Post: #1

Philip Roth, author of Sabbath's Theater and Portnoy's Complaint, had an interview with Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish publication. The NY Times printed it in English.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/books/...er.html?hp

The interview covered a variety of subjects, but his response to a question about misogyny really stood out to me.

Quote:Misogyny, a hatred of women, provides my work with neither a structure, a meaning, a motive, a message, a conviction, a perspective, or a guiding principle.[...]

The imposition of a cause’s idea of reality on the writer’s idea of reality can only mistakenly be called “reading.” And in the case at hand, it is not necessarily a harmless amusement. In some quarters, “misogynist” is now a word used almost as laxly as was “Communist” by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s — and for very like the same purpose.

This is another good quote on another topic later in the interview.

Quote:Yes, character is destiny, and yet everything is chance.

Post: #2

Roth is an alpha who never cared what anybody thought about the content of his work, from Portnoy's Complaint on.

It's obvious from The Human Stain he loathes the PC academic crowd.

That's why he'll never win the Nobel Prize for literature, even though he's a strong contender for his body of work. The one he deserves will go to some obscure Kyrgyz poet instead.

There is a question in the interview about it:

Quote:Q: You have been awarded almost every literary prize, except one. And it is no secret that your name is always mentioned when there is talk of the Nobel Prize in Literature — how does it feel to be an eternal candidate? Does it bother you, or do you laugh about it?

A: I wonder if I had called “Portnoy’s Complaint” “The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,” if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.