Gronda sesso, fallimento e morte.

It is a phrase that evokes a sense of darkness and turmoil.

The words "sesso" (sex), "fallimento" (failure), and "morte" (death) are all powerful and loaded with meaning.

Together, they create a disturbing and potent image.

It could be seen as a description of a life filled with excess, disappointment, and the inevitability of mortality.

The idea of "gronda" (dripping) further emphasizes the sense of something being continuously present and perhaps overwhelming.

This phrase might be used in a work of literature or art to convey a complex and emotional message.

It could also be interpreted in different ways depending on the context and the viewer or reader's own experiences and perspectives.

Overall, "Gronda sesso, fallimento e morte" is a thought-provoking and impactful phrase that leaves a lasting impression.

Roth creates a world. But it's not a fantasy world; it's a real one. Not veristic, but real. A world where it's not the description of the particular that wins, but that particular. Which is often completely inconsequential - it's not a thriller where after 300 pages we'll understand that the color of that sweater was the key to everything - but it makes the narration three-dimensional. Then, to this world, he adds characters whose emotions, impulses, and physicality seem obscene, but in reality, they are just transparent. Their absence in us is only a symptom of a lack of courage - or an emotional incapacity. Then there's life, death, pain, sex: we know those, nothing new. But lived and told like this, it's not for everyone.

'Sabbath or a sabbath is generally a weekly day of rest and/or time of worship that is observed in any of several faiths. The term derives from the Hebrew shabbat (???), 'to cease', which was first used in the Biblical account of the seventh day of Creation.' Humanity and civilization rest, step aside in this old Dionysus, contemptuous, irreverent, powerful, lustful, and primitive, who mocks everyone and everything, strengthened by a belief that belongs only to him. We can only follow it in a journey that accompanies, with very long flashbacks, the last months of his (s)dazzling existence.

What should not be written? What should be said? How many emotions does a book contain within and how many emotions does it throw out?

Mickey Sabbath. With the death of his mistress, he unleashes whatever it is that he has chained, hidden, and condemned to his spider webs.

A character is being solved. This is something different from melting. How should I put it... To flutter by ruffling its ruffles. You can't get angry, all those dirty things that come to his mouth are right in front of your eyes. If it were you in question, you might not even be able to hold back your stomach. But Philip Roth is playing a little game with you. I am trying to understand Sabbath, one of the most disturbing and peace-disturbing characters I have ever read, and I am seeing beyond. With all his fragility, his transparency. With what is left of his mother, his brother, his wife, and those he has lost and burned for.

And Drenka... A wonderful character portrayal... Provocative... Even with her absence, she was filling Sabbath.

A difficult read. It doesn't go down easily. It is a fact that many will not like it... However, if the tails of the foxes in your head are not touching each other and you are not afraid to face a "real" character, don't miss this work!

It is difficult to digest but enjoyable from every page. Perhaps because of the so naked portrayal of emotions such as a person's desires, fears, disappointments that can hold their fists with their wings. It is not criticizing the system, it is knocking down the pillars that hold the system up.

As a result, my acquaintance with Roth was not silent and quiet. You will understand if you also read Sabbath. Put aside the moral norms because what you will encounter is offering you something completely different: Dark, depressive, and dazzling.

There were also the sentences that made me underline and the sentences that scratched my mind... What about the author's other works? They have taken the top place on my to-buy list from now on.

Kıvanç Güney, on the other hand, is bringing out a wonderful translation that works on the spirit of this work.

I have delved into a significant number of Roth's novels, and for the most part, I have found them quite engaging. However, when it comes to Sabbath's Theatre, I simply could not persevere.

There are numerous glowing reviews out there, with many individuals lauding this particular work as potentially his very best. But alas, I will never have the opportunity to discover the reasons behind such acclaim.

After approximately 70 pages, I threw in the towel. I reached a point where I simply could not bring myself to read any further. It felt as if the story was not resonating with me on a fundamental level, and I was unable to connect with the characters or the plot.

