Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

485 strana.
odlično očuvana knjiga.
Sabbath`s Theater by Philip Roth
After an obscenity about `the laudable ideologies,` he pronounces them `shallow, shallow, shallow! Enough reading and rereading of `A Room of One`s Own` -- get yourself `The Collected Works of Ava Gardner.` ` This stream of thought is of the sort Joyce invented for Leopold Bloom, and Sabbath often makes us think of that resourceful monologuist. But of course Bloom hadn`t read Virginia Woolf, didn`t know about Ava Gardner or Yvonne de Carlo.

Roth`s genius for juxtaposing impressions, feelings and names that usually don`t belong together continually enlivens the narrative. His extraordinarily active style revels in the play of words, as in this partial catalogue of the American idioms Sabbath`s mistress, Drenka, gets delightfully wrong: `bear and grin it . . . his days are counted . . . a roof under my head . . . the boy who cried `Woof!` . . . alive and cooking.` One of the cruelest, funniest moments in the book occurs when Sabbath persuades Drenka that her husband, invited by members of the Rotary to address them on the art of hostelry, must speak for at least an hour, and at a very slow pace, as he describes the `nuts and bulbs` of his profession.

But Sabbath`s disgust at `the laudable ideologies` gives the book a polemical edge that takes things beyond purely verbal playfulness. His wife`s incessant talk about sharing and identifying makes Sabbath rasp at her, `And is the only way to get off the booze to learn to talk like a second grader?` The question `Why must you be so racially prejudiced against Japanese!` brings the reply, prompted by memories of his dead brother, `Because of what they did to Alec Guinness in `The Bridge on the River Kwai.` ` His campaign against treating women as persons rather than sexual objects is instanced by his quoting from Yeats`s `For Anne Gregory` (`Only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone / And not your yellow hair`). In his car, listening to Benny Goodman, he sings along with `The Sheik of Araby,` whose lyrics `celebrating date rape and denigrating Arabs` he finds irresistible. `For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can`t beat the nasty side of existence,` he exclaims in a burst of manic affirmation.

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THERE is plenty of nastiness in this book, and certain readers will find it repellent, not funny at all. One of Sabbath`s friends, his patience exhausted by Mickey`s abusive behavior, calls it `the discredited male polemic`s last gasp.` There is something to this charge, and the novel is stronger for allowing readers to consider the hero in such terms, if they choose. But it would be a mistake to do so exclusively, for that would involve foreclosing on the sympathies we give to the outrageous Sabbath when, in a section of 60 pages, the heart of the novel and one of the great sequences in American fiction, he returns to the Jersey Shore of his boyhood.

After visiting the graveyard where his family lies, then staking out his own grave site, Sabbath discovers, in a derelict house nearby, a 100-year-old cousin of his father`s named Fish. He finds not only Fish but also -- in a chest that once belonged to Sabbath`s mother -- a box marked `Morty`s Things,` full of the souvenirs she kept of his dead brother. Contemplating all the `beloveds` on the cemetery tombstones, he had reflected, Bloom-like, that `nobody beloved gets out alive.` Now, still alive, Sabbath finds that his conversation with old Fish draws him ironically and painfully toward life as, in a rush of memory, everything comes back.

Sabbath tells Fish (who doesn`t remember him) that, yes, his parents have sent him over to see Fish, and the old man responds with `Isn`t that remarkable?` The word gives Sabbath `an enormous boost,` makes him feel he is dealing `with a man on whom his life has left an impression.` They proceed to share commonplaces that turn out to be not so commonplace at all: that Fish has been sent a birthday card from his optometrist; that the Atlantic Ocean once uprooted the boardwalk; that everything has changed; that death is terrible. As Fish goes off to cook his lunch, Sabbath steals the box of Morty`s things -- at the bottom of which, he knows, is the American flag his mother kept -- and heads for the ocean. The section concludes in what is surely the finest passage in the novel, right down to a line from Yeats`s late sonnet `Meru,` a poem Sabbath came across earlier in a student`s notebook:

`THE boardwalk was gone. Goodbye, boardwalk. The ocean had finally carried it away. The Atlantic is a powerful ocean. Death is a terrible thing. That`s a doctor I never heard of. Remarkable. Yes, that`s the word for it. It was all remarkable. Goodbye, remarkable. Egypt and Greece goodbye, and goodbye, Rome!`

The accumulated force of this seemingly unremarkable writing can be felt only by one who has read the 50 -- or the 400 -- pages that precede it. In its exclamatory poignancy, it takes its place with comparable moments at the end of `Zuckerman Unbound` (the hero`s return to his lost Newark) and Herman Roth`s death in `Patrimony.` Over all, `Sabbath`s Theater` is no less a virtuoso performance than its predecessor, `Operation Shylock,` but it has a depth and resonance unattained there. In Roth`s new theater it feels as if the lights were about to be extinguished for good, and that`s unsettling.

The end of the novel -- Sabbath`s return to Madamaska Falls and what he discovers there -- struck me as a shade arbitrary and contrived, after the absolute rightness of the New Jersey pages, although a flashback to Drenka`s final hours in the hospital is as powerful as writing can be. As for the sexual affronts the book will cause some readers, it depends on where (or whether) you draw the line. (I had mixed feelings about an extended transcript of the phone-sex tape between Sabbath and the student, a tape that, Sabbath admits, was more than enough `to drive me out of every decent antiphallic educational institution in America.`) But, as Yeats`s Crazy Jane puts it, `Fair and foul are near of kin, / And fair needs foul.` In Sabbath`s formulation (and his creator surely agrees), `The unknown about any excess is how excessive it`s been.`

This novel is Roth`s most ambitious effort at finding that out, and it is also one of the first such efforts to conduct itself, consciously, at the end of the century -- `the century that had virtually reversed human destiny,` Sabbath thinks. Matthew Arnold, who would have had his problems with `Sabbath`s Theater,` knew, however, that a great work occurred only when the power of the man and the power of the moment came together, which is what happens in this novel. `Egypt and Greece goodbye, and goodbye, Rome!` Philip Roth seems to me to be saying something similarly terrifying and exhilarating about American life in 1995.
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