This may be Roth’s best work.

I would go further to say that I firmly believe he is one of America’s greatest writers. His works have a profound impact on the literary world.

If you despise curse words, detailed descriptions of carnal affairs, and expositions of lust, desire, and sexual needs, then this book is not for you. In such a case, the lexicon might become more important to you than the substantive messages that this book retains.

This is the story of Mickey Sabbath, a sixty-four-year-old man. Now, as an adult, he is an orphan, just like many of us will inevitably become. His life experiences are complex and full of challenges.

Absolutely brilliant. The way Roth portrays the characters and the story is truly remarkable. It makes you think deeply about life, relationships, and human nature.

Ten stars. This book is a masterpiece that deserves the highest praise. It is a must-read for anyone who loves literature and wants to explore the depths of the human psyche.

Wildly, pointlessly, boring, repetitive, obscene and pornographic. These are the words that come to mind when describing this audiobook. I tried my best to give it a chance, but by the time I reached 17% (which was about 3 hours in), I had to abandon it.

The story seemed to be going nowhere, with the same scenes and dialogue being repeated over and over again. It was not only dull but also quite offensive with its excessive use of obscene and pornographic language.

I was really disappointed as I had high hopes for this audiobook. However, it failed to deliver on every front. I would not recommend it to anyone, especially those who are looking for a meaningful and engaging listening experience.

Perhaps the author had good intentions, but the execution was seriously lacking. It's a shame that such a potentially interesting concept was ruined by poor writing and a lack of direction.

In conclusion, save your time and money and avoid this audiobook at all costs. There are plenty of other great options out there that will surely satisfy your literary cravings.

It's been quite a while since the last time I delved into the story of such a controversial character.

To be honest, I loved it mainly because of all the valuable tips Philip Roth provided me regarding crucial issues such as sex, love, marriage, and death.

The novel is filled with some of the most outrageously hilarious sex scenes I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

And now, I finally understand why "Goodbye Columbus" - and not "Sabbath's Theater" - is a mandatory read in American colleges.

It seems that this particular work offers a unique perspective and a wealth of insights that are deemed essential for students to explore and understand.

Perhaps it's the way Roth tackles these complex themes with both humor and depth that makes it such a compelling and important piece of literature.

Overall, my experience of reading this novel has been both entertaining and enlightening, and I look forward to exploring more of Roth's works in the future.

S C O M P A R I R E. The word is strange. \\"Amati Amanti\\" is the title of an episode of Chiara Gamberale's podcast on the Unbound, those who don't experience love relationships in a canonical way, those to whom the traditional family is tight. This episode starts with the reading of the opening of Teatro di Sabbath and with a digression by Gamberale on how the word \\"lover\\" has always seemed to her incomplete, insufficient to describe that kind of relationship. Since the lover is only one of the two legs, the beloved is also needed to bring about a corresponding relationship.

Out of curiosity, I start reading. And I reach the end convinced of reading one thing and finding something decidedly different. A book (for stomachs with a certain robustness) that actually has Death at its center. Or rather the DISAPPEARANCE of the people closest to us.

And the difficulty of SURVIVING without their presence. And the fear, or rather the TERROR of facing that only certainty. In short, it can be difficult even for those animated by the best intentions to remember twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three hundred and sixty-five days a year that no one can come back to live. On earth there is nothing as certain, it is the only thing we can know with absolute certainty: and no one wants to know it.

A great book (Roth, the tightrope walker of words). To be administered with all the precautions of the case.

Good morning, DNF America. This is R00ny, also known as Percevald Posthumous, here to engage in an argument with the silent void of the internet.

I wasn't a huge Roth fan before reading this book. However, I heard from several people - artists and critics whose opinions I respect (and it's interesting, isn't it, that one can respect an opinion without necessarily agreeing with it?). They said that Sabbath's Theater was their favorite book of his.

So I thought, maybe there's something to it. Why not give it a try? And so I did.

Let's start with a little lesson I learned around the age of 12: A bad or, more precisely, an unlikeable character is not the same as a poorly written character. The same can be said for books. But wait! How can this be? If the hero (in the classical sense) can be a bad person, then how can the novel that tells his story possibly be good?

It's a good question, and it's hard for me to say. But I'll try to provide some examples. Sabbath's Theater is about a very bad person, told from his point of view. There's no good guy to stop him, and yet we have such wise words as this:

"Standing out there, the sea air, the quiet, the sound of the waves, your toes in the sand, the idea that there are all those things out there that are about to bite your bait. That thrill of something being out there. You don't know what it is, you don't know how big it is. You don't even know if you'll ever see it." And he never did see it, nor, of course, did he get what you get when you're older, which is something that mocks your opening yourself up to these simple things, something that is formless and overwhelming and that probably is dread.