Perhaps it was a matter of personal taste, or maybe I was not in the right frame of mind to appreciate the nuances of this particular novel. Whatever the reason may be, Sabbath's Theatre remains a mystery to me, a work that I will likely never fully understand or appreciate.

Should Roth’s novels be lumped together with other transgressive works such as Vollmann’s Royal Family or anything by the Marquise de Sade? Most often they are not. Frequently, they are labeled as masterpieces, or literary fiction of the award-winning variety.

Whereas, Vollmann’s far superior novel abovementioned is regarded by some as an eccentric display of scarcely fictionalized, dirty journalism.

Simply stated, about 80% of the content of this novel could be labeled as transgressive. A preoccupation with sexual mores, scatological humor, and phallocentric obsessive-compulsive mania are other descriptive terms I would use. But they are also reductive. It has been hailed as a comic epic. Comic, it is, at times, though also overwhelmingly pessimistic, sad, and impolite in the way desensitized five-year-old boys are impolite. Epic in the sense that Harold and Kumar is epic, if you are in the right mindset.

Roth excels at depicting the resonating effects of grief, betrayal and lust in many instances. But when combined with psychological transparency and fringe narrators with few, if any, redeeming qualities, it becomes necessary to define the novel by other means. Lest it be consigned to the merely literal erotica section of the bookstore. Instead, let us consider how this novel, regardless of any other work he might have produced, constitutes a worthy achievement in the realm of satire, representation and the analysis of human beings.

The mental and societal situations alluded to include: madness, sexual frenzy, cartoonish seduction sequences, moving intimacy, grossly inappropriate discussions in the workplace, suggestion of far deeper corruption and crime, grief (of course), incestuous considerations, the pluses and minuses of marriage, the responsibility between lovers, spouses and professors toward those they violate, the purpose and power of art, and more. Overall, the main character represents, in my mind, a product of wish fulfilment, accomplishing in reality what could normally (and so often) only occur in the modern indelicate imagination.

Through a range of literary techniques Roth presents conflicts of varying depth and complexity, but never strays far from his central theme of the satisfaction of desires. Many farcical aspects intrude upon the serious tone it often assumes. Has anyone ever made money performing with finger puppets? Also, the ghost was an interesting way to conduct discussions and deliver character development. The dialogue can be witty, but it verges on shallow when entrenched in the single-track minds of the main characters.

I could go on extolling the great and execrable components of this multifaceted work, but I do not believe it is worth more than a modicum of my time. On to the next Roth book, to see what he can cook up with the same old ingredients.

“I will never have been a stage idol, but say whatever you want about me, mine has been a truly human life!”

The theater of Mickey Sabbath is the spectacle of his life.

Sabbath is a hero with very little heroic in him. Roth presents him right away in his worst guise: a short, hunched, bearded old man, unpleasant, depraved, and libertine to pathological levels.

After the death of his longtime lover Drenka, he finds himself retracing the most important steps of his life, the troubled stories of his wives, his past as a lewd puppeteer, his family, and his brother who died in the war.

Sabbath continuously wallows in images, sensations, and odors that only remind him of his lost youth, digging into his thoughts and always remaining true to himself.

Roth rambles, rolls out past and present events, “loses” himself in minute descriptions of the main characters in Sabbath's show, of which you can only try to absorb every single word of his dense but never boring prose.

Only Roth could truly make a character like Mickey Sabbath human.

Roth's "The Dying Animal" presents a complex exploration of human nature and relationships. The novel begins with a powerful incipit that is more basic and expressed in a universal language compared to that of "Anna Karenina". It makes us laugh as it is said by Drenka, 52 years old, to her 64-year-old lover Sabbath, both with unrestrained sexual vitality, not only dedicated to each other but also having other partners with mutual condescension.

In this novel, although I haven't read it completely yet, it doesn't reach the obsessiveness of "Portnoy's Complaint", but it completes the Rothian catalog of lustful and sexually profane Jews that once made the Jewish establishment ashamed. There are some descriptions of copulations that some might say need cuts as Philippe Noiret did in Tornatore's film when censoring the chaste kisses in "Cinema Paradiso". However, the scene of the overcoat is truly powerful.

