Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/la-contravida/Es buen momento, tras el príncipe de Asturias, para poner esta reseña de uno de los libros de este coloso de las letras norteamericanas y que estaba retrasando en demasía.En la densa y excepcional “Zuckerman encadenado”, asistíamos a la creación del alter ego más conocido de Philip Roth (otro sería el muy sexual David Kepesh) a través de un libro que constaba de tres libros y un epílogo maravilloso y complejo. En “La contravida” tenemos la “segunda” novela con Nathan Zuckerman de protagonista, si entendemos los anteriores como un solo libro.La lectura de esta última se complica según avanzan las páginas, empieza a la manera de Roth, con sus temas siempre presentes (el judaísmo, antisemitismo, relaciones paterno-filiales, el sexo de fondo…) y la estructura está clara desde el principio, ya que hay cinco episodios que, además, según los vayamos leyendo se irán desarrollando en diversas localizaciones geográficas: Newark, Israel, un avión, New York e Inglaterra.En el primer episodio encontramos a un Roth en plena forma, con la narración del hermano de Nathan hasta que muere debido a una operación que puede solucionar sus problemas para mantener relaciones sexuales con su amante inglesa; a partir de ahí es Nathan el que retoma el punto de vista y ya vemos cómo la idea del antisemitismo la extiende deconstructivamente a los propios judíos.“Insistí en la idea de que EEUU no se reducía a judíos y gentiles ni era el antisemitismo el principal problema de los judíos norteamericanos. Decir “Admitámoslo , para los judíos el problema son siempre los goyim puede tener su pizca de verdad a ratos”En la segunda parte, el lugar donde transcurre cambia drásticamente, lo que parece un flashback de la historia anterior, donde Henry habría ido a Israel, comprobamos según vamos leyendo que Henry ha sobrevivido a la operación, pero, sin embargo, se ha ido a un lugar tan lejano para convertirse en un verdadero judío; ha tenido una epifanía, en las palabras del propio hermano: “yo era ellos” ” yo soy en lo hondo como esos judíos”.Aprovecha este escenario para describir desde su punto de vista en lo que se ha convertido la nación judía: “Este, comprendes, se supone que era el sitio donde la nota consistía en convertirse en judío normal. En lugar de ello nos hemos convertido en la obsesiva prisión judía por excelencia. En lugar de ello, este sitio es el caldo de cultivo de todas las variantes de locura que el genio judío es capaz de concebir.”Y para introducir el interesante concepto del “asimilacionismo”:“-Pero es que la asimilación y los matrimonios mixtos de EEUU están provocando un segundo holocausto. Verdaderamente un holocausto espiritual está ocurriendo en EEUU y es tal letal como la amenaza que los árabes representan para el estado de Israel. Lo que Hitler no consiguió en Auschwitz están haciéndoselo los judíos norteamericanos en los dormitorios [...] Antes fue el exterminio por la vía dura; ahora es el exterminio por la vía blanda.” Hasta aquí tenemos dos historias aparentemente independientes pero unidas, lo que falta saber es por dónde va a llevar esta unión; sin embargo, tras el interludio cómico que se desarrolla en un avión, todo cambia radicalmente y lo que parecía un tipo de novela se vuelve en otra.Esta sorpresa es que en el cuarto episodio Nathan muere por el mismo tipo de operación a la que se sometió Henry en el primero y donde Henry se convierte en el narrador intentando buscar el resto de partes escritas del libro de Nathan (con el seudónimo de Carnovsky) para destruirlas.La “aparente” convencionalidad de los primeros capítulos transforma la novela en una reflexión sobre la novela y su autor relacionada con la realidad; así, en palabras de su editor en el funeral:“Si hemos de hablar con propiedad, digamos que no cabe distorsión ni falsificación en una obra que no es periodismo ni historia como no cabe esgrimir acusaciones de exposición incorrecta ante un texto que no tiene obligación alguna de recoger sus fuentes “correctamente”"Roth siempre ha sido consciente de lo que escribía y aprovecha la muerte de su alter ego, si este lo era de verdad para expresar sus preocupaciones con respecto a la influencia e importancia de la novela en la sociedad, y más en la sociedad judía:“¿A qué se debe que los lectores de Carnovsky se pregunten con tanta frecuencia si es novela? [...] Primero, como ya he dicho porque camufla su condición de escritor y su estilo reproduce exactamente la angustia afectiva. Segundo, porque pisa territorio sin explorar en el ámbito de la transgresión al describir tan explícitamente