The Dying Animal - Softcover

Roth, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099422697 ISBN 13: 9780099422693

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2006

Synopsis

David Kepesh is a white haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder and haunts him for the next eight years. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960's freed him from his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an emancipated manhood beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years, he had refined that exuberant decade of protest and licence into an orderly way of life in which he is both unimpeded in the world of Eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of this newly hatched woman a masterpiece as Kepesh describes Consuela, of 'volupte' - undo him completely. His worldliness, his confidence, his reason desert him, and on the brink of old age, a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The lighthearted erotic tale with which he began evolves into a poignant, tragic story of love and loss.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college-as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.
The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged-helplessly, bitterly, furiously-into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

From the Back Cover

“[A] disturbing masterpiece.” —The New York Review of Books

“Sorrowful, sexy, elegant . . . [A] distinguished addition to Roth’s increasingly remarkable literary career.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.” –The Los Angeles Times

“No one can come close to Roth’s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.” –The Boston Globe

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099422697
• ISBN 13: 9780099422693
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176