sexta-feira, maio 25, 2018

Philip Roth (1933 - 2018)

[ NewStatesman ]

>>> You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.

AMERICAN PASTORAL (1997)

>>> The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.

THE DYING ANIMAL (2001)

>>> Other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.

INDIGNATION (2008)

É um dos nomes fulcrais da escrita norte-americana dos últimos 60 anos, retratista metódico e implacável da imperfeição humana: Philip Roth faleceu a 22 de Maio, num hospital de Manhattan, na sequência de problemas cardíacos — contava 85 anos.
De Goodbye, Columbus (1959) a Todo o Mundo (2006) ou A Humilhação (2009), Roth segue um método de maturação do seu próprio objecto de escrita, como se escrever fosse a arte de expor o real através dos impossíveis que o atravessam. Tal atitude chega ao ponto de, nesse romance prodigioso que é A Conspiração Contra a América (2004), formular a hipótese de Charles Lindbergh, movido pela suas ideias anti-semitas, ganhar as eleições americanas de 1940 contra Franklin D. Roosevelt, gerando um universo surreal, afinal, carregado de realismo. Isto sem esquecer essa desencantada obra-prima que é Pastoral Americana (1997), aliás refeita num belo filme de e com Ewan McGregor cuja contenção não suscitou especial entusiasmo na maior parte dos espectadores. Eis o filme da BBC Philip Roth Unleashed (2014), em duas partes, apresentado por Alan Yentob.




>>> Obituário no New York Times.
>>> Entrevista aos 80 anos na NPR.
>>> Artigos de Philip Roth em The New Yorker.
>>> Philip Roth em The New York Review of Books.