The Great American Novel by Philip Roth

Published: 1973, Holt McDougal

Genre: Fiction

Themes: baseball, american culture, humour/farce

My rating (out of 5): ❤

I finished reading Philip Roth's 'The Great American Novel' last night, so I went back to the library this morning looking for something to help me get over it.

Roth's book was written in the dark ages of 1973, and I am surprised it has survived contact with today's woke generation and remained on the library shelves. It is brilliantly written, but very, very offensive. If you are female, black, disabled, Jewish or were born with dwarfism, this book will push all your buttons. It is a satire about a baseball team that is bordering on farce, so I read it as it was intended to be read, but the language burns the eyes and I'm not sure anyone would touch the manuscript if it was presented to a publisher today.

The story is very much about baseball but even I managed to follow along, even though I had no previous understanding of the game. We follow a team called the Mundays from Port Ruppert, New Jersey, struggling their way along in the Patriot League which was the third major league at the time. It begins in 1943, and the team, made up mostly of players over 50, is probably the worst team to play in the whole history of the game. The narrator is an octogenarian sportswriter named Word Smith, who has ended up living in an old people's home, and is determined to ensure people remember the Ruppert Mundays, even though no-one he speaks to has ever heard of a third major league. This is because the behaviour of the players was so disgraceful that the Patriot League had to be disbanded and the sporting authorities did their best to wipe all mention of it from the records.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone I know as even though the distasteful content is supposed to be in jest, it is still distasteful and offensive.

Comments

Violeta by Isabel Allende

Published: 2022, Bloomsbury Genre: Fiction Themes: South America, family relationships, business My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ If I ever tell my life story, I will take a leaf out of Violeta's book and make sure you understand that everybody loved me, and despite all sorts of questionable behaviour on my part, I leave the world as a winner. This is the story of a hundred year life. Violeta is approaching the end, but before she goes she is determined to write out her life story for someone she loves dearly. You don't get to know who that special someone is for most of the book, but that just serves to give the narrative a little twist. I didn't much like the character of Violeta but I understand that people who don't go round upsetting the apple cart don't make for very interesting stories. With such a great time span to play with, Isabel Allende had plenty of scope for changing Violeta's circumstances and adding in references to world events to keep the reader...

Holding by Graham Norton

Published: October 2016, Hodder and Stoughton Genre: fiction Themes: Ireland, crime, secrets, relationships, family My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤ I went into the library looking for a book by Graham Norton as I keep seeing positive comments about his books on Twitter, and I felt I might be missing something. Holding seems to be his first book, and the library copy has a Radio 2 Book Club sticker on it, and I think it's fair to say that it's a perfect book for that reading group. It's a chatty style of writing that I could imagine would be how Graham would recount a tale if he was in conversation with someone, and there are sufficient strong elements to the plot-line to keep it interesting to the end. When I first started reading I thought it was going to be a bit thin on plot, as much of the story involved character descriptions, and I was starting to wonder how it was going to pull together. Then the dramatic events began to unfold and, once I could see how everyon...

The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper

Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2021 Genre: Fiction Themes: Ancient Pompeii, slaves, brothel My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ If, like me, you spent most of your history lessons looking out the window and didn't really absorb very much about the ancient Roman Empire, nil desperandum, as you will still manage perfectly well with this book. Set in first century Pompeii, the story follows the life of Amara, a young Greek woman who has been shipped to Pompeii as a slave and then bought by the owner of The Wolf Den brothel. As the daughter of a doctor, she was bought up in relatively comfortable circumstances, but a series of terrible events turned her life upside down and she is now trapped in an endless cycle of fear and degradation with almost no hope of escape. Amara is one of a group of slaves working in the Wolf Den, and they do what they can to protect one another from serious harm, but Amara knows that if she wants anything better for herself, she must make the brothel ow...

dittybox

Search This Blog