Damn, but I could relate to that idea. Does that mean I'm a bad person?

Or this:

Clothes are a masquerade anyway. When you go outside and see everyone in clothes, then you know for sure that nobody has a clue as to why he was born and that, aware of it or not, people are perpetually performing in a dream.

Call me crazy, but isn't this something that anyone - black, trans, white, Q, American, Transylvanian - could relate to? Isn't that the point? That even what you so easily call a "bad" person is still a person, no matter how bad?

Calm down, haters. Read the whole thing before you judge.

That goes for you too, Michiko Kakutani, the grand vizier of "literary" critics at the New York Times. Maybe if you, one of the country's most well-paid readers, actually read to about the midpoint of a serious author's latest work, you would be able to see how blatantly he satirizes you.

But no. This is DNF America. The land of TL:DR. Give me the 8-hour boring TV version. If I don't like someone in the first few pages, it means the author didn't do his job. When I look in the mirror, I see someone with no moral ambiguity whatsoever. I am a good person. As long as I don't read books like this, I'll stay a good person. Just keep telling myself this. Don't think about things that make me feel funny. Don't question the paradox. When it gets tough: Quit.

Funny though, how when you stick it out, you find out that all that terrible stuff that scared you, when you confront it, actually makes you... what's the word?

Of course this is very good. Superb writing. A great master at work.

Nonetheless I must admit that I struggled with this book. It's not necessarily a bad thing, don't get me wrong.

When I was half way through, I wanted to give up. If I had abandoned Mickey Sabbath at that point, I would have written the following review: “Of course this is very good, but it’s also unbearable. One cleverly written sentence after another is wasted on the boring struggles of a despicable lowlife. We can only hope that he doesn't mirror too many aspects of the writer’s personality. This book is too American for me in its Woody Allen-like obsession with obsession, fornicating Jews and psychological victimism. Adultery doesn’t make a character complex and showing off with European culture doesn’t make a writer profound. This book is irritating and unlovable. And for this very reason, I could also give five stars, I know, and I probably should. The reason why I don’t is that I could only admire the dexterity of the narrator without one moment enjoying his company.” I was thinking of giving it two stars.

But I went on and finished it. In spite of my earlier doubts and irritations, this big American novel leaves me impressed. The character of Mickey Sabbath, who gave me such a hard time empathising with him in the beginning, does in the end stand out as memorably profound and tragic. The masterly narrative technique of constantly mixing the present with the past in a sort of third person stream of consciousness pays off marvellously. In the end, we see Mickey Sabbath exactly so, as a tragic mixture of present and past, as driven by loss, as hopelessly trying to regain a paradise lost, while his losses made him cynical enough to recognise the absurdity of his hopeless endeavour.

I’m grateful for the struggle. It has made me appreciate the depth and complexity of this work even more.

The third age of life, the dusk of the worlds, of love and of life. An age of memories of possibilities, of opportunities seized and missed, a look at one's youth soberly and with different thoughts. Is there a difference between love and sex or do they complement each other? Experimenting in love's satisfactions and finding a suitable partner or more than one partner. The third age, the age of memories, a look at the fragrant juices of life, the fragrant streams of life, and does a person ever grow old? The heart plays one game, the mind sings another song, inside there is a fire, the appearance of an old man is subjective, unreal (?), but spreads, and on the outside the objective looks of the young in the streams of fire-drenched, spilled love, protected by the egotism of laughter from the unwanted old society.


"…A person can be young only once, but can be immature forever."


Mickey Sabato is a lecherous old man and it is easy to condemn him. He is addicted to sex, thinks about sex constantly, experiments in sex, experiments in which he was the actor, but he also thinks about death and about youth and about their interconnection. The story is set in motion by the death of his lover, the unforgotten Drenka, of Croatian origin, with a funny accent, and the constant insecurities of the country in which he had not gained the experiences of first love, first jealousy, first experiments. The death of a secret love that lasted thirteen full years, of a sexual like-minded person, a passionate criminal. The death sets in motion thoughts about all that and all those who are no longer there. Mickey, on his journey from the province where he now lives to New York where he once lived, tells through memories his youth with his first idol, his older brother Morty, remembers his first wife Nikki, who disappeared, left with someone else, remembers the hostile fingers on the streets of Rome and New York that unbutton the happy and warm breasts in the middle of the street and condemn the moral but promiscuous bearers of power. All memories carry sadness within them, the sadness that arises when all those you love go to some happier worlds, parallel universes, and leave only memories to one lecherous old man with an immature and young heart. Memories of Drenka's breasts, Drenka's touches, irritated poses, passionate kisses, shining eyes, warm thighs and the voluptuous passion of the like-minded. Memories of her juices of life in which he swam, with which she spilled over him, gave to him, embraced him, memories of the words they learned, of the happiness they gave and received, of the cosmetics of sexual horror to which they approached and rejoiced as in something most wonderful, memories of something that no longer exists.


