I'm still a bit perplexed, and so I really wouldn't know what to say about something like this.

It's really beautiful, anyway.

I had only read "Portnoy's Complaint", "Indignation" and "Exit Ghost" by Roth; as much as these three impressed me, this is really a whole other planet, something horribly excessive, sometimes disturbing, exciting.

A very complex novel but that, at the same time, sticks you there, because once you get past the first thirty pages you want to know everything about that huge character that is Sabbath, a unique concentration of shamelessness, mischief and sin.

I was expecting a sort of "Barney Version", but it's really something completely different: not necessarily better, but just different; especially because of the protagonist and all that sex that you breathe from beginning to end.

(Comment from February 2012)

Ever since I shut down my arts center's blog at the beginning of the year, I've been free from the task of reviewing three contemporary novels a week to generate content for it.

Instead, I've embarked on a project I'm calling "The Great Completist Challenge of 2018." In this challenge, I'm going back to older authors I haven't read much of before, with the intention of reading every book they've ever written.

Being the obsessive I am, I keep adding to the challenge before finishing anyone already in it. The list currently includes Tim Powers, Shirley Jackson, John Updike, John Irving, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq, Kurt Vonnegut, Bernard Malamud, Daphne Du Maurier, and Margaret Atwood.

Last week, I added yet another name, the always great but recently late Philip Roth. I actually collect his works as part of my rare-book dealership at eBay, but I've barely made a dent in reading his books myself.

Before taking on my main interest of reading all nine of his "Nathan Zuckerman" books in order, I thought I'd first read two isolated titles that I saw a lot of public intellectuals mentioning as their favorites right after his death. I started with the 1995 National Book Award-winning "Sabbath's Theater."

I say "surprising" here not just because this isn't one of the titles he's really famous for, but also because of the deliberately disagreeable subject matter. It's an in-depth look at one of the most despicable people in literary history, pornographic puppeteer Mickey Sabbath.

We first meet him as an elderly, slovenly, overweight, girl-fondling, unapologetic sexist and racist. He only cares about himself, sometimes at the expense of destroying the people around him. His every action is guided by the Imp Of The Perverse, and he has never done anything for the benefit of another human being.

So why is he such a compelling character anyway? That's the question I found myself asking as I read the book. He's terribly funny, like Roth, a New York Jew and a child of immigrants, with a kind of witty fatalism towards the world.

He's also outrageously outrageous, and many times you can't believe you're reading an award-winning novel about his exploits. Mostly, though, the main pleasure is seeing how society reacts to his repulsive behavior based on his age and circumstances.

Roth really shined as an author when he hit middle-age, taking incisive looks at the process of aging. As he shows here, Sabbath's "strut of the cock" act was once seen as sexy and charming, but as he aged, it became less and less so.

By the mid-'90s, poor Sabbath has been kicked out of his house and university, and is penniless, homeless, and contemplating suicide in the most damaging way possible.

It sounds bewildering, but after reading it, I can see why so many people consider "Sabbath's Theater" to be their favorite Roth book. It's the ultimate guilty pleasure, but also a revealing look at many aspects of life. If you can stomach it, it comes highly recommended.

I storm and I roar, and I fall in a twist,
And missing my whore, I bugger my fist.

Grieving, Suicidal Puppeteer and Master Manipulator of Women

Swaths of this 1995 National Book Award winner pulsate with the prurient, the pornographic ponderings of Philip Roth. He vaunts his venery as a sex-tagenarian, plunging into the piercing tale of Mickey Sabbath. Sabbath is a 64-year-old primal puppeteer (-retired) with a penchant for prostitutes and loose women, bawdy bopping, and generally, close encounters of the lewd kind. Sabbath delights in being labeled a "dirty old man." The book flashes between legion acts of unfaithful, intimate intercourse and episodes of phallic farce. For example, Sabbath uses the dirty panties of a friend's co-ed daughter for self-gratification in the friend's tub.

