|
|
FREE SHIPPING on Orders over $25!
AudibleInk - Indignation
|
|
List Price: $26.00
Our Price: $17.16
Your Save: $ 8.84 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
|
FREE SHIPPING on Orders over $25!
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780547054841
ISBN: 054705484X
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2008-09-05
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Release Date: 2008-09-16
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life's unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.
It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.
As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.
Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Comment: Roth at the peak of his powers. This book stayed with me for days after I finished it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Butcher
Comment:
INDIGNATION, is a coming of death story by Phillip Roth. Built around the idea that Little things have a suprisingly large consequences (the butterfly exponential perhaps?) the characters move along towards finality. Constantly Jewish in nature, the dialog lacks the slap of Portnoy's - oy, I kvetch too much (too much I kvetch?). Kosher butchering shepherds the often bloody story along . . .a hardworking New Jersey family, a good son, a good father, a saintly mother, the unsuitable shikse, a war, a repressive Midwestern (Winesburg Ohio make a cameo appearance). In a few pages a tangible world takes shape, what more should a novel offer?
Ideal to read as I did: in a late October Indian Summer on a park bench behind a university library in Ohio....
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lots of indignation here, but not from me
Comment: Roth's protagonist, Marcus Messner, is filled with enough of his own youthful and idealistic indignation to justify the book's title. But the title word could just as easily apply to Marcus's butcher father, to the Winesburg college dean and president and a number of other minor characters, as well as to the Chinese Communist hordes swarming down through North Korea in that frigid and often nearly forgotten conflict of the fifties, which forms an ominous and omnipresent background to the story. Indignation, which is a surprisingly slight book, nearly a novella, marks a return to the kind of stories that made Roth famous over forty-some years ago. Like Good-Bye Columbus, it looks at college life and all the excitement, mysteries and sexual frustrations that accompany it. Winesburg College is, of course, an obvious nod (or perhaps eye-rolling shaking of the head) to Sherwood Anderson's classic collection of interconnected stories, Winesburg, Ohio - a book which I first read in my own college days in the sixties. I was reading Anderson, in fact, around the same time I first discovered Philip Roth, in his then-bestselling and then-scandalous novel, Portnoy's Complaint. A novel which finally put the sin of Onan right out there in the open. I thought it was about time too, as I nodded and chuckled my way through Alex's adventures with milk bottles, a slab of liver, and, finally, the Monkey. In fact, I was naive and stupid enough to adopt that book as required reading in one of the first Lit classes I taught in 1970. And I actually got away with it. I have read many other Roth books since then. My favorite is one of Roth's earliest novels, Letting Go, which I have re-read several times and would highly recommend. More recently, The Human Stain is, I think, one of Roth's best realized works, and its film version, with Sir Anthony Hopkins, is equally good. (Which makes me remember Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw in the classic film, Good-Bye Columbus. Benjamin also brought Alex Portnoy to life on screen, an effort which was less successful.) Indignation, with its showers of semen high into the air, stained socks and the unstable but beautiful "Olivia the Expert" does indeed mark a kind of restrained return to the Portnoy days, albeit under a shadow of war and imminent death. I read this book in just two sittings. It's funny, it's disturbing, and it's immediate, despite its setting of over fifty years ago. A real page-turner, entertaining and real. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another Must-Read from Roth
Comment: INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. You see, everything is a challenge to Marcus and his existence is, well, an ordeal. As a result, he always seems on the verge of hysterical expression. Indeed, he is, at one moment, surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. This emotional tone makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.
INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naïveté, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.
The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)
Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.
Regardless, this is another fine novel from a great American writer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brief but Intense
Comment: Philip Roth is one of those authors I would read no matter what. He is such an excellent stylist and passionate writer that the pages just seem to drip with energy. I relish his ability to generate confusion, excitement, disgust, interest and fascination in his work. That's not to say his work doesn't vary in quality but, in this little story, he hits all the markers I expect and creates a great experience.
Indignation tells the story of Marcus Messner, a boy who grew up in his parents' kosher butcher shop in Newark during World War II and the years following. It is now the early 1950's and, after a successful stint at a local college, he clashes with his ever-crazier father and heads to a college in a small town in Ohio.
Needless to say, things don't get any easier for Marcus at his new place. He has intense confrontations with his roommates, his "girlfriend," one of the deans of the school and his mother, among others. It is a struggle to tell whether Marcus is simply going crazy himself or whether he is an intense, studious boy being pushed to his limits.
Ultimately, what I like most about this novel is the way seemly small events have such a powerful impact on people and their lives. And how events that are ignored when they happen turn out to be the turning points. I won't give away the results of Marcus' story that Roth details in the brief coda that closes the novel. Needless to say, it isn't what you are expecting. Anyone looking for a short, intense read won't go wrong choosing this one.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
