The Professor of Desire: A Novel -

Philip Roth

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2013

272 páginas

9h 4m

ISBN-10: B00D0MY4HA

Descrição do produto
Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire is the story of an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling trying to make his way to both pleasure and dignity through a world of sensual possibilities. Temptation comes to him in both ordinary and spectacular forms, and the novel charts the history of his desire from the early years, when he accedes to it totally, to the time when he attempts to domesticate his passions (and his wife's) and finally to that most surprising moment when desire ebbs and, frighteningly, seems on the brink of disappearance. The book explores, in all its painful ramifications, the pursuit and loss of erotic happiness.

Among the variety of places that comprise this world of sensual possibilities are the mountaintop resort hotel where David Kepesh spends his boyhood, the college in upstate New York where he begins life as a passionate man by describing himself to coeds he hopes to seduce with Lord Byron's dictum, "studious by day, dissolute by night"; a basement flat in London, where he lives with two Swedish girls, one of whom he even thinks fleetingly of turning into a prostitute. Drawing back from all that he comes to recognize as dangerous in himself, he takes up a serious, responsible vocation--as a professor of literature--but then, later, in California, takes up with Helen Baird, a young woman in flight from her own adventurous years in the Far East, which culminated in a narrowly aborted murder plot against her lover's wife. David marries this woman whom he thinks of as a "heroine," courageous in her sensual abandon as well as in her renunciations. The marriage, always at cross purposes, ends in disaster. Back now in New York City, Kepesh falls into a state of spiritual despair and physical impotence over the unhappiness he has caused himself and others. In his small sublet apartment he entertains his aging parents, who are puzzled by the course their only son's personal life has taken. While a persistent homosexual stranger conducts a ridiculous siege outside the door, and a champion womanizer attempts to reconvert him to satyrism, David himself wonders about his future as a lover of anyone. Then he meets Claire Ovington, a loving and orderly young teacher, "the most extraordinary ordinary person I've ever met." While in Europe on a romantic holiday, they travel to Kafka's grave in Prague, and afterwards, asleep in his mistress's arms, David dreams of a bizarre encounter with "Kafka's whore."

Finally, in a rented Catskill house not far from the resort hotel where he was raised, David and Claire spend an idyllic summer, seemingly blessed by permanence and love. Kepesh's widowed father arrives for Labor Day weekend, with his friend, a concentration-camp survivor who has become old Mr. Kepesh's dearest companion. Their presence reinforces David's growing sense of the fragility of all existence, and in the last third of this novel--in a long conclusion that may be as moving as anything in contemporary fiction--Roth brings together all the strands of Kepesh's story in final scenes that are distinguished by an incomparably elegiac tone.

Capa Interna
As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself "a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes." Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be--or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a menage a trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremely intelligent, affecting, and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.
Contracapa
"Ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time." —Village Voice

"No one writing can juggle the somber and the ludicrous more adroitly than Roth." —Time

"Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism.... [He] speaks of a sexuality that questions itself; it is still hedonism, but it is problematic, wounded, ironic hedonism. His is the uncommon union of confession and irony. Infinitely vulnerable in his sincerity and infinitely elusive in his irony." —Milan Kundera

"A thoughtful...elegant novel.... A fine display of literary skills." —The New York Times Book Review
Sobre o Autor
In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for AMERICAN PASTORAL. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.” Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.