I mostly agree with the assessment of Edward Porter, the National Book Award's blogger for this novel. He described the novel, in part, as "a celebration of the inexhaustible human need for carnality--as creative act, as vindication of individuality, as rebellion against failed marriage and other bad choices, and, most importantly, as fuck-you to the ever-present specter of death."

For much of the novel, Sabbath contemplates suicide while unconsolably grieving for Drenka, his lustful recently-deceased, long-term partner in unfaithful sexual hi-jinks. Sabbath repeatedly flashes back to their escapades. In these, Roth shows his mastery of lecherous linguistics. He writes, "Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka's uberous breasts--uberous, the root of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto's painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit--suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head back ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may once have groaned), 'I feel it deep down in my c***,' he was pierced with the sharpest of longings for his late little mother."

***By censoring this word, I'm not being prudish. I can only think of a couple of words in the English lexicon that I more detest, and I simply will not write it out.

Eros e Thanatos


I'm not accustomed to rereading, but this I owed to Philip Roth. After finishing the reading of all 29 novels of the author and retrospectively noting that in only one case had I given the lowest score; moreover, precisely the first (or one of the first) of his works that I read a quarter of a century ago, the only one that I had erased from my memory but that many friends include among his best novels.


Apparently, I must have been in a state of considerable distraction when I first read The Sabbath Theater because today it is clear to me that it is an excellent book that best concentrates all the themes most congenial to Roth, developed with an audacious management of the temporal flows with frequent recent flashbacks (the previous sexual and "professional" experiences of the protagonist) and remote (childhood and adolescence, where the author, as often happens to him, expresses himself best in the representation of the Jewish family of origin).


Eroticism dominates the existence and personality of Mickey Sabbath and consequently a large part of the narration with prevalently accurate and incisive accents (the different sexuality of the three women in the protagonist's life but also of the others, all characterized with great effectiveness), sometimes frankly excessive and rather forced (the recording of the prolonged erotic phone call with the girl), and, to my memory, it spreads as in no other novel of the author in every nook and cranny of the narration until it even appears in the most unpredictable moments and situations.


But equally dominant, albeit more subdued, is the sense of death and the frailty of the human body: funerals, suicides, premature deaths, cemeteries, cancers, succeed one another, cadencing the events of the characters in a "memento mori" that at the same time nourishes the frenzied vitality of Sabbath engaged in a perennial challenge against time, decadence, habit, and old age, well symbolized by the character of Fish, the centenary friend of the father whose encounter with the protagonist is one of the most touching moments of the novel.


Both registers, the erotic and the funerary, are accompanied, as always in Roth, by dialogues perfect in their incisiveness and surgical precision. In conclusion, I continue to believe that "The Sabbath Theater" is not Roth's masterpiece, but it is certainly one of his most significant and stimulating works. I'm glad to say goodbye to the author with a novel like this and not with the pale "The Humbling", the last novel that I had read of the Master.

A unique novel for the diverse and contrasting emotions it has aroused in me: disgust, emotion, repugnance, reflection, entertainment, astonishment, obscenity, tenderness.

Beyond every form of conformism and puritanism, it is a profound and brilliant story in its cynical, sacrilegious, and unbigoted spirit. Roth confirms himself among my favorite authors.

This novel takes the reader on a wild ride through a range of emotions that are both intense and unexpected. It challenges our preconceived notions and forces us to confront the darker side of human nature.

The writing is masterful, with Roth's ability to create complex and vivid characters shining through on every page. Despite the often uncomfortable subject matter, the story is also strangely captivating, drawing the reader in and refusing to let go.

In conclusion, this is a novel that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. It is a testament to Roth's talent as a writer and his willingness to explore the depths of the human psyche.

Somebody recommended this book as mandatory reading for anyone over 40.

Well, it's truly a book exclusively for adults. It is filled with the powerful emotions of lust and grief, as well as the profound themes of life and death.

Sabbath, the protagonist, is a selfish sociopath, and often he is a rather disgusting character. However, there is indeed something within him that those of us in our 40s can learn from his hedonism and intransigence.

