The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal

by PhilipRoth (Author)

Synopsis

'No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex' With these words America's most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college - as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated. The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous, humblingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling the themes of eros and mortality, licence and repression, freedom and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 176
Edition: 01
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 05 Apr 2002

ISBN 10: 0099422697
ISBN 13: 9780099422693
Book Overview: 'This is a vicious, furious book, unapologetically not of this age - it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest' New Statesman

Media Reviews
Brief and brilliant -- Frank Kermode * London Review of Books *
A small disturbing masterpiece * New York Review of Books *
A fierce, compacted, sometimes brutal meditation on the passing of time and the meaning of freedom * Daily Telegraph *
Written with Roth's familiar elegance and composure * Sunday Times *
Intense and brilliant... Dazzling and compelling * Sunday Herald *
Author Bio
Philip Roth (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for `the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004'. Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award `for a body of work . . . of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose `scale of achievement over a sustained career . . . places him or her in the highest rank of American literature'. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.