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Sabbath's Theater: a highly comic book about death and grief
Philip Roth
Writer
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Views | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 111. Being a Jew in America | 322 | 02:53 | |
| 112. I was one Jew when I was 10, another when I was 20 | 252 | 01:40 | |
| 113. What it is to be a Jew shifts with where you are | 286 | 02:11 | |
| 114. I wanted to be an American | 266 | 01:13 | |
| 115. Searching for my burial plot leads me to write Sabbath's... | 460 | 04:30 | |
| 116. Mickey Sabbath | 576 | 02:39 | |
| 117. Sabbath's Theater: a highly comic book about death and... | 533 | 01:10 | |
| 118. Living with the character you invent | 407 | 02:01 | |
| 119. Inventing a woman | 395 | 02:28 | |
| 120. Sex in literature | 498 | 02:20 |
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Now I speak of grief being at the centre of the book and death being at the centre of the book and yet the book is highly comic. How that came to be, I don't know. I liked his expansiveness as a man. I... I liked his cynicism, I liked his comedy and it allowed me to write a very expansive novel. Drenka, his... his lady-friend, appears in the book as well, and I think she's quite vivid and she's... there's a death scene that is quite unusual, I think. So the book was saturated in grief and death and yet it is enormously funny. So that seems to me an achievement of sorts.
The fame of the American writer Philip Roth (1933-2018) rested on the frank explorations of Jewish-American life he portrayed in his novels. There is a strong autobiographical element in much of what he wrote, alongside social commentary and political satire. Despite often polarising critics with his frequently explicit accounts of his male protagonists' sexual doings, Roth received a great many prestigious literary awards which include a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1997, and the 4th Man Booker International Prize in 2011.
Title: "Sabbath's Theater": a highly comic book about death and grief
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: Sabbath's Theater
Duration: 1 minute, 10 seconds
Date story recorded: March 2011
Date story went live: 18 March 2013