Even when he is thinking about suicide, he still pulsates with life. It's as if his very essence, despite its flaws, holds a certain allure and a lesson for us.

Perhaps it is a reminder that within the darkest of characters and the most complex of emotions, there can still be something valuable to discover and understand about ourselves and the human condition.

This book, with its exploration of Sabbath's character, offers a unique perspective that can potentially resonate with those who are at a particular stage in life and are seeking deeper insights into the mysteries of existence.

It challenges us to look beyond the surface and find meaning in the most unexpected of places.

Omul Sabbath, a sixty-year-old puppeteer, has an enormous appetite for the unacceptable, for the sordid, for sex, sex, sex and yet again sex, for infidelity and yes, he is damn tenacious when it comes to himself, to what he likes. His body. Himself against the whole world, himself despite everything. Refusing to accept that he is just an ordinary person who is aging, who is becoming uglier and more withdrawn, one like all the others, one like us, the rest, at the end of our powers. The power of Sabbath is the power of a man who is aware that he has little left to lose, so to the horror of the others he forces time, circumstances, intimidates and challenges, plays the wise man, a fake wise man. Fluctuation - the law of life. For every thought, a counter-thought, for every impulse, a counter-impulse, Sabbath has found his direction: free will. No restraint, no fear of ridicule or of too much. There is no fear of the ticking clock for the depraved and shameless Sabbath: he simply lives, without false modesty, without fears, without being an actor in his own destiny.

Drenka, his crazy lover, tells him in a moment of sexual euphoria:

"There is no one like you!"  "

- True! Wonderful.

One more thing: I would have read this book even considering only the cover! Very powerful, visually speaking.

N-am să mă storc de o recenzie la această indiscutabilă capodoperă a lui Roth - Teatrul lui Sabbath, situată în top 3 romane scrise de Philip Roth - conform preferințelor mele.

Totuși, pentru că stilul traducătoarei Iulia Gorzo m-a scos din minți și nu m-a lăsat să savurez romanul în tihnă, am să spicuiesc aici din nesuferitele dumisale tabieturi verbale. Limba română a d-nei Gorzo, căreia îi “datorăm” Teatrul lui Sabbath în românește (& editurii, bineînțeles), este profund marcată de ticuri. Unul dintre acestea e formula “pe undeva”. De exemplu, în varianta engleză “Yet there was something thrilling in seeing Norman.”, traducerea Gorzo este “Și totuși (și + totuși!) /pe undeva/ era încântat să-l vadă pe Norman.” Și așa mai multe exemple. În plus, există și alte greșeli precum traducerea gresită a unor cuvinte precum “checkers” care înseamnă “joc de dame” și nu “șah” așa cum a făcut Gorzo.

Concluzie: găsesc că, ca traducătoare, Iulia Gorzo este “pe undeva” considerabil overrated. Am ajuns să evit cărțile traduse de ea, cum făcusem într-o vreme cu cele ale Cristinei Jinga.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!—Marquis de Sade

Reading Roth’s 1995 National Book Award-winning novel is not an easy task. At a little more than a year anniversary from his 2018 death, I took a comprehensive look at all my higher-rated Roth books. Now, I conclude with his last great book, which was his personal favorite among all his works, yet not necessarily the personal favorite of all his readers. And now, I re-evaluate the book, realizing that I might have judged it a bit too harshly in my initial review. I perceive the book in three distinct parts. The first part delves into Mickey Sabbath's affair with his mistress Drenka. The second part focuses on his descent into madness, primarily through reliving the past. The third part takes place at the Jersey Shore, where he encounters 100-year-old Fish, an old neighbor, and where he recovers and comes to a greater appreciation of memories of his brother Morty and his lover Drenka.

For a significant portion of the first part, almost a quarter of it, former puppet master and adjunct puppet theater instructor Mickey Sabbath (or, Morris Shabas) is engaged in an affair with Drenka Balich. Most of what we read is about their intense sexual relationship, which is graphically described. However, one must see that Mickey is a particular type, a satyr. He's not a nice guy, as is evident from his actions and words throughout. We're not supposed to "like" him. He's perhaps a bit like Humbert Humbert, an exquisitely crafted character that constantly challenges our impulse to find a way to admire or even sympathize with him (though he does manage to achieve a bit of this for me in the last part). Seen in this light, he is a thoroughly interesting character, with Roth pulling out all the stops and using his richest language yet. We can see how Roth delights in this old goat.

