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Bigger Crowds, More Roses

James Lasdun: Best Fascist Face, 3 June 2021

The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy 
by Victoria de Grazia.
Harvard, 517 pp., £28.95, August 2020, 978 0 674 98639 8
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... The plot​ sounds like Joseph Roth at his most cynically extravagant: a demobbed soldier, down on his luck, has a chance meeting with a political agitator on the rise, and the two forge an alliance that propels the soldier onto the world stage. He marries a rich American opera singer, governs an African colony, conducts an epic legal battle with the Vatican, embroils himself in the darkest villainies of his exceptionally brutal era, is executed multiple times without realising it, and ends his days on an island in the Mediterranean ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip RothThe Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip RothA Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
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... Claudia Roth Pierpont met Philip Roth at a birthday party in 2002. She was a fan, but managed not to alienate him with clumsy enthusiasm. A couple of years later he sent her a photocopy of a newspaper article he thought she might be interested in. They met for coffee and became more relaxed with each other ...

My Kind of Psychopath

Michael Wood, 20 July 1995

Pulp Fiction 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 198 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 571 17546 5
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Reservoir Dogs 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 113 pp., £7.99, November 1994, 0 571 17362 4
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True Romance 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 134 pp., £7.99, January 1995, 0 571 17593 7
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Natural Born Killers 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 175 pp., £7.99, July 1995, 0 571 17617 8
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... not cool enough, or edgy enough, their delight in the ridiculous is too obvious. When Tim Roth, as the cop in Reservoir Dogs, explains to his mentor that the diamond-heist gang have code-names based on colours, and he is Mr Orange, his mentor repeats the name before his next speech – this is not in the screenplay – and can’t help ...

The Leopard

James Meek: A Leopard in the Family, 19 June 2014

... place of obligation. Sometimes the two merge, as in the case of the Jewish Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth, who ended up broke in Paris, mourning the dissolution of ‘my fatherland, the only one I have ever had’. ‘His birthplace had been ceded to Poland,’ writes Michael Hofmann, ‘his country – the supranational Dual Monarchy comprising 17 ...

Four pfennige per track km

Thomas Laqueur: Adolf Eichmann and Holocaust photography, 4 November 2004

Eichmann: His Life and Crimes 
by David Cesarani.
Heinemann, 458 pp., £20, August 2004, 0 434 01056 1
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Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence 
by Janina Struk.
Tauris, 251 pp., £15.95, December 2003, 1 86064 546 1
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... the contingency that Cesarani and most other historians today rightly insist on, some people – Joseph Roth, for example – saw with brutal clarity what the abandonment of thought meant. In ‘The Auto-da-fé of the Mind’, Roth writes:Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t ...

Kafka at Las Vegas

Alan Bennett, 23 July 1987

... of the Habsburg Emperors, did the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Emperor at the time was Franz Joseph and that comes into it too, for here is Franz K writing about Joseph K in the time of Franz Joseph K. There was another emperor nearer at hand, the emperor in the armchair, Kafka’s ...

Not Enough Delilahs

Andrew O’Hagan: Lillian Ross, 4 July 2019

Picture 
by Lillian Ross.
NYRB, 219 pp., £14.99, June 2019, 978 1 68137 315 7
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... Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend ...

On not liking Tsvetaeva

Clarence Brown, 8 September 1994

Marina Tsvetaeva: Poetics of Appropriation 
by Michael Makin.
Oxford, 355 pp., £40, January 1994, 0 19 815164 0
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Tsvetaeva 
by Viktoria Schweitzer, translated by Robert Chandler, H.T. Willetts and Peter Norman.
Harvill, 400 pp., £20, December 1993, 0 00 272053 1
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... are given to seeking out images of violence and coercion: an excellent recent article by Claudia Roth Pierpont in the New Yorker was entitled ‘The Rage of Aphrodite’. Her prose is collected under the rubric A Captive Spirit; her best translator, Elaine Feinstein, took a line of hers, ‘A captive lion’, as the title of a fine biography. Tsvetaeva wrote ...

A Kind of Gnawing Offness

David Haglund: Tao Lin, 21 October 2010

Richard Yates 
by Tao Lin.
Melville House, 206 pp., £10.99, October 2010, 978 1 935554 15 8
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... or a bear or a moose appears. The dolphins sometimes kill celebrities, Sean Penn and Philip Roth as well as Elijah Wood. Eeeee Eee Eeee seems vaguely adolescent; its ideal reader is probably 18 or 19 years old. (The New York Public Library shelves the book in the ‘Young Adult’ section.) And its long closing scene, in which the unnamed president of ...

Bang, Crash, Crack

Elizabeth Lowry: Primo Levi, 7 June 2007

A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories 
by Primo Levi, translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli.
Penguin, 164 pp., £20, April 2007, 978 0 7139 9955 6
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... is that ‘writing is never spontaneous.’ So too, as he pointed out in an interview with Philip Roth, the truth told in The Truce is ‘filtered truth’, each episode having been ‘preceded by countless verbal versions’ and retouchings as it was recounted by Levi to his friends and family. Levi’s writing about the Holocaust and its aftermath, in other ...

Goofing Off

Michael Hofmann: Hrabal’s Categories, 21 July 2022

All My Cats 
by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Paul Wilson.
Penguin, 96 pp., £7.99, August 2020, 978 0 241 42219 9
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... he adored cats and dogs and cows and horses, but his friend, agent and German translator, Susanna Roth, is certain that he meant to end his own life, and dismisses attempts to repurpose his death (often by the same people who had stifled his surly life and enchanting work). ‘Bohumil Hrabal did not die tragically,’ she writes in her 2001 memoir of ...

Why am I so fucked up?

Christian Lorentzen: 37 Shades of Zadie, 8 November 2012

NW 
by Zadie Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 295 pp., £18.99, August 2012, 978 0 241 14414 5
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... of the time. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, suggested she’d been steeping in Bellow and Roth. To Wood, she still sounded too much like Wallace, and his review, in this paper, was harsh enough (‘disturbingly mutant’, he said of the way she wrote like a Yank) to prompt a group of American writers to start a magazine, the Believer, devoted to ...

Subject, Spectator, Phantom

J. Hoberman: The Strangest Personality Ever to Lead the Free World, 17 February 2005

Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief 
by Mark Feeney.
Chicago, 422 pp., £19.50, November 2004, 0 226 23968 3
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... an impressive roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills – whose analyses of Nixon, Reagan and Wayne blazed the trail for Nixon at the Movies – took him on as a character. Pundits have searched for literary ...

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