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Loading... Everyman (2006)by Philip Roth
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A good companion piece to Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre". ( ) Everyman is a shockingly enticing read. I say shocking because one would hope everyman doesn't have such exploitations and not every female would be so enticed to read about such "endeavors." It seems to be another case of masculine hubris. Yet the main character is so honestly portrayed, so fragile the reader wishes to shake him to earlier self-realization. Everyman is only everyman in the initial and concluding pages during his funeral. "No hocus locus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There were only our bodies born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us." This short novel begins with the funeral of "Everyman," our unnamed main character, and then proceeds to relate his life story as fleshed out and structured around a skeleton of his various encounters with death or mortality. (Hmm, reminds me of Maggie Farrell's I am I am I am). As a young boy he witnessed a drowned soldier/sailor who had washed up on shore, and shortly after when he was hospitalized for a hernia operation, his roommate, another young boy, died mysteriously in the night---"memorable enough that he was in the hospital that young, but even more memorable that he had registered a death." Thereafter, through-out he life he was haunted by health problems, and concurrently thoughts of death. In contrast, his older brother remained the picture of health into old age, while his own body was constantly betraying him. I had stopped reading Roth when I became bored with his (male) characters constant obsessions with sex and female bodies. This "meditation on mortality," as it has been described, has less of that than in many of his earlier books, although Everyman does go through three marriages, each to a successively younger woman, and in his late sixties is still hitting on a 20-something jogger younger than his daughter. But on the whole, I "enjoyed," if that's the correct word, this story about how one man dealt with facing death. Recommended 4 stars First line: "Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues from New York who recalled his energy and originality and told his daughter, Nancy, what a pleasure it had been to work with him." Last line: "He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he had feared from the start. no reviews | add a review
The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion when you're seventy-five." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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