Roth para todas las estaciones

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	• Sabbath's Theater Philip Roth Vintage, 1996 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 54 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Roth at his best

Given the degree of raunchiness depicted in this novel it is not surprising that Roth engenders either 5 star reviews or 1 stars. I have read nearly all of his novels, and this ranks as one of the best (along with The Human Stain and American Pastoral). He has portrayed in Sabbath one of the truly great anti-establishment, amoral, rebellious characters of all time. Hurray for authors like Roth and Mailer and Paul Theroux who are able to deliver superlative literature with a dead aim at the hypocritical morals and values of our culture.

Roth para todas las estaciones

Antes del leer el "Teatro del Sabbath" había incursionado en otras obras del señor Roth de las que -debo decirlo- había salido algo defraudado. Tengo la impresión de que esto sucede cada vez que uno como lector se enfrenta a un escritor de la categoría y la magnitud de éste. No es fácil empinarse hasta donde ellos esperan que lleguemos. Son como guías en la montaña cuyos trancos no podemos seguir. Y nos vamos rezagando. Y esto fue lo que me pasó con esas primeras novelas suyas que yo leí.
¿Por qué recomiendo leer entonces el "Teatro"? Porque a mi juicio ella posee a la vista los elementos más propios de este maravilloso autor. No es necesario adentrarse en estudios avanzados de ningún tipo para comprenderlo. No hacen falta reseñas. Ni siquiera esta misma reseña que ahora escribo. P. Roth está aquí en plena forma, su sentido del humor mezclado con su facilidad para organizar tragedias que se nos quedan palpitando en el pulso (y no exagero), es algo asombroso. Su capacidad de hacernos reír y de estremecernos sobrepasa todo lo que habíamos leído antes. Aquí, en esta novela, supera a Bellow porque Roth es más sencillo pero ni un milímetro menos profundo ni ambicioso. Este último es un mejor Virgilio que aquél. Nos coge de la mano y nos va enseñando este teatro con toda su armazón y sus cortinas y sus marionetas... Este Philip Roth es definitivo. Leedlo en primer lugar. Después es fácil comprender y disfrutar lo demás. El deleite es mayor con sus restantes obras si se parte con el "Teatro." La recomiendo a todos los lectores en español que aún no se hayan decidido por él y más aún a los que no se hayan decidido por ningún otro.

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Angry old man ranting...

Mickey Sabbath is not what anyone would commonly call a "nice guy." He's actually quite insufferable--even to himself. So spending nearly 500 pages in close proximity to this guy isn't any walk in the park, which seems to be many reviewers' chief objection to this book. Sabbath suffers and he's made it his life's work to cause everyone around him to suffer, including his audience. Because stripping away all the lies and illusions with which we robe ourselves from the naked shock of it....that's what life via Sabbath reveals itself to be--as the Buddha also pointed out: in a word, suffering.

Sabbath, though, is no Buddha. He's more like an x-rated, sadistic version of the speaker in Ecclesiastes. All is vanity, and Sabbath feels compelled to browbeat, analyze, and peel away with the most brutal and uncompromising reason possible every last shred of genteel self-delusion and sentimental nonsense you use to hide yourself from the world...and, most of all, from yourself. And, Reason's satyr that he is, he'll sexually seduce even his best friend's wife while he's talking him out of his illusions, just for the horny heck of it.

Who can live with someone like Mickey Sabbath? No one. But as Roth/Sabbath points out, Isolation is the best preparation for death. There are some truths we're not meant to utter; some facts we're meant to look only askance at--for the survival of our sanity and our society. Sabbath stares directly at the obscene and blurts out the unspeakable truth. He is, like all true prophets, an essential but awful character no one wants in their living room--a wild force without limits or boundaries, the destructive side of creativity, clearing the ground...for what? He's not compatible with life--because he embodies the life-force itself: elemental, evolutionary, revolutionary. In Sabbath's vicinity, it's war all the time.

A puppeteer whose arthritically crippled fingers can pull the strings no longer. A husband whose infidelities drove one wife to disappear into thin air and another straight to the bottom of the bottle. A friend who betrays even those who've helped him out of the gutter. A performer who can no longer determine when he's acting--or if it's *all* an act. A lover whose mistress--the only woman whose libido matched his own in its violent and insatiable honesty--has tragically died. Sabbath is a man who cannot escape his own lacerating awareness of his own inescapable self-consciousness. Now, haunted by his mother's ghost, he's on a mission to do the impossible even though he knows it's also the inevitable. He's on a mission to die. To join the dead who lie buried in a group of family plots in a run-down Jewish cemetery at the Jersey shore where he grew up 64 years ago.

One of the only things that humanizes Sabbath--at least from the conventional point of view--besides how irredeemably, unapologetically, and unreservedly thoroughly rotten he is--is the sentimental and uncharacteristically idealistic love he has for his brother Mort and his mistress Drenka. Both, not incidentally, and quite ideally, dead. One wonders if Sabbath would have inevitably antagonized and alienated these two as well, if only they'd committed the unpardonable sin of continuing to live and, therefore, disappoint. As it is, Drenka's demise conveniently follows the ultimatum she issues Sabbath--fidelity to her or no more adultery. Ultimatums, in particular, those that seek to limit his absolute right to libidinous liberty being one among many things that Sabbath takes only two ways, ill and not at all.

These are among the questions for the reader to decide. And, to his credit, Roth doesn't play court to the hobgoblin of little minds: consistency. Sabbath is a character consistently nothing if not inconsistent. He's a man limned with huge boundaries. He contains contradictions, paradoxes, puzzles, irresolvable conflicts. The closer you look the more nothing makes any sense. Only death is going to solve Sabbath. But even that's another problem. Sabbath can't quite put an end to the suffering--in other words, himself. In a sense, it's just too much fun being miserable.

*Sabbath's Theater* is truly a virtuoso work of literature. Roth is lucky enough to have started publishing what now seems a billion years ago when publishers actually published real novels--novels that tried to articulate something important about the human condition. Hard it is to imagine an author as audacious as Roth getting his start in the current commercial publishing environment. This book is harsh, crude, PC-hostile at every turn. It's personal to the point of self-indulgence and solipsistic self-pity. It's racist, misogynistic, pornographic, and absolutely brilliant. There's a touching death-bed conversation the likes of which I can guarantee you've never witnessed before in any film or fiction between Sabbath and his fading lover--an epiphanous remembrance of sharing golden showers! Only an extraordinary writer could have the slimmest chance of getting away with something like this--and many other things like it in *Sabbath's Theater.* Philip Roth is such a writer and this novel is too--extraordinary theater.

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Theater of Pain

While I have not always enjoyed all of Philip Roth's books, even the ones I disliked had some redeeming quality. This is Philip Roth's worst book. Roth is such a talented and thorough writer that it pains me to see him write books about ones extra-marital escapades. To make things less tolerable, the main character's tastes stretch far into the realm of deviancy.

Mickey Sabbath's life is altered when his long-time mistress dies. His problems are exacerbated when his wife effectively disowns him. Trying to satisfy his drive, Sabbath falls to stealing garments in one of his many attempts to relive the past. In a downward spiral that leads toward suicide, Sabbath revisits the past while trying to engage previous interests. Just based on his behavior, it is difficult to like or identify with the main character. At the same, there really is not any character to like in this book.

While many of Roth's books involve man's most basic drive, "Sabbath's Theater" takes the discussion to a base level while lacking any wit. Part of me was compelled not to finish the book as it was just not to my taste. Judging by the reviews, it was not up to the standards of others either.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress?an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own?Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

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