7/3/2023 0 Comments Patrimony by philip roth![]() ![]() The self-portrait in this book is more rounded and less self-conscious than in Mr. Roth brings to the tale his gift for attention, his worldly, vernacular heart and the tremendous inventive force that here he keeps largely in check, applying it only in swift laser paragraphs. That ordinary, crucial story is well suited to a comic master, and Mr. Similarly, imagination struggles to preserve the dying father or mother as a distinct personality with its own peculiar failed procedures and heroic measures, independent from those of an institution. Roth portrays in often ebullient detail could be summarized abstractly as the effort to keep death as it once was - a phenomenon of one particular human body and soul - and to prevent it from becoming altogether a phenomenon of Health Care. ![]() In a cunningly straightforward way, "Patrimony" tells one of the central true stories many Americans share nowadays: the agonized, sometimes comic labor of a family and a dying parent who must deal with all the loyalties and grudges of their past while coping with their transformed future as dictated by the invasive, also benign pressures of modern medicine and its technologies, bureaucratically organized. Roth's material - his father Herman Roth's struggle with a so-called benign tumor that presses against his facial nerve and his brain, and eventually kills him. Philip Roth's subtitle, "A True Story," is un ironically accurate the homely phrase captures in spirit the ordinary dignity of Mr. ![]()
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