la sexualidad de la vida familiar.”Y encontramos una de las claves del relato en las siguientes palabras en boca del editor:“Dicho en pocas palabras: pensaron que Nathan hablaba de sí mismo en la novela y que, por consiguiente, estaba loco; porque ellos para hacer una cosa así, tendrían que haberse vuelto locos”El propio Roth nos está diciendo que Zuckerman no es él, no habla a través de Zuckerman, por eso lo mata, sin compasión, en su segunda novela.Ya para acabar, tenemos otro cambio de estilo y narración, en Inglaterra comprobamos que Nathan vive ahora con María y entre gentiles (católicos), parece un relato costumbrista inglés y utiliza igualmente lo epistolar para relatar las cartas entre los dos cónyuges.Viendo toda la obra, entonces nos hemos enfrentado a cuatro realidades distintas, diversas, donde la coherencia interna ha sido brutalmente destruida de manera autoconsciente por Roth, esta fragmentación es el signo de los tiempos, las dudas ante una realidad que se desmorona, donde los personajes se intercambian y no sabes a lo que atenerte.Es el relato de un maestro que trata de experimentar con el fondo, con la forma, con los puntos de vista narrativos y todo ello para hacernos reflexionar, para hacernos ver la importancia del autor y su obra, y lo que influye en nuestra realidad.Esta novela me ha hecho darme cuenta de que, al menos en sus primeros años, la lectura cronológica es imprescindible, ya que la unidad argumental de su carrera se podría resentir y, desde luego, no disfrutar de la manera en que se merece.Es un titán, no se puede dudar, pero quien empiece con esta obra posiblemente no vuelva a él.
I loved Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. It was one of those rare books that could make me feel a multitude of emotions and it took me by surprise. It is rare that books truly take me by surprise and have unexpected twists in the plots. This book did everything.In the beginning this book offended me. I was outraged by the raw, raunchiness of it. I hated the character of Henry. He disgusted me. I hated the way he left his family to have an affair. I hated the way he risked his life to have a dangerous and unnecessary heart surgery just so he wouldn’t be impotent anymore so that he could continue his sexual affair with his dental assistant. I hate how immoral he was. I hated the way the book seemed so raw and sexual as well. I’ll admit I may be a bit biased in thinking that as my initial reaction though. I read this book as part of required reading for Dr. Jesse Zuba’s The American Novel class. The first week we began reading this book I was chosen to lead the class in discussion about it. The chapter, Basel, discussed Henry’s sex life (or lack thereof) in detail, making for a rather awkward class discussion, to say the least.The second chapter, Judea amused me and broadened my way of thinking. I found it interesting the way that Henry decided to go to Judea after his surgery to try to recreate himself into an overly zealous Jew, abandoning everything in life just for his religion and for a chance to connect with his born heritage. I liked the arguments about identity and the questions raised. Does our ancestry or heritage really matter? How do we identify ourselves? Is our identity in our blood or is it in our lifestyle? I never really gave this much thought, but Roth makes an interesting point. Yes, I have Irish, Scottish and Germany blood — but is this really part of my identity? I’m proud of my heritage, but I’m not sure I’d say I identify with it. My identity is that of an American. America is all I’ve ever known. I’ve never been to Scotland, Ireland, or Germany. I can’t begin to tell you anything about it because I’ve never had any experiences with it.Gloucestershire served as the climax of the novel and the point where I realized just how much of a gem this novel truly is. In this chapter we learn that everything we were previously set up to believe was all a lie. We were never reading about Henry’s life at all, but rather, Nathan’s life fictionalized to be Henry’s. We were reading the first few chapters of Nathan’s novel. Suddenly Nathan didn’t seem as innocent or revolutionary to me anymore. I HATED him. How dare he write such things about all of his family members! I was outraged! But then I thought to myself — he is a writer. This is what writers do — they write fiction. They make things up. But was what he was doing ethical? Was it right?I am a writer, just like Nathan. When I read about the way that Nathan disguised his own life in his writing by pretending these things happened to others in his life, I began to question