The Dying Animal, Philip Roth
The Dying Animal, Philip Roth
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The Dying Animal

Author: Philip Roth

Narrator: Tom Stechschulte

Unabridged: 4 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/05/2023

Synopsis

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 twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged—helplessly, bitterly, furiously—into 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.

About Philip Roth

Philip Roth (1933–2018) was one of the most decorated writers in American history, having won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Book Award, and many more. He also won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union and in the same year received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years “for the entire work of the recipient.”

About Tom Stechschulte

Tom Stechschulte (1948–2021) was an acclaimed narrator and winner of the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He had been a college athlete and business major when a friend dared him to audition for a play. He got the part and traded the locker room for the dressing room, eventually taking him to New York City and to recording audiobooks.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on December 21, 2013

An absurdist, wish-fulfillment meandering stream of consciousness type book-length monologue recounting the inner life of an aging narcissist, misogynist, breast-obsessed professor who, like the cliché has sex with his students and is incomprehensibly virile in his sixties. In terms of committing to......more

Goodreads review by Michael on May 25, 2018

While not his greatest work, Philip Roth's A Dying Animal is a highly readable and entertaining story of Roth's alter ego David Kapesh and his various affairs as a septuagenarian ex-professor. It ranges from hilarious to grotesque (in the Sabbath's Theater sense of the word) to poignant. Few writers......more

Goodreads review by William2 on February 09, 2024

I’d like to know who else among today’s writers has produced anything even remotely like this brilliantly articulate inquiry into desire and mortality? The only books I can think of are The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera—but that was mostly about Eros, not Thanatos—and Sophie’s Choic......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on August 12, 2017

Oh, Mr. Roth, you're so dead-on when you write: "You're not superior to sex" (33). This simple idea is made manifest with that inimitable, incredible Rothian verve we absolutely admire. The entitled voice nears perilously close to, in my recent memory, the pu**y protagonist of the horrid abortion th......more

Goodreads review by Matteo on June 09, 2018

Videorecensione: [URL not allowed]......more

Quotes

“A disturbing masterpiece.” New York Review of Books

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