"Mickey, everywhere, everything is so soft, like some huge warm embrace... but now there is no more of that warm embrace, that flattery, that caress; there are no more those journeys for her on which we never went, there is no more anything of that for her, her exaggerations, her willfulness, her thoughtlessness, her love, her cowardice, her sharing of herself, her wildness - that common and then dimmed cancer turned into a tumour - the female body that was more desirable to Sabato than all. That hunger to always be Drenka, to last and last and be warm and healthy and herself, all that insignificant and all that wonderful has now been eaten away, organ by organ, cell by cell, by those smooth black birds. Now only the fragments of this story and the fragments of her English, only the pieces of the heart of the apple that was Drenka - only that is left."


The fragments of a desperate life change like a track, and all those young and in the heart happy girls who rode through Mickey's life, float and create living wounds in memory. And why does no one anymore have an understanding for the lecherous old man and his needs, his young heart and his passionate language? And all those beautiful challenging photographs and all those fragrant things, only that is left for Mickey, for his arthritic hands. The condemnation of the war that took Morty away from him, the condemnation of those who stole his youth, of those who replaced the fire of sex and the enjoyment in sex with the killing of youth, sending youth to meet death, a meeting with despair behind which only petrified looks, broken embraces, grief, shame and pain remain. And who is the maniac here? Who should be condemned here? Mickey, whose whole life was a search for pleasure, beauty, the touch of a gentle and young female hand, the touch of Drenka, Nikki or Roseanne, the desperate Kitty or some other beauty, or those moral virtues that in the name of peace kill and send the young to be killed. Mickey is a fantastic little lost old man, an anti-young man for example, full of laughter, moral and amoral discoveries of the world and an unspoiled desire for his wild Drenka.


"If it weren't too late to go back to the sea, if his fingers weren't arthritic, if Morty had survived, and Nikki hadn't been crazy, or if he hadn't been - if there were no war, madness, bigotry, illness, imbecility, suicides and death, it seems he would be in a much better state. He has paid the full price for art, only he has created none. The sea of all those old-fashioned artistic torments - isolation, poverty, despair, spiritual and physical disorders - and no one knows or cares about that. He is just someone who has married, grown old and become embittered, one of the billions."

The number one complaint leveled against anything that Philip Roth writes is his treatment of women. However, I would like to point out that Roth's men aren't exactly shining examples of human virtue either. So, is Roth a misogynist? The truth is that Roth's characters can be grotesque and yet still manage to garner readerly sympathy. I just want to make this clear - I am not disputing that his books are not somewhat placed in a "male gaze" and that his textual treatment of women can be hard to take. But Roth is not Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.

He has often made it his goal to depict humans, regardless of what group they may or may not belong to. Another major criticism he faces is that he writes badly about the Jews. To this, Roth replies, "Well, can't Jews be bad too?" His treatment of both Jews and women has several important parallels.

After recovering from a bout of crippling depression, Roth found Sabbath's Theater an enormously fun undertaking. He felt free to write in a way he hadn't felt in years, and it shows. Sabbath's Theater is a cauldron of literary mimicry and allusion, mixed with a healthy dose of sexual perversion. Often the two overlap, as in the line, "Behold! The arrow of desire!" If you pay attention, you will notice Mickey's extraordinary connections to Shakespeare, such as "Forswear fucking!" The middle section is punctuated with a very Ulysses-like stream of consciousness. Mickey even makes puns of Dostoyevsky's name.

My point is that this is a very literary book. I'm not going to say that "beneath the rough dirty surface lies blah blah blah blah blah..." because that would be devaluing the innumerable facets of the novel. Everything - literature, sex, history, language, etc. - intertwines.

If you are going to read it, just let Sabbath's Theater do what it does best. Be horrified. Be sympathetic. Celebrate when you recognize an allusion. Enjoy Roth at his most free.

I'm feeling rather sad tonight.

I just did a check and realized that I've completely run out of one-star-rated books to review. Over the years, I've really had a great time with all those truly dreadful books that were like scraping the bottom of the barrel. But now, I find myself having to move into the two-star category. And let me tell you, it's not half as amusing as the one-star ones.

Because now, I have to be all wisely judging, well on the one hand this, and on the other hand that. You know, it's all that blah blah.