Roth is not overly obsessed with sex (yes, a little bit, but he describes it effectively and accurately at times). After all, sexual impulses have a significant influence on our behavior. Roth uses it as a tool to understand and describe life and anticipate its end because sex can be defined as "la petite mort".

Sex, being Jewish today, and death are the themes that Roth rotates around throughout his writing life. He does this in "The Dying Animal" which is an existential theater and the swan song of a man - Sabbath - at the culmination of failure. Sabbath is a character who remains memorable not only because he is a kind of "vilain" - a negative hero (but in literature, the good ones are always in the minority and often boring). He has a remarkable mind that goes hand in hand with his sexual potency.

I like Sabbath because he is not an enigma. He is frank, doesn't hide anything, doesn't try to please, and never uses masks. He oscillates between frivolity and seriousness, has no sympathy for moral values, has an irascible nature, is sarcastic towards everything, and is a perfect egoist. Yet, he can also show a soft side, a crack where the tenderness of the reader can finally insinuate, like inserting a hand into the pulp of a watermelon after scratching the cellophane for a long time.

The passion for Drenka is not only sexual but also love. Sabbath is extremely tender when spending the last nights in the hospital talking to her, terminally ill and with her life ebbing away. Drenka, that explosion of life, joy, and exuberance, lies emaciated, full of tubes, with the urine bag hanging from the bed, but still has a light in her eyes for her American boyfriend, as she always called him, the European from Yugoslavia.

Sabbath is an ex of everything: ex-son, ex-brother, ex-husband, ex-friend, ex-artist. His life rolls towards an inevitable precipice, without return. Sabbath facilitates the descent, making himself even more of a "vilain" and only accelerating its motion. He abandons his wife in a psychiatric hospital, wants to take to bed the wife of his best friend who is trying to save him, and steals from a ninety-year-old cousin. And in that Ossianic delirium at the cemetery where he goes to find his dead and prepare his place with diligent anticipation: a 2-meter-long and 1-meter-deep hole, reserved with the caretaker, the most beautiful memories surface, but it is also a slow approach to death. There is nothing more serious than death, and it is the only solution for him.

A beautiful image of Sabbath remains in my mind: him standing still in his slovenliness at the corner of 34th or 37th street in New York, it doesn't matter which, with a glass in his hand. A stranger drops half a dollar into the glass as an unrequested alms. The others already see in him what he has become or is about to become, even before he is fully aware of it.

Not least, it is a novel with a perfect temporal structure.

It is truly arduous to offer criticism when one finds oneself wallowing in a cesspool of filth, impropriety, and indelicate imagery. One becomes as content as a hippopotamus in a mudbath, coated in muck yet preferring it to the stings and bites of insects on solid land. Mickey Sabbath, once a pornographic puppeteer and always a sexual obsessive, is an unlikable man. His only glimmer of hope for redemption lies in pointing out how the loss of his heroic older brother in World War II sent his parents into a downward spiral of self-destruction upon receiving the news. Mickey was a bright kid, but the circumstances around him led him to a life of non-achievement. He left school and embarked on a career in the merchant navy, sailing around the whorehouses of the Caribbean and South America, allowing his teenage libido to take over and control him.

