Desiderio, ossessione e vecchiaia in "The Dying Animal" di Philip Roth

"The Dying Animal" was written by Philip Roth and was released in 2001.

Temi principali del romanzo

This is a novel about desire, sexual freedom, sexual revolution, old age, angry children, love, life and death, illness, but above all, it tells of an obsession.
Roth's writing style is straightforward and straightforward: the story, full of sensuality and raw reality.
The protagonist is David Kepesh, a university professor who does not accept aging and finds in the beautiful students of his course the right motivation to exorcise this atavistic fear.

The protagonist is an example of narcissism: a person with an ideal that is dramatically high and different from reality, which uses other people to seek to achieve his youthful ideal.

Il ruolo del sesso

For the professor, sex is the means by which to express their desire to live.

He loves female form because he cannot see something more beautiful in nature and expresses this desire by often extending his approach and painting sex with his most extreme and less conventional forms.
However, the encounter with Cuban woman Consuela Castillo will be decisive: Surfing pleasure begins to assume seriousness, bringing David back to the dimension of conventional love.

With this book, Roth paints a dramatic picture: on the one hand, an elder who struggles with old age and acceptance of himself; on the other, a woman fighting against death.