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Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
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Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

Series: Zuckerman Bound (5)

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680286,956 (3.55)23
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Houghton Mifflin (2007), Hardcover, 304 pages

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Recently added byAlanMcGrath, DK1010, Leitheoir, private library, nsalle, Di_M, anoceandrowning, susan11, grebmops, nimrod75
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English (24)  Dutch (3)  Italian (1)  All languages (28)
Showing 1-5 of 24 (next | show all)
I read only 63 pages of Exit Ghost before I gave up on it. Perhaps it gets better, but I was not enjoying it enough to give it a chance. I found some of the authors quips very enlightening, but the story did not feel realistic. The protagonist has spent a year living in the Berkshire mountains, then during a scheduled appointment in New York City decides on a whim to move back to the city. He answers a classified ad to swap apartments and does not even plan to return to his home to get his belongings. That's how far I read, so I don't know if he does indeed follow through on this fickle plan. ( )
  DK1010 | Feb 3, 2010 |
Let's be franck: Exit ghost is a bit boring.
It is slow all the way to the end and hardly uplifting.
Just as if Philip Roth is trying too hard: to intelectual, too pessimistic, too obvious also.
Of course it is well written (I have read it in French) and there are very good pages, but the result is not what you expect from such an acclaimed writer. ( )
  sinaloa237 | Nov 12, 2009 |
Dite quel che volete: Roth non delude mai. La lucidità della sua visione del mondo manda bagliori sinistri ed accecanti ad ogni riga.
Un esempio?
«Sarà un discorso breve», dice Zuckerman alzandosi in piedi, al modesto pranzo di compleanno che hanno preparato per lui i custodi della sua casa di campagna. «Pensate all'anno 4000». La coppia sorride. «No, no. Seriamente, pensate all'anno 4000. Immaginatevelo. In tutte le sue dimensioni. Prendetevi il tempo che vi occorre ». E dopo un lungo silenzio aggiunge: «Ecco a cosa assomiglia avere settant'anni». ( )
  sanseverina | Nov 3, 2009 |
Very clever, slightly weird, funny and satirical, a bit intellectual, obsessive reading...i'm not entirely sure what i thought of this book, to be honest. Did i enjoy it? I'm not sure "enjoy" is the right word. It was a good read, although slow to start with it soon picked up, but i'm left feeling slightly frustrated as i don't think the story has been resolved...at least not to my satisfaction. But what do i know? This is my first Philip Roth book, so maybe thats typical. ( )
  heidijane | Jul 20, 2009 |
I didn't love this latest (and last?) installment of Roth's Nathan Zuckerman novels. Zuckerman, impotent and incontinent following prostate surgery, leaves his Berkshires haven for Manhattan. He connects with the lover of his late literary hero, I. E. Lonoff, an aggressive would-be biographer of Lonoff who claims to know a secret, and a young couple with whom he agrees to swap homes for a year. The story was absorbing, and the writing as good as always, but the tone put me off. Zuckerman seems to equate his sexual impotency with his literary decline, and that's so facile. He also seems to revere the Great Male Writers with their Big Ideas and their Propulsive Energy, and gives me the impression he would disdain women writers. I've been reading a Roth novel a year, and the recent ones I've read didn't have this vaguely anti-feminist tone. ( )
  CasualFriday | May 20, 2009 |
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Epigraph
Before death takes you, O take back this.
-Dylan Thomas, "Find Meat on Bones"
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For B.T.
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I hadn't been in New York in eleven years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I'd hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven years and, what's more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back; with no sense of loss--merely, at the outset, a kind of drought within me--I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment. The impulse to be in it and of it I had long since killed.
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Exit Ghost

Book description

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0618915478, Hardcover)

The last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman, the indomitable literary adventurer of Roth's nine Zuckerman books, like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.

Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.

The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.

The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret." Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.

Haunted by Roth's earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.

Exit Zuckerman: Talking with Philip Roth

When we talked with Philip Roth for the Amazon Wire podcast, we asked him about his long relationship with his fictional surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, his decision to bring Zuckerman back (and say goodbye to him) in Exit Ghost, and the difficulties of aging for novelists, and we managed to touch on George Plimpton, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, and The Tempest, along with nearly all of the nine Zuckerman books. You can listen to interview in the podcast above, or read the full transcript.

Zuckerman Returns to Manhattan: Philip Roth Reads from Exit Ghost

When Nathan Zuckerman returns to Manhattan from his self-imposed rural retreat for the first time in 11 years in Exit Ghost, what does he find? Along with his surprising and unsettling encounters with an aged and ill woman who had once been a young mystery to him, an aggressive biographer who won't take no for an answer, and an alluring young writer who tempts him back into the adventure of seduction, he is confronted with a city whose streets are filled with people behaving quite differently than a decade before. "For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time," he thinks. "I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the street through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire." Listen to Philip Roth read an excerpt from Exit Ghost.

Looking Back on Zuckerman The Ghost Writer: Introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer who spends a night in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff, and meets a haunting young woman whom he imagines could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. Zuckerman Unbound: Zuckerman, with newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent '60s, where he is assumed by fans and enemies to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?"). The Anatomy Lesson: At 40, Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction--pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman is unable to write a line, but the novel provides some of the funniest and fiercest scenes in all of Roth's fiction. The Prague Orgy: In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s, where he discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism. Zuckerman Bound: The latest in the Library of America's collected Roth works brings together his first Zuckerman trilogy, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson, along with the epilogue, The Prague Orgy. The Counterlife: From New Jersey to England to the West Bank, the characters in The Counterlife, illuminated by the skeptical, enveloping intelligence of Nathan Zuckerman, are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate. American Pastoral: Swede Levov, legendary high-school athlete and boyhood idol of Nathan Zuckerman, is wrenched overnight out of the American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk when his teenage daughter proves capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. I Married a Communist: The rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, takes the young Zuckerman under his wing, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s. The Human Stain: Coleman Silk, an aging classics professor forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist, has a secret, kept for 50 years from all around him, including his friend Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.

(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:57:41 -0500)

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