the ethics of writing. Would I have done the same thing? It’s hard to say. Mostly everything I write, whether fiction or non-fiction, has been influenced by people I know in real life. I have written fiction stories with real people doing extreme things. I have written fiction stories based on real life events that were exaggerated just like Nathan did. Although I am outraged and offended by Nathan, I realize there’s many times that I’ve done very similar, if not the same, things as Nathan. Nathan is just the typical writer using his writing as a way to express himself and maybe say things he wasn’t to say but doesn’t know how to. With writing a person can wear a mask. They can change life and cater it to be exactly as they see it or want to see it. Looking back, although at first I was initially offended by it, maybe this isn’t such a problem after all. Writing is creative. It allows us to make ourselves and those around us into anything we want them to be. The danger doesn't lie in writing, but rather, life when it comes to role playing and identity creation. When we try to be or make others into things that they are not in real life, that’s a real problem. It’s best to just let those things stay in fictional worlds in the written word.The Counterlife gets a full five star rating from me for raising interesting questions about life and ethics that I have not previously considered, taking me by surprise in ways I never could have imagined, and helping me to re-examine and re-evaluate my own life. Not many books have as much power as this one does, making this one a true stand-out gem.
What do You think about The Counterlife (1996)?
Or "If everyone must have a future, it's better off being multiple choice."Of the many themes that often crop up whenever Roth comes out with a Nathan Zuckerman novel, one of them is the extent a writer can draw from real life without regard to the consequences of what real life might think about that, especially if you distort or exaggerate things for the sake of entertainment. This was depicted literally in earlier stories where Zuckerman's family was none too happy that his most famous novel was being perceived as thinly veiled autobiography, but here he seems to take it a step further, taking real life and rewriting it and then tweaking it again. And doing it over and over, until it lies down in contradictory layers.The novel is divided into five parts, all distinct with subtle links. The first section deals with Zuckerman's brother, Henry, coping with a medical condition that leaves him impotent and unable to enjoy his mistress the way he used to (i.e. often). An operation is considered risky but he chooses to undergo it anyway, and dies. His brother goes to the funeral and waxes eloquent, wandering through the remnants of a life he didn't fully know anymore.Then his brother gets better, or at least a reset button gets hit, as he abandons his family and decides to join a militant Jewish group in an Israeli settlement, forcing Zuckerman to go there to talk some sense into him. And so it goes from there, reeling from scenario to scenario, some of them playing off the next without having any regard for what happened before (a later reversal has Nathan Zuckerman the one suffering the indignity of impotence and dying on the operating table) and some both informed and eviscerated by what came before. In all of them there's the idea of escape, of seeking to get out, but in almost every case the escape doesn't take you anywhere better, just different. It becomes escape by immersion, as if smothering becomes a way of forgetting, that if you forget what's chasing you, then it might forget as well.To me, it seems like Zuckerman is attempting a way out by rewriting his own mythology, casting himself in events where he comes across as looking better in comparison or simply as the put-upon hero, attacked for his own heritage in a world where people don't understand what it's like to be a shorthand stereotype for all the problems in the world that can be conceivably be blamed on you. Which is all of them. As it becomes clearer that the hand of the author (Zuckerman, not Roth) is apparent in each section, taking what we know of real life and recasting it in forms that he can understand for himself, discarded fragments begging to cohere, life bent toward seeking to say something profound when sometimes the most profound thing any of us can do is die unexpectedly and make everyone left behind wonder what we were thinking. As the tales wind on, they remind me of nothing more than Moorcock's "Condition of Muzak", where all the fantasy layers