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Title: Shop Talk : A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work by Philip Roth ISBN: 0-375-71413-8 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)
Rating: 3
Summary: A Useful, But Unremarkable, Collection of Rothiana
Comment: "Shop Talk" is a collection of ten previously published interviews, essays and recollections by Philip Roth. The pieces originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. There is nothing really new in this collection, some of the interviews going back nearly thirty years and addressing literary matters that are now of no more than historical interest.
Apart from his own writing, Roth has been involved over the years in publishing the work of Eastern European authors. I think, especially, of the numerous books published by Penguin, with Roth's imprimatur, in the "Writers from the Other Europe" series. I also think of Roth's active support (through PEN and otherwise) of those writers who were, prior to the dissolution of the Soviet monolith, writing under the repression of Eastern Bloc governments. Accordingly, and not surprisingly, the most interesting of the pieces in "Shop Talk" are the contrapuntal interviews with the Czech authors, Ivan Klima (interviewed in 1990) and Milan Kundera (interviewed in 1980). While these two interviews are, alas, somewhat dated, they do provide interesting insights into the literary-historical struggle that marked writing from that country over the past several decades.
"Shop Talk" also contains interviews with the late Primo Levi (from 1986) and Aharon Appelfeld (from 1988) that provide useful, albeit well-known, insights into the biographical peculiarities that have informed their writing. There are also shorter interviews with the late Isaac Bashevis Singer (from 1976) on the topic of Bruno Schulz (another Eastern European writer) and the Irish writer Edna O'Brien.
In addition to the interviews, there are three other pieces. One is a short vignette of Roth's relationship with Bernard Malamud, published shortly after Malamud's death in March of 1986. The second is a similar piece on the artist Philip Guston, who became a friend of Roth's while both lived in Woodstock, New York, in the 1970s. The article contains several whimsical illustrations that Guston gave Roth depicting Roth's character, David Kepesh, the professor who turned into a female breast in Roth's novel "The Breast." Last, there is a discussion of the works of Saul Bellow, the most recent of the pieces in this collection (published in The New Yorker in 2000). It is a discussion that can be fully appreciated only if you've read Bellow's works.
"Shop Talk" is, in short, a useful compendium of previous published pieces, albeit a compendium which provides nothing new. It would have benefited, perhaps, from an introductory essay from Roth to place these pieces in perspective.
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Title: Reading Myself and Others by Philip Roth, Martin Asher ISBN: 0679749071 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Dying Animal by Philip Roth ISBN: 037571412X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 09 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Facts : A Novelist's Autobiography by Philip Roth ISBN: 0679749055 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Deception by Philip Roth ISBN: 0679752943 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth ISBN: 0679772596 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 06 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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