Off The Bookshelf UK - Books The Dying Animal The Dying Animal New & Used The Dying Animal

Search Books - select a category

Buy The Dying Animal online at Discounted New and Used prices. Delivered to your door with Off-The-Bookshelf.

The Dying Animal
by: Philip Roth

List Price: £6.99

Off The Bookshelf's Price: £5.49

You Save: £1.50 (21%)
Prices subject to change.

Used Price: £1.86
Third Party New Price: £2.44

Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780099422693
ISBN: 0099422697
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: October 05, 2006
Publisher: Vintage
Studio: Vintage
Sales Rank: 37333

Related Items:

Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk Review:
The Dying Animal is the latest addition to Philip Roth's already considerable and highly celebrated oeuvre. The protagonist is David Kepesh, a recurring protagonist in Roth's work, having been introduced first in the Kafkaesque 1972 novella, The Breast, and again in The Professor of Desire (1979). Kepesh, now a 70-year-old arts critic and lecturer in critical theory, is a sexual adventurer, who feels himself liberated from marriage, children and old school sexual mores by the 1960s sexual revolution, and uses his celebrity and intellectual reputation to seduce the young women that he tutors. Written in the form of a conversational confession, Roth has Kepesh introduce the method of his sexual conquests and then the foil to his method, the beautiful, mannered and busty Consuela Castillo. So begins a description of a descent into the madness of love; "crazy distortions of longing, doting, possessiveness ... this need, this derangement. Will it ever stop?"

. What begins as a chronology of sexual conquest becomes an exquisite meditation on the destructive and addictive nature of love and lust. Notions of social freedom, and sexual emancipation are explored as Kepesh, who for so long has considered himself a free animal, finds himself caged in by his obsession. His journey of sexual discovery becomes one of self-discovery, and as his life journey nears its close he also begins to realise in himself and those around him, "the dying animal" (from Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium"),a different beast to the sexual animal yet still entwined with it through shared flesh.

This is a sexually candid novel, a brave and daring one, a novel that does not blink in the admission that so many of our actions are motivated by the sexual. In this it is reminiscent of the writings of Henry Miller, which are mentioned among the many literary references that populate this book. Every line of Roth's prose brings a desire to read the next; it is brilliantly written, and like the Yeats poem from which it draws inspiration, it is open to much interpretation. --Iain Robinson

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A great little book
Passionate, uninhibited and hilarious - this is vintage Philip Roth. A shameless celebration of getting on and loving it.

Rating:

- delayed reaction
The "Dying Animal" is the only book of Roth's I have read. Though I was not too impressed while reading it, I have to say that, in retrospect, nothing apart from V. Woolf's "to the lighthouse" has moved me so much. It is not that the writing skills need be compared, alas, they belong to different times, different dimensions maybe, but the sensitivity involved, I at least feel is rare. As John Lennon once very aptly said, "life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans". Roth, in this book captures the element of our miscomprehension. Some books help us pass time, some help us fill a gap and some books tell us a little more, however painful, about who we are and how little we know about it.

Rating:

- A limp offering from the redoubtable Philip Roth
Hard to say, isn't it, when you haven't read the other books David Kapesh features in - The Breast and Professor of Desire. At least that's how I feel. The Dying Animal seems very much like a novelette coda resting on the edifice of past achievement. But I could be wrong. Like I said, this is my first brush with Kapesh.

Of course, the necessary question: do you really desire a meeting with this sexually profligate old professor?

David Kapesh is, in The Dying Animal, 70 years old. No longer the sexually active, somehow predatory college lecturer who, even in his sixties, was able to seduce young students and share his undeniable erotic experience with them. We meet him looking back on an affair he had eight year's previous ... Read More:

Rating:

- A very fine book...
Having only recently read Roth's previous novel, "The Human Stain", I was struck at first by the number of similar strands that appear in both books. This is not to diminish "The Dying Animal", or imply that it is a rehash of a previous idea - infact, if anything, I consider it to be the stronger of the two books.

I would say it certainly benefits by being presented as a novella. "The Human Stain" was for me, at times, a bit difficult to navigate through and required a great deal of persistance as the themes and messages I think were occasionally lost, reducing the books overall impact. However "The Dying Animal" benefits from the restrictions of its format, and is more concise and I think more invigorated as a result.

For ... Read More:

Rating:

- A heart-rending tale of love and insecurity
This novelette marks a change of style for Roth. It is a short and very personal account of the insecurities of true love. In this case the central character is a familiar Rothian sexual adventurer who loses all his self-confidence when he finally falls in love with one of his much younger former students. His inability to confront his insecurity leads him to destroy the relationship. He only discovers his mistake when it is too late. I loved this book. As so often with Roth, one wonders how much is autobiographical.... to call the transient sex scenes pornographic is prurient and silly: this is a story about human tragedy, beautifully crafted by one of the greatest writers.

Books : The Dying Animal