Sabbath's Theater

Philip Roth

ISBN 10: 0099582015 / ISBN 13: 9780099582014

Published by Vintage Publishing, GB, 1996

About this Item

'A work of near heroic vitality and cunning' Sunday TelegraphAt sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780099582014

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sabbath's Theater
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing, GB
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099582015
• ISBN 13: 9780099582014
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 12.9W x 2.9H x 19.8D centimeters 12.9 centimeters width by 2.9 centimeters height by 19.8 centimeters depth
• Weight: 341 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Micky 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 exceeds 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.

Review

Mickey Sabbath, the hero in Sabbath's Theater, the winner of the 1995 National Book Award, makes a concerted effort to be bad. Like Alexander Portnoy, the famously self-abusing character in Roth's 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, Sabbath has an appetite for "acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus." But while Portnoy's antics were usually comical and liberating, Sabbath often feels imprisoned by his own acts of self-indulgence. Though his frantic pursuit of sex is a desperate attempt to abate his anxieties about death, it only serves to obliterate any semblance of real life he could have had.