Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth

I read this book because one of my neighbours recommended the author. I’ve read some of his other books and quite enjoyed them. This book was probably a bit too explicit for me, filled with far too many things which I really did not need to know. I won’t spoil the book by explaining myself further, I will simply include the chapter titles as a clue: The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve met, Whacking Off, The Jewish Blues, Cunt Crazy, The Most prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life, and In Exile.

Despite the moments of extreme discomfort involved in reading this book, I quite enjoyed parts of the novel, particularly some of the humour. This is a book filled to the brim with a wonderful sense of familial awareness, of guilt brought on by parental expectations and of the anxiety that comes with any coming of age story. Alexander Portnoy is the protagonist and the book is narrated as an unburdening to his therapist. As a consequence, the story unfolds in a colloquial, chatty style with constant references to the Doctor who is supposedly listening.

But the book is actually more about ‘not listening’ than it is about ‘listening’ and/or hearing. It describes Portnoy’s desire to be anyone other than himself, to absolve himself of what he sees as his overbearing mother (“She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”), his embarrassing family and the antiquated rituals which he thinks smother his ability to express himself. His family are clearly all incapable to actually communicating with each other in any sort of meaningful way, and Portnoy has successfully deluded himself into thinking that he can find meaning by focusing solely on his penis and its performance (or lack their of).

Portnoy’s relationship with his mother is, on the surface, the one constant in this text. He is her only son, one of two children, the light of her life and the bearer of all her dreams and expectations:

“My own mother, let me remind you, when I returned this past summer from adventure in Europe, greets me over the phone with the following salutation: ‘Well, how’s my lover?’Her lover she calls me, while her husband is listening on the other extension! And it never occurs to her, if I’m her lover, who is he, the schmegeggy she lives with? No, you don’t have to go digging where these people are concerned – they wear the old unconscious on their sleeves!”

Portnoy’s father, on the other hand, is a downtrodden man whose head aches all the time and who suffers from constant constipation. This is ironically explained in stark juxtaposition to Portnoy’s own ability to constantly (and I mean CONSTANTLY and UBIQUITOUSLY) “express” himself penilely.

Portnoy describes his father as intellectually inferior, stuck in the rut of his life, and incapable of expressing himself:

“Where he had been imprisoned, I would fly: that was his dream. Mine was its corollary: in my liberation would be his – from ignorance, from exploitation, from anonymity. To this day our destinies remain scrambled together in my imagination, and there are still too many times when, upon reading in some book a passage that impresses me with its logic or its wisdom, instantly, involuntarily, I think, ‘If only he could read this. Yes! Read, and understand -!’”

He shares with the readers, in quiet confidences, his disappointments about his father:

“My father, you must understand – as doubtless you do: blackmailers account for a substantial part of the human community, and, I would imagine, of your clientele – my father has been ‘going’ for this tumor test for nearly as long as I can remember. Why his head aches him all the time is, of course, because he is constipated all the time – why he is constipated all the time is because ownership of his intestinal tract is in the hands of the form of Worry, Fear & Frustration.”

His constant and ongoing frustrations with his family:

“Christ, in the face of my defiance – if my father had only been my mother! And my mother my father! But what a mix-up of the sexes in our house! Who should by rights be advancing on me, retreating – and who should be retreating, advancing! Who should be scolding, collapsing in helplessness, enfeebled totally by a tender heart! And who should be collapsing, instead scolding, correcting, reproving, criticizing, faultfinding without end! Filling the patriarchal vacuum!”

And it is this patriarchal vacuum that brings readers to understand part of the sad crux of this tale: Portnoy perceives himself as “a boy without a father“. On so many different levels, Portnoy desires to “be the one”, to have some defined role which he can embrace and to sink into the security that that knowledge brings with it. Ultimately, it is this that drives this novel, the protagonist’s overwhelming desires to bring meaning to his life and to ‘find himself’ in a way that he has in the past been unable.

“How have I come to be such an enemy and flayer of myself? And so alone! Oh, so alone! Nothing but self! Locked up in me! Yes, I have to ask myself (as the airplane carries me – I believe – away from my tormentor), what has become of my purposes, those decent and worthwhile goals? Home? I have none. Family? No! Things I could own just by snapping my fingers … so why not snap them then, and get on with my life? No, instead of tucking in my children and lying down beside a loyal wife (to whom I am loyal too), I have, on two different evenings, taken to bed with me – coinstantaneously, as they say in the whorehouses – a fat little Italian whore and an illiterate, unbalanced American mannequin.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Roth is a superb writer, a craftsman indeed. And there are so many aspects of this tome that I appreciated. But this book is not everyone’s cup of tea (it is certainly not everyone’s piece of liver, that’s for sure), but if you are not faint-hearted and enjoy a bit of a literary jostle, then go ahead and have a read. Let me know what you think!

The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson

I finished The Finkler Question and it has taken me an age to come to writing this review. I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that I have struggled to get a grip on this novel. Yes, it is well written, a lovely combination of humour and dissent, of emotional distress and longing, of delicious language and revolting self loathing. A difficult book to access. It is possible that this is a man’s book, written by a man, about the friendship between men and their respective relationships with their partners. At times I felt quite alienated by this aspect of the novel and while I related, in part, to the general desire of these characters to belong, I struggled to properly empathise with their journeys.

