The prestige earned by Philip Roth In so many years of dedication, it corresponds to his more than 30 books published since 1960. An authentic library with its own stamp that opens up a literary panorama that completes itself as a literary genre of its own.
From his Jewish origins, the author always traces paths towards knowledge of their culture, which is now practically a melting pot spread throughout the world in a pitiful and at the same time enriching journey for them and for other countries that welcome them.
Su American Trilogy delves into all those aspects of this stateless culture during many phases of history. But it is not just a matter of selling us the motorcycle of Judaism as the best religion or the most authentic idiosyncrasy. Integration has its spaces of disagreement and Roth does not always take sides with the ideology of his people. The result is a wonderful synthesis of an open mind.
But beyond the own and vindictive argumentation of a Jewish people that found in him a wonderful voice from which to expose his ideology and morals, Philip Roth has narrated many more aspects of his particular world, which is none other than our own world passed through the sieve of one of the most brilliant imaginaries for world literature.
Prior to my selection of his best books, I invite you to know this new compilation book of his varied ideology embodied in interviews, articles and essays dating between 1960 and 2013:
Top 3 Recommended Philip Roth Novels
Portnoy's lament
I will probably agree with any Roth admirer that this novel is easily his best work. Everything that involves presenting a central character around which the universe of the narrative proposal revolves evokes the character of characters: Don Quixote.
And it is that every explanation of a protagonist who undertakes a journey is a bit of that transition between lucidity and madness, that opposing change and that vision of monsters alien to one's origins.
Alexander Portnoy psychoanalyzes before us to discover what the impact of parallel education and learning on absolutely contradictory aspects entails. The Jewish dream and the American dream face to face with their greatness and their miseries, with an ironic background that smoothes out those asperities typical of any conflict.
The conspiracy against America
I am a lot of ucronÃas, those fascinating historical assumptions from false forks of history. And the truth is that Hitler and Nazism is a point that not a few authors have taken as a reference to draw these uchronies.
I myself modestly wrote «The arms of my cross«. Philip K. Dick had done the same with his book The man in the castle. Philip Roth was concerned in this novel to outline a world in which the United States was favorable to the final Nazi solution.
To do this, the author determines that Lindbergh, a famous American pilot who declared himself pro-Hitler, ended up winning the Roosevelt elections in 1940. About how everything would have been, about the hardships that his own family should have endured ... Roth takes advantage of this uchrony to expose the harshness of anti-Semitic persecution.
American pastoral
Roth readers who aren't happy with my ranking of their top three novels would probably set this one in their top drawer. The Pulitzer Prize motif pulls a lot.
And it is true that once again Roth wrote a rounded work, but there are colors for taste... The famous 60s in the United States, with its flourishing cultural and social movement, with its contradictions still not overcome regarding racism and war conflicts in places where many Americans thought they had nothing to do with, the sinister cold war...
That America undoubtedly moved every day in distress. Roth takes advantage of this situation to focus on his most personal condition. Americans who moved between pride, love, disappointment, frustration or fear.
Characters that really dazzle from that inexhaustible imaginary of the author. Swede Levuv as a universal character ...
