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The Dying Animal

By Philip Roth

(43)

| Audio Cassette | 9780618135882

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Book Description

David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.
Since tContinue

David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.
Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when he left his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an "emancipated manhood," beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years he has refined that exuberant decade of protest and license into an orderly life in which he is both unimpeded in the world of eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of Consuela, "a masterpiece of volupté" undo him completely, and a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The carefree erotic adventure evolves, over eight years, into a story of grim loss.
What is astonishing is how much of America"s post-sixties sexual landscape is encompassed in THE DYING ANIMAL. Once again, with unmatched facility, Philip Roth entangles the fate of his characters with the social forces that shape our daily lives. And there is no character who can tell us more about the way we live with desire now than David Kepesh, whose previous incarnations as a sexual being were chronicled by Roth in THE BREAST and THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE.
A work of passionate immediacy as well as a striking exploration of attachment and freedom, THE DYING ANIMAL is intellectually bold, forcefully candid, wholly of our time, and utterly without precedent--a story of sexual discovery told about himself by a man of seventy, a story about the power of eros and the fact of death.

Critics

  • Breast man

    The Dying Animal Philip Roth 176pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99 As Philip Roth nears 70, it is apparent that his life's work is the history of the male psyche from childhood to old age. His last four amazing books, from 1995's Sabbath's Theater, in which h ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • The sexual licence fee

    The Dying Animal Philip Roth Cape £12.99, pp156 This isn't properly a continuation of the great stream of novels Philip Roth has produced in the past decade, rather a coda in which the same preoccupations are far less effectively explored. It would b ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

4 Reviews

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  • The reader is soon trapped by this wonderful way of expressing ideas and feelings.

    This book is written in the second person. There is this man, this professor that has a very defined strategy to hunt young women. He has the intellectual capacity and the ability to conquer them, he uses them for a while, and then he ends the relationship before the girls can say goodbye to him, an ... (continue)

    This book is written in the second person. There is this man, this professor that has a very defined strategy to hunt young women. He has the intellectual capacity and the ability to conquer them, he uses them for a while, and then he ends the relationship before the girls can say goodbye to him, and can even figure out what happened. He does that year after year, picking up his next pray from his class' students, every time more successfully than the time before, until he meets this extremely good looking young girl (Consuela -something-) and he falls madly in love with her. It is fascinating to see how he evolves and how he sees the doom on what he is doing; and even though he is really in love, he decides to end the relationship just as he did with every other relationship that he had in the past. The problem is 1. He never forgets her, and 2. She is madly in love with him too, (and 3. There are some very intimate details that you only can learn about if you read the book, but what make this relationship very unique)

    Anyway, it is great to read a book like this, and after I was done with reading it, I ran to the library to grab another one by the same author.

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    ariadna73 said on Jul 22, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • Roth wishlist

    Quite liked the style but apparently I should move to American Pastoral and the trilogy.. they are on the list..

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    Enricogirardi said on Jun 30, 2009 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

  • Is Sex Immortal?

    This book has brilliantly explored sex from a very special angle. An aged professor, David Kepesh (the protagonist and first person narrator); a 24-year-old decorous (in Kepesh's view) and voluptuous (more in reality) from a Cuban exile family, Consuela Castillo. The contrast of the young-and-old, t ... (continue)

    This book has brilliantly explored sex from a very special angle. An aged professor, David Kepesh (the protagonist and first person narrator); a 24-year-old decorous (in Kepesh's view) and voluptuous (more in reality) from a Cuban exile family, Consuela Castillo. The contrast of the young-and-old, teacher-and-student and America-and-Cuba culture spark clashes throughout the book.

    Though it's a little bit cliche that the aged professor could not overcome his feeling beyond the erotic sensation and towards Consuela's illness, Roth has dealt well to end it at the right place.

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    artie said on Jan 8, 2009 | Add your feedback

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