Although I will credit Jacobson with stellar writing, I still find it difficult to understand why this book was the recipient of the Booker Prize. Yes, it is different and confronting, but I find myself wondering whether perhaps this book outshone the other nominees simply because it is so politically incorrect: a Jewish author writing about a Jewish character who is ASHAMED of being affiliated with Israel and her actions, specifically in Gaza. At times this aspect of the book is so confronting and the author’s self-loathing so over bearing that one has to put the book down and take a breather. Jacobson does a superb job of covering this tension with humour and there is no doubt that there are many many moments of ‘laugh out loud’ comedy. For me, this was one of the saving graces of this book. The other redeeming factor was that I fell in love with the elderly Jewish man, Libor and his all consuming love for his late wife, Malkie. The tenderness and sensitivity with which Jacobson has painted this relationship is miraculous, especially in confrontation with the angst which devours most of the book.

Libor is a delightful character, filled with wit and wisdom. “Libor’s position with regard to Israel with three ‘r’s and no ‘I’ – Isrrrae – was what Treslove had heard described as the lifeboat position. ‘No, I’ve never been there and don’t ever want to go there,’ he said, ‘but even at my age the time might not be far away when I have nowhere else to go. That is history’s lesson.”… But whereas Libor pronounced Israel as a holy utterance, like the cough of G-d, Finkler put a seasick ‘y’ between the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ – Israyelis – as though the word denoted one of the illnesses for which his father had prescribed his famous pill. ‘History’s lesson is that the Israyelis have never fought an enemy yet that wasn’t made stronger by the fight. History’s lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.” For Jewish readers, there is a subtext here that grates uncomfortably as this discussion so resembles life in Israel and in the Diaspora. Although Finkler detests his “fellow Jews for their clannishness about Israel, Finkler couldn’t hide his disdain for Treslove for so much as daring, as an outsider, to have a view. ‘Because of the blood that will be spilled while we sit and do nothing,’ he said, spraying Treslove with his contempt. And then, to Libor, ‘And because as a Jew I am ashamed.’”

Treslove, who spends the entire book trying to work out what it is that is so special about his Jewish friends and then aspiring to join their tribe, is baffled. “Such confidence, such certainty of right, whether or not Libor was correct in thinking that all Finkler wanted was for non-Finklers to approve of him… Libor was right – Finkler was seeking love. A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has.”

Treslove and Finkler’s relationship is quite tortured and in some ways irritating. Treslove is desperate for Finkler’s approval but unsure why and Finkler is so arrogant and unknowing that he cannot comprehend the lengths to which his friend would go for him. “But that was Finkler’s way. He would lift the hem of his life infinitesimally, just enough to make Treslove feel intrigued and excluded, before lowering it again.”

There are many poignant moments in this text which leave readers pondering some of the deeper implications of the way that we live our lives:

“what moved him was this proof of the destructibility of things; everything exacted its price in the end, and perhaps happiness exacted it even more cruelly than its opposite. Was it better then – measuring the loss – not to know happiness at all? Better to go through life waiting for what never came, because that way you had less to mourn?”

And, clearly, Jacobson himself has “a timid awareness of one’s small –place in a universe ringed by a barbed-wire fence of rights and limits”. Ultimately, this is a novel about identity and each of the characters is on their own quest to find themselves and to understand the nature of their connections to the world that they inhabit.

“What am I?” Treslove stared at the ceiling. It felt like a trick question.”

While this is certainly a worthy theme, it is not what stayed with me from this text which in truth I really did not enjoy. What I have retained is the marvellous way that Jacobson uses language and I will leave you with just one example below:

So these were the reluctant, resented dawns. Hephzibah was right about their splendour. But not about their breaking. The verb was wrong. It suggested too sudden and purposeful a disclosure. From her terrace the great London dawn bled slowly into sight, a thin line of red blood leaking out between the rooftops, appearing at the windows of the buildings it had infiltrated, one at a time, as though in a soundless military coup. On some mornings it was as though a sea of blood rose from the city floor. Higher up, the sky would be mauled with rough blooms of deep blues and burgundies like bruising. Pummelled into light, the hostage day began.

 

Almost Dead

What does one say about Assaf Gavron’s book ‘Almost Dead’? I’ve been pondering this review for a few days now. It is such a complex and disturbing text that it is difficult to know where to begin and whether, indeed, the author has achieved any sort of textual integrity in this text.

To start with, the book’s premise itself is complex – half the text is devoted to the narrative of an Israeli who narrowly escapes from three terrorist attacks in one week in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The other half of the book tells the story of the brother of the mastermind behind these attacks who has been coaxed into joining the struggle and enlisted to perform the final attack much against his will and his conscience. If this isn’t a challenging enough structure, Gavron complicates things further by narrating the Arab protagonist in a series of stream of consciousness recollections for, as readers discover through the telling, he is in a coma following his failed final attack.

Behind this complex dialogue between Arab and Israeli, thrown in the mix are a romance, friendship and a bit of detective work.

It is a lot to cover and for the first part of the book I was unsure if the author was going to meet this challenge. I actually found myself wondering if I had missed something central, feeling lost in the confusion of the various strands of narratives and the way they were woven together.

However, by the end of this tale, I was hooked. Gavron has achieved something monumental here and I was enthralled to read the internal thoughts of these characters. Interestingly, I think that he captured the Arab protagonist with more clarity than he did the Israeli who seemed far more self absorbed and concerned with his emotions than his counterpart. In itself this is an interesting comment to make about Israeli society which perhaps has the freedom to be self absorbed.

Strangely enough I found these characters to be very believable and this story itself not too far fetched. But, it is a weighty subject and although captivating, quite disturbing. Readers would have to be in the right frame of mind to tackle this one, but well worth it I would say!

Click here to buy from Amazon: Almost Dead: A Novel