So anyway, let's talk about Philip Roth. I need to explain that I went through this phase where a certain particular person (I'll just refer to this person as a person, as the word doesn't carry any undertone of resentment nor does it intimate ill-disguised hostility) made me understand that Philip Roth was to literature what "We Are The World" was to the starving millions. So, I read a whole heap of his works. And I have to say, I was not convinced. In fact, I might even say I was the opposite of convinced. I was unvinced. I was devinced.

I will admit that occasionally, like every 120 pages or so in a really long book, you can get a pretty good laugh from Sabbath's Theater. It's always ALWAYS of the O MY GOD that's so disgusting variety or the pages-of-spewed-forth-insults variety. I guess that's not too bad. I was actually going to say that's more than you get from The Bible. But come to think of it, that's exactly what you get from The Bible. O my God that's so disgusting, followed some time later by pages of hideous insults. There you have it.

A complex book, the free thoughts of a 60-year-old Jew, set in a New York frequented by the rich Jewish bourgeoisie.

Within the community that appears externally compact, the class distances, differences in thought, and actions can be perceived.

A sexually potent man, a lover of women and girls, constantly in search of the carnal relationship... the need to feel alive by exhibiting a virile erection.

The syncopated rhythm at the beginning, then it expands, smoothly transitioning from the first to the third person without interruption.

A plot borrowed from personal experiences, such as the life of a couple, professional failure (a puppeteer and writer), with age advancing inexorably... the sensitivity matures to measure time, to stop and think about the time that remains for you, the strength that is gradually lost, the patience that is exhausted, and the desires that remain.

It is a linear process that traverses the many pages of this novel/story by a remarkable writer who, I believe, at the end, exhausted, after a story that retraces the past and present, is still searching for himself... and does not find him!

A great writer, a challenging book that, despite the difficulties that have also weighed on me, I still feel compelled to recommend.

Philip Milton Roth has long been a target of criticism, with many accusing him of objectifying women, misogyny, and even pornography. His detractors claim that his female characters are mere sex objects, lacking in depth and complexity. However, based on my own reading, I find this argument to be baseless. Roth's female characters are multifaceted, with their own jobs, opinions, and personalities.

Take, for example, the controversy surrounding "The Fappening," the release of hundreds of self-shot, homemade "sexy" pictures of female celebrities. The reaction to this event should have been a wake-up call for Roth's critics. Millions of men were drawn to these pictures, searching for and discussing them. And yet, women around the world are happily taking these pictures, allowing themselves to be objectified. This shows that sex and objectification are not as straightforward as some would like to believe.

Of all Roth's books, "Sabbath’s Theater" is perhaps the most controversial. It is often labeled as pornographic, and in some places, it is indeed filled with filth. However, I believe that this book is not really about sex at all. Instead, it is a tragic exploration of an old man's struggle with grief, old age, and ultimately, death. Like Shakespeare's Richard III or Hamlet, Mickey Sabbath is a larger-than-life character, fighting a losing battle against forces beyond his control.

While I have some criticisms of the book, such as its length and lack of a traditional plot, I still believe that "Sabbath’s Theater" is a great read. It is brave, intelligent, and challenging, making us confront aspects of humanity that we might prefer to ignore. And in Mickey Sabbath, we have a character who, despite his flaws, is worthy of our admiration. He is a man who refuses to go gentle into that good night, raging against the dying of the light.

A 25 years after "Portnoy", after several attempts entrusted to his alter ego Zuckerman, Roth - I throw it out there without thinking too much - bringing together the obsession of Ahab, the anger of Heathcliff, the introspection of Herzog, the madness of Don Quixote, the selfishness of Pechorin (and I stop here) creates Mickey Sabbath, the puppeteer, an exceptional anti-hero and his definitive character.

The play is from the start a seesaw oscillating between facts and memories, perversion and compassion, provocations and melancholy.

It is a sarcastic, provocative work, overflowing with sneering and crystal-clear irony.

Roth, accustomed to temporal leaps and sudden passages between narration and the protagonist's thoughts, has always been reluctant to use the experimental narrative formats typical of postmodernism. But here, when Sabbath breaks loose, there appear streams of consciousness, strange imaginations and crazy dialogues. Another provocation by Roth, with a dig at Joyce, as if to say one must be crazy to think it's intelligent to write in this way.

Interestingly, while the genius and intuitions of many artists fade with age, Roth is in his sixties when he reaches the most fruitful phase of his career and in 5 years publishes "Sabbath", "The Human Stain" and "American Pastoral".

Soon after, he closes the Kepesh trilogy with "The Dying Animal", bids farewell to Zuckerman and says goodbye to literature.

The play of Sabbath is probably his best book and I am convinced that Philip Roth has been the greatest novelist of the last hundred years.