Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7176 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Carl Wilkinson, Observer

'capable of altering the way you see the world'

Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times
Pick of the week - 'one ends the novel exhilarated, buoyed up by
its boldness and defiance'

Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
'so compelling, so important'

Customer Reviews

Accomplished and steeped in truth
I read this right after reading the latest Martin Amis novel, and it was like a fresh of breath air after emerging from a dusty and dimly-lit library. Compared with Amis, Philip Roth is beautifully to-the-point and straightforward in the way he explains things and illuminates his characters.

I also read this shortly after attending a couple of very significant funerals, I therefore found Roth's ruminations on death both comforting and bleak - a lovely combination in literature, I think.

Recommended. (It's also fairly short, which is a plus if you read slowly and/or don't have much time but want to read something decent, as is generally the case with me.)

Superb
This was an enormously enjoyable read. From the opening paragraph, you know you are in the hands of a master. He title refers to death, the fate that must meet everyman and is borrowed from a 15th century play of the same name. The book is a meditation on mortality and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that the mortal coil is heir to - to totally butcher Hamlet's soliloquys. Roth shows himself as a literary stylist at the height of his powers as he tackles "the Big Adios". The narrative in this short, page turner of a book carries you headlong to the grave -where it must inevitably end.

Middle class tragedy
When he's bad, he's very very bad ("Sabbath's Theatre") and when he's good he's wonderful. This is from the good end of the Roth oeuvre, telling the story of a middle-aged man's descent into illness, self-realisation and death, devoid of all comfort about just rewards or afterlives.

A small gem - not easy to read if you are yourself a middle aged bloke with the occasional dodgy health problem, but still great.