My life as a man
My Life as a Man (Original title: My Life as a Man ) (1974) is the seventh novel by Philip Roth .
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1967. The Jewish writer and literature professor Peter Tarnopol retired to an artist colony in Vermont to write an autobiographical story. Her main storyline - Tarnopols, in his own words, nightmarish marriage with Maureen Johnson, Maureen's accidental death, his affair with Susan McCall, his therapy with the psychoanalyst Dr. Spielvogel - precedes the story in an exposé . The completed first-person narration forms the more extensive second part of the work: My true story .
The first part consists of two earlier shorter stories by Peter Tarnopol: Green Behind the Ears and Compassion (or: The Seriousness of the Fifties) , summarized under the title Useful Inventions . The main character here is a certain Nathan Zuckerman - in the first story as a teenager, who is torn between sex with a friend and the literary tea afternoons with a teacher, in the second again as a suffering husband. These Zuckerman tales are referred to several times in Tarnopol's autobiography, My True Story ; among other things they are commented, often very critically or ironically, by Tarnopol's brother, his sister, and his therapist. They have been described as fiction within fiction: the author Philip Roth invents the fictional first-person narrator Peter Tarnopol, whose life shows numerous parallels with his own, just as the life of Tarnopol's fictional character Nathan Zuckerman shows numerous parallels with his own.
In Mein Leben als Mann , Roth deals for the first time with the relationship between the author and his work. He then pursued the subject further in his later novels, particularly Operation Shylock . In The Facts - A Writer's Autobiography , Roth explains that Tarnopol's first-person narrative, My True Story, contains much of his own experiences; B. numerous details of his ruinous marriage to Josephine Jensen, which is reflected in Tarnopol's relationship with the fictional character Maureen.
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- ↑ In several publisher texts on the book, including on buecher.de , accessed on July 29, 2020.
- ↑ "In My Life as a Man, Roth invents a fictitious character, Peter Tarnopol, whose life closely parallels his own, just as the life of Tarnopol's fictitious character, Nathan Zuckerman, closely parallels his.", It says in the enotes summary about the book, accessed on July 29, 2020.
- ↑ Roth uses the pseudonym Josephine (Josie) Jensen in The Facts for his first wife. In fact, it was Margaret Martinson Williams, who died in an accident in 1968. According to the Roth Biography of the Philip Roth Society, accessed on August 4, 2020.
- ↑ Morris Dickstein sees this as a major weakness of the novel, but a very telling statement about the person Roth. "Like Rousseau's" Confessions "and its modern progeny," My Life as a Man "is reckless in inviting us to review the man rather than the writer: that's part of its appeal. To get the story out Roth is willing to look not only ignoble and self-centered, but also foolish, helpless, even a little ugly " in: My life as a Man New York Times, June 2, 1974, accessed July 27, 2020.