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Editorial Review:
Patrimony , a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father--famous for his vigor, charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections--battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.With the honesty of a skilled biographer and the sensitivity of a caring son, Roth chronicles the life of his father, Herman, in this gripping work which won a 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award. Roth holds little back in describing his father as a man of rare intensity and fierce independence who, for better or worse, stood by his principles and held others to his own rigorous standards. Writes Roth, "His obsessive stubbornness--his stubborn obsessiveness--had very nearly driven my mother to a breakdown in her final years." Frank throughout, Roth calls his father "a pitiless realist, but I wasn't his offspring for nothing, and I could be pretty realistic, too."
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Delivered in great (newe condition) on time...:
As promised, the paperbook was in new and perfect condition and arrived in a very timely manner. This is a side of Roth not revealed in his fiction. No sarcasm here, no satire, just a sympathetic and moving account of how he saw his father through his final days with caring, humor, and love.
Patrimony but not Matrimony!:
I like Philip Roth as an author. This book is really a tribute to his father not so much his mother. It seems that he was closer to his father, Herman Roth who he calls the true Bard of Newark, New Jersey. While his son, Philip Roth, has continued to become one of America's top authors and was almost short of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, Roth is hardly known or as popular as he should be. This book tells the story of how he copes and deals with his father's illness and death. I wished he... more info This is a difficult book with an extraordinary writing:
There is something sad, something utterly painful about book tributes to fathers. When reading Wiesel's "Night", Franzen's "My Father's Brain" or Roth's "Patrimony", one comes to grips with a difficult reality, of the unnatural heart ache and grief that accompany aging and what they do in the mean time to the father-son relationship.more info Personal, But Too Personal?:
It assumes a certain degree of risk for one of the most successful writers of the last half of the 20th Century to expose his personal life for the approval of the public. Perhaps crossing a barrier into intimacy in "Patrimony", Philip Roth tells of the story of the death of his father.more info Accessories:
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