Masterpiece, but don't read if you're squeamish about sex

Be warned that this is a nasty literary accomplishment. The energy of the book is outstanding, the writing masterful, the insights are unnerving, and the sex is outrageous. Philip Roth has created a character with the wild abandon of the god Pan, as if Freud's Id turned into a 62 year old scandal plagued unemployed over weight Jewish man. Mickey Sabbath is one of the most amazing characters in 20th century literature, a wild version of the forces of Eros, enjoying all forms of sexual adventures while fighting against the final curtain. Mickey Sabbath is not a lovable character by any stretch of the imagination. He is rude, ungrateful, predatory, manipulative, confrontive, and pleasure driven. As I read the book I never could shake the perception that Mickey Sabbath is not a character study so much as Phillip Roth's exploration of these life forces raging against the absurdity of death using his own perceptions of human nature. He is a personality so large that he almost ceases to be a personality and becomes more of a force of nature. However unlike the sociopath forces of nature characters that populate Cormac McCarthy's novels, Mickey is full of sarcasm and hysteria. The energy never lets up in this book, which made me feel as if I had read 450 pages of recent disasters as I finished the book. Mickey Sabbath's life is a disaster and he has made mistake upon mistake in his dealings with other humans. Some of the sex acts will be shocking to some readers but I thought Roth included them because he did want to shock the reader to some extent, shock the reader into seeing the extremely wide range of sexual desires and acts that encompass the human condition. Further, Roth repeatedly shows characters overcoming resistance to some taboo behavior that liberates the character is some manner while also extolling a price for the new knowledge.

Mickey Sabbath, a 62 year old abject failure, lives on his wife's tiny teacher's salary because he was fired from a college position after an extremely filthy tape of his conversations with one of his students is found and given to the college President. This crisis sends his secretive alcohol wife, Roseanne, into a tailspin which lands her in detox. The story is told in a number of flash-back recollections of the many failures of this fellow, who keeps on failing, one mistake after another, as if life is a constant recovery process from the mistakes we bring upon ourselves due to the human condition and the desires and emotions and obsessions which we can not control. It is Roth's strength that he contrasts Roseanne's recovery through a 12-step program with Mickey's continued hysterical self-destruction binge. Peace and sanity are not for Mickey and he deviously tries to undermine Roseanne. I found this aspect of the book far more disturbing than the sexuality. I finally came to the conclusion that Mickey views serenity as based on false premises, and that the most honest position is one of outright rage and predatory lust. Few can maintain that level of intensity but Roth gives us 450 pages of action that can only be described as hysterical (in both meanings of the word).

It is the death of his long time lover, Drenka that unhinges Mickey, a man who was already unhinged. He begins a journey of destruction while evoking destructive memories from his wild past. The switching from past to present is superbly written and even if the actions are wild and destructive, the writing is perfect and keeps the reader on target at all times. The novel is masterful, exploring the human spirit running and raging against the coming of the night.

Classic Phillip Roth

Mickey Sabbath’s sixty-four and his need and feed is sexual gratification with death lurking close by. Sabbath was a professional puppeteer until arthritis of his hands stopped him. He did not use strings, but pulled plenty of them in real life, his theater. He was a finger puppet and did miraculous things while puppeteering, like exposing a woman’s breasts in public unbeknownst to her.

In this novel, Philip Roth has laid down what a lot of men (American ones at least) fantasize about frequently and act out (probably) much less often. It is disturbing that we are so preoccupied with sex. It doesn’t seem to disturb Roth. Not content to masturbate with his dead lover in mind on his bed, Sabbath must do it at her grave—others of her lovers do the same thing—which eventually leads to Mickey’s undoing.

Sabbath—a name with triple meaning—assumes that any woman (pre-menopausal at least) can be seduced and yields to the games Sabbath wants to play. Sabbath-woman conversations (except with his dead mother) seem almost always (but not quite) to be explicitly sexual; the purpose being to arouse and satisfy the male partner. He is sexist and misogynistic. If men have redeeming features, they don’t come through in Sabbath's character. He is not likable.

Where does Sabbath’s preoccupation come from? When he was twelve his older brother was killed in action in WWII and from that point on his mother does nothing but grieve for Mickey’s brother, who Mickey adored, the rest of her life. He didn’t get his sex drive from his brother. By default it seems to be innate.

There’s no argument that Roth is a superb writer. His character portrayals and observations (e.g., his second wife’s sojourn in a mental hospital for alcoholism) are insightful, sometimes hilarious and sometimes very sad. He skips around masterfully, never confusing the reader, and lapses into Joycean language now and then.

But what’s it all for?

Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth is a blazing work of literary audacity—raw, unfiltered, and astonishingly alive. Through the unruly, scandalous figure of Mickey Sabbath, Roth creates not merely a character but a force of nature: obscene and tender, grotesque and philosophical, self-destructive and heartbreakingly human.