There is an abundance of things to contemplate, almost to the point of being overwhelming, yet never quite. Philip Roth never relinquishes his grip. There is a plethora of characters - it's as if Dickens had written porn. Drenka, Sabbath's Croatian mistress; Nikki, his first wife who vanished mysteriously; Roseanna, his second wife struggling to break free from alcoholism; Norman Cowan, his wife Michelle, their absent daughter Deborah - whose absence tempts Sabbath into new depths of depravity; Kathy Goolsbee and her infamous telephone tapes. They are all vividly described, despite being immersed in Sabbath's crude world and imagination.
The events, which are often vulgar and frequently disturbing, are all crafted with a literary finesse that shields the reader from a barrage of explicit obscenity. Masturbating over Drenka's grave - and Sabbath is not the only pervert defiling her earthly remains. The transcription of Sabbath's predatory phone calls to Kathy Goolsbee - the "what are you wearing now?" variety of phone calls. Sabbath rummaging through the underwear drawers of the absent Deborah, sniffing and rubbing himself with his discoveries. Against this, there is a more lyrical and humorous side. Sabbath recalling his obscenity trial for fondling a young student during a performance of his Indecent Puppet Theater. Sabbath arranging his grave plot in his hometown on the Jersey Shore and uncovering his long-dead brother's final possessions in the home of an old family friend. And, above all, the grief of Nikki when her mother dies - it should be heart-wrenchingly sad, but Roth transforms it into a hilarious farce. These elements, along with the numerous literary allusions, prevent the book from devolving into a mere orgy of titillation, offering more than just an impressive vocabulary within the realm of pornography.
As is sometimes the case with Roth, he can become overly enamored with his own erudition, and all the characters start speaking as if they were literature professors debating their points, or like Philip Roth talking to himself. However, the book is a magnificent odyssey through one man's seedy world, a world in which he is a puppet操纵 other puppets while being controlled by the puppet-master of his theater, his penis.

Sabbath’s Theater is a captivating tale that delves into the life of Mickey Sabbath, an incredibly unique and rather despicable character that one seldom encounters in the realm of literature. Mickey’s life seems to revolve around sex, lust, and passion. His insatiable desires often lead him down some truly strange paths.

However, it’s easy to become fixated solely on Mickey’s sexual drive and needs, thereby overlooking everything else about him. While Mickey uses people, he can’t simply be classified as a bully. Instead, he is more of a manipulator. He employs his innate understanding of human behavior and emotions, combined with unwavering persistence, to achieve his goals.

Surprisingly, Mickey is capable of kindness and patience when it suits his purposes. He can also experience something that resembles love, although it is so intricately intertwined with sexual need and desire that it becomes nearly impossible for either Mickey or the reader to disentangle the two.

I spent a significant portion of the novel attempting to fathom what aspects of Mickey’s upbringing and personal history contributed to his adult behavior, yet I never reached any definitive conclusions. I often find pleasure in reading about characters that I dislike, and Mickey is no exception. Strangely enough, Mickey admires his brother Morty because he is such a good person. The most significant event in Mickey’s life is his brother’s death.

I have read a substantial amount of Philip Roth’s work, despite his frequent focus on sex, strange sexual acts, and the penis. One of the reasons I have devoured so many of his novels is his remarkable ability to tell a great story. However, there is a frustration. Periodically, Roth veers into philosophical and analytical territory, ruminating and musing.

Sometimes these interludes can be highly entertaining and enlightening, but at other times, they can be rather dry. I’ll be eagerly flipping through the pages (yes, you might not typically think of Philip Roth as a page-turning storyteller, but for me, he often is), and then suddenly, I’ll hit a section where I feel like I’m just slogging along. And then, just as suddenly, the pages start turning themselves again.

I also greatly admire how Roth approaches the structure of many of his novels. He can seamlessly move back and forth in time and between characters, with a fluidity and organicness that is truly impressive. There are times when I pause in my reading because I realize the novel has gracefully transitioned into the background story of a particular character, and I wonder how it got there without my noticing the transition.

I find that the structure of his novels can be complex, yet it doesn’t make consuming the story a difficult task. It all flows so smoothly that I can’t help but be curious about how he pieced it all together.

Sabbath’s Theater is a complex novel about a bizarre character. It’s not a novel that I would recommend to just anyone, and this holds true for many of Roth’s novels. I simply don’t want to direct someone towards his work only to have them be repelled. It’s better to let each person decide for themselves if Philip Roth is the right fit for them.