that Jerry Cornelius has built up over the previous novels are revealed as a plaque-ridden buildup, and the removal of all that excess shows the mundane core it was built upon, the gradual stripping back to a truth that may not quite be the truth, but close enough. You see why the construction had to occur but instead of marveling in the structure you wonder why it had to be distorted in the first place.Despite all the literary gymnastics, it's written both directly and straightforwardly, containing of his most spare sequences, never coming across strictly as an overcomplicated literary exercise. What could come across as a series of short stories winds up taking on an accumulated resonance as one story moves to the next. The scenes involving the funerals or deaths are written with a clear-eyed nostalgia, an elegant aching for lost times that we never realize are lost until they're irredeemable out of reach. Sometimes it can fall in love with the sound of its own dialogue, and there are several passages where characters go on and on about some point, generally involving the place of Jews in the world and their relationship to the rest of the world (something he analyzes from almost every angle, from the man who feels that their only job is to stand and fight, to the idea homegrown antisemitism is harmless if you can't do anything about it and nobody really means it). It's ground he's gone over before, but there's a warmth to some of the writing here, mostly in the scenes in England (at least until people start getting offended), where Zuckerman writes himself as married with a child on the way, infusing the scenes with a longing that bleeds through Zuckerman's attempts to make his points. In those moments the novel feels most human, when he's grappling with being a man, one concerned with idea that it's not too late and time hasn't run out on achieving the things that he never realized he wanted to achieve. In that respect the novel works best when it's conscious of how we're constantly attempting to rewrite ourselves, to form this idea of how we want to see ourselves and how we want others to see us but instead of simply letting it rest as a literary form of narcissism, Roth takes it a step further and shows us the friction that occurs when everyone gets the invitation to join our mythologies, but reveal that, honestly, they have better things they'd rather be doing.
—Michael Battaglia
Nathan Zuckerman is a perfect opportunity for Philip Roth to be philosophical about the art of writing. And not just in word, but in deed - with Nathan Zuckerman being a fictional Philip Roth (with all of the biographical criticism and paradoxes no doubt intentional), Roth gets a perfect opportunity to muse on being a writer and the art of writing in a fictional rather than critical setting.In this book, Zuckerman reinvents a few different versions of the tale of his relationship with his brother, Henry. The variations on a theme in this book make the progress a little more idealistic than plot-driven, and I like the stuff that goes on in here a lot, with variations that even reverse situations and a lot of great questions about identity, but I didn't find this book as compelling as others, especially the Zuckerman books to come after this one.But one thing that has been hooking my craw (beeing my bonnet?) of late is how almost every blurb on every Roth book I've read of late has noted Roth's comedy. It's not that I disagree, but I'm not always sure that the comedy of which these blurbs speak is the same comedy that I see in Roth, and that's the wonderfully sad kind of comedy, the tragicomedy if you will, the comedy that makes us cringe a little not exactly out of empathy, but out of recognition.
—Richard
Roth is certainly an entertaining, witty, and creative story-teller. The structure of this book reminded me that while Roth leaves a lasting impression of making our more unseemly side seem more human and even touchingly funny, his real strength as a novelist is the imaginative narrations of his novels. I still regard "American Pastoral" and "Sabbath's Theater" as his masterpieces, but "The Counterlife" shares the grafting of individual/family stories with larger social narratives as well. Can't wait to read "The Human Stain" in the near future (after I knock some other books off that have been patiently waiting for my attention.)One last impression I want to remark on after reading the novel is that there are some Jewish novelists who are even more obsessed with their identity politics than even gay novelists (who would have thought THAT could be possible!)
—Kevin Lawrence
