature." Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.
编辑推荐 "A rich exploration of the epiphany that awaits us all - that 'life's most disturbing intensity is death' " Kirkus Reviews, Starred

"Through it all, there's that Rothian voice: pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"Let's use a noun I've never used before: masterpiece." Atlantic Monthly

"This brilliant little morality play on the ways that our bodies dictate the paths our lives take is vintage Roth" Library Journal Starred

"It's another triumph" CNN

"Same old terrain, same ever-astonishing mastery." Observer

"Let's not crank up the suspense. He's done it again" Newsweek

" Mr. Roth, our best literary stylist...does an impressive job on his chosen turf." The Wall Street Journal

"...elegant, profoundly brave work of art." O, The Oprah Magazine

"...an instance of Roth writing at the top of his bent and to maximum effect" The Chicago Tribune

"[Everyman] is a parable that captures, as few works of fiction have, the pathos of Being." The Washington Post
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Sara NelsonWhat is it about Philip Roth? He has published 27 books, almost all of which deal with the same topics—Jewishness, Americanness, sex, aging, family—and yet each is simultaneously familiar and new. His latest novel is a slim but dense volume about a sickly boy who grows up obsessed with his and everybody else's health, and eventually dies in his 70s, just as he always said he would. (I'm not giving anything away here; the story begins with the hero's funeral.) It might remind you of the old joke about the hypochondriac who ordered his tombstone to read: "I told you I was sick."And yet, despite its coy title, the book is both universal and very, very specific, and Roth watchers will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the hero to Roth himself. (In most of his books, whether written in the third person or the first, a main character is a tortured Jewish guy from Newark—like Roth.) The unnamed hero here is a thrice-married adman, a father and a philanderer, a 70-something who spends his last days lamenting his lost prowess (physical and sexual), envying his healthy and beloved older brother, and refusing to apologize for his many years of bad behavior, although he palpably regrets them. Surely some wiseacre critic will note that he is Portnoy all grown up, an amalgamation of all the womanizing, sex- and death-obsessed characters Roth has written about (and been?) throughout his career.But to obsess about the parallels between author and character is to miss the point: like all of Roth's works, even the lesser ones, this is an artful yet surprisingly readable treatise on... well, on being human and struggling and aging at the beginning of the new century. It also borrows devices from his previous works—there's a sequence about a gravedigger that's reminiscent of the glove-making passages in American Pastoral, and many observations will remind careful readers of both Patrimony and The Dying Animal—and through it all, there's that Rothian voice: pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him, not even his own self-seriousness. "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work," he has his adman-turned-art-teacher opine about an annoying student. Obviously, Roth himself is a professional. (May 5)Sara Nelson is editor-in-chief of PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Does Roth's new novel top or even match the stunning accomplishment of his previous one, the best-selling and award-winning The Plot against America (2004)? It is shorter in length and narrower in scope. It is the portrait of an ordinary man--he novel's title is apt--who accomplishes nothing extraordinary. Strict chronology is set aside as various episodes from the past and the present jostle for center stage. The motif of death followed this man throughout his life, beginning in boyhood, and with the advent of middle age, the frailty of the flesh, in both sexual and physical terms, is increasingly apparent to him. Despite its shortness in length and relative narrowness in scope, this novel speaks eloquently about life's un fulfillments, about making adjustments if the unfolding of one's life doesn't follow the original plan. Roth continues exercising his career-defining, clear-eyed, intelligent vision of how the psychology of families works. In The Plot against America, we saw how a family reacts to external forces; here, the reaction is to a family's internal circumstances. Perhaps, then, more readers will find this lean, poig-nant novel more relevant to themselves. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
文摘 Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues from New York, who recalled his energy and originality and told his daughter, Nancy, what a pleasure it had been to work with him. There were also people who’d driven up from Starfish Beach, the residential retirement village at the Jersey Shore where he’d been living since Thanksgiving of 2001—the elderly to whom only recently he’d been giving art classes. And there were his two sons, Randy and Lonny, middle-aged men from his turbulent first marriage, very much their mother’s children, who as a consequence knew little of him that was praiseworthy and much that was beastly and who were present out of duty and nothing more. His older brother, Howie, and his sister-in-law were there, having flown in from California the night before, and there was one of his three ex-wives, the middle one, Nancy’s mother, Phoebe, a tall, very thin whitehaired woman whose right arm hung limply at her side. When asked by Nancy if she wanted to say anything, Phoebe shyly shook her head but then went ahead to speak in a soft voice, her speech faintly slurred. “It’s just so hard to believe. I keep thinking of him swimming the bay—that’s all. I just keep seeing him swimming the bay.” And then Nancy, who had made her father’s funeral arrangements and placed the phone calls to those who’d showed up so that the mourners wouldn’t consist of just her mother, herself, and his brother and sister-in-law. There was only one person whose presence hadn’t to do with having been invited, a heavyset woman with a pleasant round face and dyed red hair who had simply appeared at the cemetery and introduced herself as Maureen, the private duty nurse who had looked after him following his heart surgery years back. Howie remembered her and went up to kiss her cheek.
Nancy told everyone, “I can begin by saying something t
……
读书人网 >Literature

热点推荐