Remembering Roth with Kitaj, Milan Kundera, RIP Philip Roth

  • 1aaKitajPhilipRoth
    New Yorker obit

    Artnet (see the portrait)
    Kitaj

  • Guardian obit
    Writer Friends paying tribute (guardian)

  • 1aKunderaRothP
    Roth with Milan Kundera

    The New Yorker the Book of Laughter
    (Philip Roth and his friends. By Claudia Roth Pierpont)

    Playfulness and humor were also crucial to Roth’s regard for the work of Milan Kundera, to whom “The Ghost Writer” is dedicated.

  • Roth’s work speaks, at heart, of his crazy, complete love for America. But it also says how fragile this America is, vulnerable to its own ghosts, in constant freefall. It’s that ambivalence, that anxious love, demanding and sometimes desperate, that distinguished him from the other writers of the American pastoral—Mailer, Malamud, Bellow. And its that love that gave Roth such a singular place in the landscape of American and world literature. I remember the day I spent with him, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration. We watched the ceremony, live on CNN. I observed him surreptitiously. I listened to his commentary. What struck me was his mix of disgust, malice, and satisfaction, as a novelist, at having predicted and described it all in advance. —Bernard-Henri Lévy

  • 1aaKunderaRothVera
    (Kundera, Vera Kundera and Roth)

    Tablet magazine

    Tablet reached the home of Milan Kundera, the great Czech novelist and friend of Philip Roth, in Paris. Kundera wasn’t feeling well.
    After a formative visit to Eastern Europe in 1972, Roth came to champion a group of writers, including Kundera, who became known as “Writers from the Other Europe,” the name of the series of novels Roth shepherded into print in America through the 1980s. Through these publications, English-language audiences were introduced to the work of Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski, Daniol Kiš, Joseph Brodsky, Bohumil Hrabal, and György Konrád, among other writers working under the tyranny of Soviet occupation.
    Above all, Kundera and Roth’s was a friendship between two great novelists, one of whom understood love and the other who understood anxiety, and both of whom were extremely funny on the page.
    Vera Kundera, Milan’s wife, had one comment she wanted everyone to hear: “Those cretins in Stockholm never gave him his prize,” she said, adding, “those cretins.”

    Baby P. Roth 1a-10-mois_c250

    “I don’t wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature”
    (Interview -via)

    Wiki

    In 1990, Roth married his longtime companion, English actress Claire Bloom. In 1994 they separated, and in 1996 Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, that described the couple’s marriage in detail, much of which was unflattering to Roth. Certain aspects of I Married a Communist have been regarded by critics as veiled rebuttals to the accusations in Bloom’s memoir.

    Eight of Philip Roth’s novels and short stories have been adapted as films: Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy’s Complaint; The Human Stain; The Dying Animal, adapted as Elegy; The Humbling; Indignation; and American Pastoral. In addition, The Ghost Writer was adapted for television in 1984.[55] In 2014, filmmaker Alex Ross Perry made Listen Up Philip, which was influenced by Roth’s art.

  • Would there ever be another writer like Roth? (Paris Review)