Philip Roth
L'animale morente

I often find myself at a loss when it comes to contemporary books. I feel an academic annoyance in not knowing if I'm about to approach a "classic," an institution, or just any product of our time, destined for an unpromising future, cataloged hastily or calmly, or worse yet destined to multiply like bunnies, suitable to be gifted or if it somehow finds a place in the market. I feel a lot of annoyance, then, because of the annoyance itself. I would never allow myself to feel this way about an album or a genre; I find it right that I should be challenged and that my convictions should be subjected to less than kind things. For prose, for some reason, I struggle like a fan of Gazzè discovering that Calcutta is now cool. Perhaps because for a novel, rarely is thirty years enough to assign value. In the storm of input that characterizes modernity, one tends to be hasty, to consider anyone as one of many, unworthy of analysis, weightless, and even struggles to decide if something pleased them in relation to what we know that is comparable, to form a solid opinion. And at this point, the simple pleasure of consumption disappears, another thing I want to try to keep intact. Difficult, then, difficult. Roth is also an author who always leaves you in doubt, one who writes a novel a year is hard to follow and weigh, even if only because if you buy them all you're a fan and thus have a biased opinion; if you read only a few and pass absolute value judgments you're presumptuous and useless. Here, too, you'll have to let it all settle, see what sinks and what rises over time: leaving only to isolate this dying creature, test it between the fingers, see how its joints flex, see it walk, count its legs, perceive its skin. Try to understand if it can swim between the sediments, in and out of my memory. "The Dying Animal" is set on digestible coordinates and presents no interpretative difficulties; it is agile, brief, and above all, it moves with mastery and dexterity. Roth, despite what they say, is a guarantee of good storytelling; those who know him, even just from "Pastoral," know it well. The plot, even if very simple, is handled with confidence, like a model's catwalk; you've already understood a lot right away, but there's still something to discover until the end. It's Kepesh's old age, it's the story of his surrender to insensitivity, to the strength of the body: one of his students, Consuela, naively imprisons him behind bars of jealousy and impotence. The book has its own power, perhaps even a sense of urgency, in the defeat of the libertine, dying under his own tools, this cannot be denied, at least insofar as it is not necessarily the defeat of his lifestyle, but of his inability to understand human and family relationships; a current theme that accompanies other references, such as terrorism and American society of the last century. The adoption of the first person in a long dialogue avoids narrative difficulties and allows for a medium and pleasant tone in the discourse. Essentially, it is one of those books you can finish in an afternoon. Quick and impactful, apparently, then.

In my opinion, however, we are not in 5-star territory. The book does not manage, and doesn't make it an issue, to problematize its content, that is to say, the story does not emerge as actionable, doesn't manage to assume weight except in a lyrical dimension on which I frankly have doubts; the love story that forms the backbone of the book runs at 25%, it is nothing more than an occasional relationship and even if we were to consider it, as a narrative weight, on par with Kepesh's relational difficulties, it fails, unlike the latter, to engage. The confusion the protagonist makes between the two types of relationships, however well outlined (worth reading the book for), and despite a search, undertaken by the protagonist, for his origins in a deliberately biased sociological analysis, is closed in a niche that today it is fashionable to illuminate but isn't, in the end, that particular, since it is commonly recognized and in a sense accepted. I have the impression that the book is somewhat a corollary, a branch of the mature thinking of the author to which a short work has been dedicated, perhaps to be read when and if the mammoths of Roth exist but otherwise skippable if left on its own. Essentially a book I would recommend borrowing but not buying.