E pervers, e blazat, e haios & teribil de dureros. Vorba Drenkai, romanul asta, precum Mickey Sabbath, este America. It presents a vivid and perhaps somewhat disturbing picture of a certain aspect of American society. The words used to describe it, such as "perverse," "blazing," "terrible," and "painful," give a sense of the intensity and complexity of the themes explored within the novel. It seems to be a work that delves deep into the human condition, uncovering the hidden and often unacknowledged aspects of our lives. With a rating of 4.5/5, it clearly has managed to capture the attention and admiration of many readers. It makes one wonder what exactly it is about this novel that makes it so captivating and relevant. Perhaps it is the way it challenges our preconceived notions and forces us to confront the darker side of our nature. Or maybe it is the unique perspective it offers on the American experience.

Μίκυ Σαμπαθ + Ντρενκα Μπαλιτς = L.F.E

This equation represents a unique and exciting combination. Μίκυ Σαμπαθ and Ντρενκα Μπαλιτς come together to form L.F.E, which stands for something truly special.

They are not just an ordinary pair but the best anti-heroic couple. Their story is one that captivates and intrigues.

Μίκυ Σαμπαθ might have a mysterious past, filled with hidden talents and a rebellious spirit. Ντρενκα Μπαλιτς, on the other hand, could be a strong and independent character, with a heart of gold beneath her tough exterior.

When they join forces as L.F.E, they bring a new kind of energy and excitement. Their adventures are sure to be filled with action, drama, and unexpected twists.

This anti-heroic couple challenges the norms and defies expectations, making them a force to be reckoned with.

We can't wait to see what lies ahead for Μίκυ Σαμπαθ, Ντρενκα Μπαλιτς, and L.F.E.

Sabbath’s Theater is an extraordinarily challenging work to pen about. Mere words such as “moving”, “imaginative” or “deep” simply fall short of adequately capturing its essence. By the conclusion of the book, one has the distinct impression of having traversed through four or five separate books rather than just a single one. It is truly a breathtaking literary experience. Roth’s prose here reaches its most densely textured state. It is one of those rare works that compels the reader to set aside the book every five pages, rest their forehead on the table, and engage in half an hour of profound thought and vivid imagination. The power and force it exudes are nothing short of brutal.

Primarily, the work appears to be a scathing and well-articulated assault on commitment and fidelity, as well as on marriage and marital life. However, this philosophy never undermines the intense sense of wonder and curiosity that the reader encounters while uncovering the past of Mickey Sabbath. The allure and suspense remain unwavering throughout. The protagonist’s obscenity and blatant immorality are constantly unearthed by other characters in the most shockingly inappropriate manners, thereby eliciting a far more diverse range of emotions than just alienation. There is thus a repulsive, almost malicious audacity that is likely to disgust many readers.

The narcissistic Sabbath is by nature a middle finger. It is this very same middle finger that has landed him in trouble time and again. In his youth, he was a premature embodiment of a 60s sexual revolutionary. And his sexual rebelliousness persists long after the societal changes of the century have occurred. Sex seems to be the sole thing that Sabbath clings to in order to maintain his grip on life. And he eventually comes to the realization that the puppeteer has been life itself all along, and not him.

Life is incoherent and devoid of meaning. There are two means of escaping this cruel incoherence: death and sex. And once again, in a Roth book, death and carnality merge into a single, vivid image. This time, it is even more obscene and extreme. An old man masturbating on the grave of his late beloved. An old man urinating on the grave of his late beloved. And when Sabbath is discovered by the son of his lover, a trooper, he attempts to explain to him the religious significance of what he feels compelled to do on the grave of his lover. Although Sabbath is desperate to provide his lover’s son with a sufficient reason to kill him, as he would rather be murdered than commit suicide, the gravity of his actions on his lover’s grave cannot be denied. For sex, like religion, endows life with a semblance of coherence. But unlike in religion, this coherence is not a false construct.

The comedy, that unique brand of thrifty yet potent comedy that is always present in Roth’s works to make everything just a touch more tragic, can also be discerned in Sabbath’s Theater. The final scene, in which Sabbath is left stranded in the middle of nowhere with no means of taking his own life and no one to murder him, effectively encapsulates the absurdity that pervades the entire novel.