I married a communist, from Philip Roth

Original Language: English

Títutulus original: I Married a Communist

Year of publication: 1998

Translation: Ce Santiago

Valoración: Highly recommended

Eleven years ago I got with the American trilogy of Philip Roth, in the volume of Gutenberg galaxy for the missing circle of readers, with the illusion of reading one of the best novelists in the West for the first time (the best, according to some). And I started by Pastoral AmericanaI found an unequal, slow and bland quality novel. So, disappointed with the work and the writer, I left the volume on the shelf for years and years. But a book in a library of a reader, a 2/3 virgin of its complete reading, is it not at once a challenge and a small dishonor? Roth deserved a second chance.

Through the elder , brother of the first and, like him, raised in a hard neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey: worker and ditch cavator, seducer, soldier, somewhat violent, sometimes somewhat inopportune polemicist and fervent apostle of Lenin’s religion in the religion in the America in the late 40s and 50s, there when ideological persecution and black lists. Ira becomes the popular unlikely star of radio series and comes to rub shoulders with the most florid in the artistic world of the US, without losing for it or their ideas or, in large part, its disastrous style.

Roth is still Roth, so that the reading of this work may not be entirely recommended for those who prefer a lighter speech or a story in which the dialogues frequently agiliate the plot. Even visually, the pages are filled with end -to -end lines. There are few points and apart, few dialogues in a work that, although it extends more than desirable – to understand who writes this review – is solid, is well structured and portrays, in a plausible and convincing way, men and women of all line and style in a country and in a concrete historical moment. The pieces of the story fit better than those of Pastoral. And, as the pages progress, you have no doubt that you are reading a breed novelist.

Of course, prepare for an overdose of the US of America- resident of the Jewish identity issue.- Perhaps this excess is the fruit or the consequence of a heterogeneous and yet compact set, of the great portrait of a nation in splendor, Little porous to external influences. Not surprisingly, we are in the heart of the American trilogy.

But Ringold’s story transcends creation and art and without being, say, a novel-program, mastery the express and hidden tensions of a fragmented society, the various circumstances of people and, in short, their different ways of face the world, with solid and psychologically well -defined characters.

An invoice work within reach of few, but of those that do not usually content the public. In my opinion and on this occasion, Roth makes clear his wood of great novelist, of a complete and credible portraits builder, in an aesthetic and intelligent work.

Signed: Francisco Marín