The novel is a triumph of language. Roth stretches prose to its limits—by turns savage, hilarious, lyrical, and devastating. Beneath the provocation lies a profound meditation on grief, aging, memory, and the unbearable persistence of desire. Few writers have matched this level of imaginative freedom and psychological depth.

This is not a polite novel; it is a fearless one. A masterpiece that reminds us what fiction can do when it refuses to compromise.

"Sabbath's Theater" is an enthralling, comical novel that tells the story of Mickey Sabbath, a lecherous, manipulating, 64-year-old man. Mickey is a former puppeteer and producer of Sabbath's Indecent Theater in the late 1950s near Columbia University. Using his fingers to get female students' attention and enticing them into allowing him to unbutton their blouse, he succeeds twice; the last one leading to his arrest on indecent exposure charges. His subsequent prosecution ends that enterprise. After his wife Nikki's disappearance thirty years ago, Mickey relocated to Madamaska Falls in upstate NY. There he marries Roseanne, a recovering alcoholic and to whom he's never nice. Mickey, unemployed for the last thirty years and suffering from arthritis, isn't an easy man to like who has an unsurpassed penchant for exaggerating his difficulties. He's a serial adulterer who's so afflicted with Eros that even at 64 he has a robust sexual appetite and routinely disregards social conventions regarding sex. Drenka, a Croatian immigrant and like Mickey a serial adulterer, is his mistress of thirteen years. She gives him an ultimatum at the beginning of the novel: they either enter a sexually exclusive relationship or end the relationship. As the reader would later learn Drenka is dying of ovarian cancer, but doesn't tell Mickey right away. Experiencing a tumult caused by the death of his mistress and lacking another partner, Mickey becomes unhinged even suicidal. He thinks his dead mother's ghost surrounds him wanting to communicate with him. After an argument with Roseanne, he drives to NJ where he grew up. On his way there he reminisces about his parents, his older brother Morty, who influenced him deeply and was shot down by the Japanese in WWII forever sowing in Mickey antipathy toward the Japanese. Mr. Roth possesses an extraordinary skill for describing the emotions people experience when they face a loss. He illustrates how profoundly Morty's death affected his parents and changed their and Sabbath's life forever. Given the themes in the novel, it's likely that one would either love it or hate it. I liked it enough to give it four stars. Philip Roth here, as in his other books involving neurotic heroes seeking transcendence, doesn't disappoint.

This book contains one of the best portrayals of addiction there is. On a par with Under the Volcano. Just as Under the Volcano gave nearly as much time to the Consul's release as to his pain in his last day, this book revels in the pleasure that Mickey got in his last days remembered and otherwise - and it's not trivial, but awe-inspiringly transgressive fun. Of course, "addiction" is only one of the paradigms that one might use to analyze the book, but I believe the ferocity of Sabbath's pursuit of his path is unmistakeable. His wife's recovery, portrayed as a shallow - or worse, uninteresting - quest in Mickey's eyes, is a sly commentary on this issue, perhaps. And more often than not, use of the word "addiction" is neither analytical or descriptive. It's a terribly determinative word for a novel, comic or tragic. Nevertheless, it's clear that addiction/allergy is a progressive condition - ultimately fatal to all relationships, including the one between the addict and himself. By never taking the issue on directly or dealing in pat diagnoses, bromidic solutions, easy generalizations and the like, Roth makes the "predictable" downward spiral so much more powerful and inescapably human.

I thought this was a book about Jewish theater. The trouble with buying from a distance, we can't pick them up and look through them. I would not have bought this book but having done so, it cost almost 6 dollars to return it. I'm not judging the quality of this book for ones who enjoy this type of reading, it's just not what I like. I had heard about this author being intelligent, thought provoking, and a very good writer. He probably is because I see he has written many books and won many awards. Just fyi.... No judging... just not for me.

Darkly comic and at times quite disgusting, this rumination on sex, death and then more sex told through the eyes of the wonderfully obnoxious Mickey Sabbath, is one of Roth's very best books. Not for the squeamish or the easily offended, but a thoroughly absorbing read; and like all Philip Roth's great novels, you just don't want it to end. If only he did sequels....

Novela muy bien escrita, con personajes muy bien logrados y gran sentido del humor.

Es una bonita edición económica.

Lamentablemente, llegó con algunos detalles en el lomo y unas páginas dobladas.

Philip Roth‘s „Sabbath‘s Theater“ great novel I ever have read. Roth was a very skillful writer, Drenka, Sabbath and all guys in the story impressed me deeply by their passion, tribulations and not achieving the happiness they were looking for.

Chegou até antes do previsto. Livro em bom estado, como descrito

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