“He'd paid the full price for art, only he hadn't made any.”
“He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.”
“Despite all my many troubles,” Sabbath tells Norman, “I continue to know what matters in life: profound hatred.”
“He's a misanthrope, through and through.”

And while Drenka is as sex-obsessed as Mickey, their encounters are not lovely romantic sex but unapologetically animalistic. Then, unfortunately (spoiler alert!), Drenka dies, which marks the beginning of Mickey's spiraling descent into comically suicidal (strange as it may sound, but Roth manages to pull it off) reflection, sometimes in Joycean stream-of-consciousness. This is another reference, to Joyce, with Drenka as Mickey's Molly. One might call this strange book dark comedy or comic farce, reminiscent of others who write unapologetically about sex (and death), from de Sade to Rabelais to Henry Miller.

“Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the mania of lust”--Mickey

Nothing is too outrageous for this guy, and I think Roth, who shocked, offended, and delighted the literary world with Portnoy's Complaint, goes even darker here, which is why some people hate this book far more. But he's deliberately shocking and deliberately unsentimental. He's not trying to "please" you with a redemptive story. You think you might start to like him? Well, Roth says, watch Sabbath do THIS; do you like him now? And you squirm. I surely did, and couldn't read a lot of it at one time. But he isn't a character from American Pastoral; he's not an admirable father or a complicated ethical deliberator. He's just a great, outrageous character.

“He’d never lost the simple pleasure, which went way back, of making people uncomfortable, especially comfortable people.”
“All I know how to do is antagonize.”

Thrown out of his house finally by his drunken wife Roseanna, disgraced by audiotaped phone calls confirming a relationship (at 60) with his 20-year-old student, Kathy, Sabbath is a train wreck of a man, unemployed, and angry at the world, but knows he has no one to blame but himself.

“Mistressless, wifeless, vocationless, homeless, penniless,” he goes to Manhattan for a funeral, stays at the home of his former best friend, and steals the panties of his nineteen-year-old daughter “... on the self-destroying hilarity of the last roller coaster.” We learn about the libidinous Sabbath’s life in street and off-off-Broadway puppeteering--The Indecent Theater of Manhattan--and of his many sexual escapades. We are not, I think now, asked to admire this devil, this man seen in the process of destroying his life. But in these early years, we can almost envision his comically bawdy show and smile at his outrageousness, that is, until he gropes a woman from the audience engaged with him in one of his street theater shows, and charges are pressed against him by a passing cop (not by the woman; she sees it all as part of his act). Just when you begin to maybe start to like him, he slaps you in the face.

“I am disorderly conduct.”

In Manhattan, he meets his first wife, Nikki, who (spoiler alert) mysteriously disappears, leading him to escape to upstate New York and into the arms of another wife, Roseanna, who barely manages to stay with him until his public disgrace over the affair with his student makes it finally impossible. We are not led to cheer on this old horny goat, who is 64 at the time of the tale. This guy is a failure, an often arrogant, usually articulate, sometimes funny, sometimes disgusting pig whom we see suddenly facing despair and possibly death. You decide:

“In the masterpieces people are always killing themselves when they commit adultery. He wanted to kill himself when he couldn’t.”
“... those ejaculations leading nowhere.”
“The walking panegyric for obscenity. The inverted saint whose message is desecration"—Norman, about Sabbath

And yet, Sabbath, purchasing his gravesite, is funny. Just when you have given up on any shred of decency in the man, he is finally thoughtful, anguished, seeing things closely for maybe the first time. I begin to even care for him when he finds, in his 100-year-old ex-neighbor Fish’s house, a box with his dead brother Morty’s artifacts in it, something that turns him around (for a bit? For good?). Each successive act of disaster leads him back in memory to Morty, killed in WWII, and Nikki, his missing wife, and to his lover Drenka, whom we can finally accept as the love of his life.

