Τρία βιβλία για τον Φίλιπ Ροθ

Ολική επαναφορά με τρία βιβλία για τον Ροθ. Με αφορμή τα βιβλία αυτά ο κριτικός Michael Gorra γράφει ένα εξαιρετικό άρθρο "Philip’s Theater" 

Philip Roth: The Biograph by Blake Bailey

Norton, 898 pp., $40.00

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor

Penguin, 171 pp., $26.00

Philip Roth: A Counterlife by Ira Nadel

Oxford University Press, 546 pp., $29.95

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/04/08/philip-roth-biography-theater/

Απόσπασμα:

"Ι don’t want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting.” Philip Roth died three years ago, on May 22, 2018, and those instructions to his biographer provide Blake Bailey with his epigraph. Yet how can we take him at his word? Roth believed the facts had to be set straight, the truth laid out, and the public disabused of what it thought it already knew. He wasn’t a self-hating Jew, as some of his first critics had argued, and unlike his character Nathan Zuckerman he hadn’t suffered a father’s deathbed curse or been cast out of the family for writing a scandalous best seller. He wasn’t as one with Portnoy, and people also needed to know that he wasn’t the monster of selfishness Bloom had described in her preemptive memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996). He wasn’t his characters; nor was he the character he’d been made out to be. Ensuring that the record was straight meant, however, that he had to control the narrative, even though he also knew that human life was all about getting things wrong, and wrong again, and other people in particular.

Roth was eighty-five when he died, and had published his last novel, Nemesis, about a 1944 polio outbreak in his native Newark, in the fall of 2010. Two years later he let the news slip that he considered himself retired. There would be no new fiction, though he continued to supervise the ten-volume Library of America edition of his work, which appeared under the nominal editorship of Ross Miller, a University of Connecticut professor who had once been his friend. Yet Miller too was now one of those who needed to be put right. Roth had made him his biographer, but around the start of 2010 he took the job away, troubled by Miller’s failure to make much progress, to interview the older friends who had begun to die. What especially disturbed him, though, was the line of questioning Miller had begun to adopt. He found it traitorous in its sympathy for Bloom, and in retirement wrote several hundred pages of what he called “Notes on a Slander-Monger” in rebuttal. He also left a few hundred more of “Notes for My Biographer,” a point-by-point response to Bloom’s memoir. Neither manuscript has been published, and they now rest under a thirty-year embargo".