Sabbath is in the end King Lear, at least as he sees himself; not maybe quite admirable, but maybe Lear and Fool together, wrapped in his brother's honorary American flag, wearing his red, white and blue yarmulke. This is an image you will not forget, I think. As Drenka says of him,

“You are America.”

Roth as a fiction writer is not unlike Sabbath in his puppet theater, manipulating his audience, messing with us, crossing the line and groping us, though sometimes impressing us! Creating illusions. Here's one, or is this real?

“We are immoderate because grief is immoderate, all the hundreds and thousands of kinds of grief.”

And then Mickey says of himself, in case we think he is just a joke: “I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.”

Roth (RIP 1933-2018) has said that Sabbath's Theater is his favorite book, the one he had the most fun writing. Fun!? Well, I can see that. Yes, the act of creating, the sheer language in it! It’s not my favorite Roth—American Pastoral is mine--but I can finally appreciate it for its powerful literary achievement, maybe his most impressive accomplishment.

Cynicism, misanthropy, and pessimism do not constitute Art in and of themselves, insofar as they do not conform to the consistent understanding of the existential burden, the pain that the passage of time entails, and pleasure as the opposite of the fear of death. Roth's hero is vulgar, arrogant, deviant, and at the same time enchanting, because the writing of the leading author - a fierce weapon! - transports him from a literary hybrid into a Human Being and the readers into accomplices, collaborators, and fellow travelers on a magical journey.

It is through Roth's masterful pen that we are able to see the complex and multi-faceted nature of his characters. The hero, with all his flaws and vices, becomes a captivating figure that draws us in and makes us question our own beliefs and values.

Roth's work challenges us to look beyond the surface and to explore the deeper recesses of the human psyche. He forces us to confront the uncomfortable truths about ourselves and the world we live in.

In this way, his writing becomes a powerful tool for self-reflection and personal growth. It is not just entertainment, but a means of awakening our consciousness and expanding our understanding of the human condition.

Sabbath is one who gathers losses, in a paste of emotion and messianic obsession: that of his brother Morty, shot down in the sky of the Philippines in '44; of his mother, who never fully recovered; of Drenka, the love of his life; of Roseanna who left him; of Nikki, vanished who knows where. Now he is so old, sad and shabby that the only thing left for him to do is to organize his burial.

Many things are splendid, emotionally intense, and catapult this book among my absolute favorite Roth novels: (1) the feverish prose, of great beauty, (2) the unexpected jumps from the first to the third person, (3) the out-of-context fragments that leave you disconcerted for a moment, (4) the relationship between Roseanna and her father reconstructed through the letters, (5) the chat with Fish and the flag in the drawer of the credenza, (6) the painful sincerity of Sabbath.

Unfortunately, to my taste, much of what has to do with sex and cemeteries seems to have aged badly, exaggerated, unnecessarily excessive; perhaps with little sense today, written like this.

[80/100]

I truly desired to have a fondness for this book. I am a great enthusiast of Roth's literary output, and I am accustomed to his passionate ranting style as well as the manner in which he unfolds a narrative. Therefore, I persevered with it for a considerable period (roughly half of the book).

Nonetheless, in the end, it exhausted me. I had an intense aversion to Mickey Sabbath from the very beginning (well, perhaps that's the intention). However, despite this, I did take pleasure in some of the early episodes and discovered certain parts to be highly amusing.

Nevertheless, this was insufficient to maintain my interest for a long enough duration to endure an incomprehensible section where he returns to New York to attend a funeral. At that moment, I realized that I was not anticipating whatever was going to come next and decided that I had no inclination to turn another page.

Undoubtedly, it is a clever piece of writing, and Sabbath is a distinctive character - one in whom most of us can identify a part of ourselves. But for me, this simply was not enough. It probably merits more than one star, but since this is my standard score for any book that I do not complete, one star it shall be.