Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Professor of Desire: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Professor of Desire: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Professor of Desire: A Novel
    Ebook265 pages5 hours

    The Professor of Desire: A Novel

    By Philip Roth

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire is the story of an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling trying to make his way to both pleasure and dignity through a world of sensual possibilities.

    Temptation comes to him in both ordinary and spectacular forms, and the novel charts the history of his desire from the early years, when he accedes to it totally, to the time when he attempts to domesticate his passions (and his wife's) and finally to that most surprising moment when desire ebbs and, frighteningly, seems on the brink of disappearance. The book explores, in all its painful ramifications, the pursuit and loss of erotic happiness.

    Among the variety of places that comprise this world of sensual possibilities are the mountaintop resort hotel where David Kepesh spends his boyhood, the college in upstate New York where he begins life as a passionate man by describing himself to coeds he hopes to seduce with Lord Byron's dictum, "studious by day, dissolute by night"; a basement flat in London, where he lives with two Swedish girls, one of whom he even thinks fleetingly of turning into a prostitute. Drawing back from all that he comes to recognize as dangerous in himself, he takes up a serious, responsible vocation--as a professor of literature--but then, later, in California, takes up with Helen Baird, a young woman in flight from her own adventurous years in the Far East, which culminated in a narrowly aborted murder plot against her lover's wife. David marries this woman whom he thinks of as a "heroine," courageous in her sensual abandon as well as in her renunciations. The marriage, always at cross purposes, ends in disaster. Back now in New York City, Kepesh falls into a state of spiritual despair and physical impotence over the unhappiness he has caused himself and others. In his small sublet apartment he entertains his aging parents, who are puzzled by the course their only son's personal life has taken. While a persistent homosexual stranger conducts a ridiculous siege outside the door, and a champion womanizer attempts to reconvert him to satyrism, David himself wonders about his future as a lover of anyone. hen he meets Claire Ovington, a loving and orderly young teacher, "the most extraordinary ordinary person I've ever met." While in Europe on a romantic holiday, they travel to Kafka's grave in Prague, and afterwards, asleep in his mistress's arms, David dreams of a bizarre encounter with "Kafka's whore."

    Finally, in a rented Catskill house not far from the resort hotel where he was raised, David and Claire spend an idyllic summer, seemingly blessed by permanence and love. Kepesh's widowed father arrives for Labor Day weekend, with his friend, a concentration-camp survivor who has become old Mr. Kepesh's dearest companion. Their presence reinforces David's growing sense of the fragility of all existence, and in the last third of this novel--in a long conclusion that may be as moving as anything in contemporary fiction--Roth brings together all the strands of Kepesh's story in final scenes that are distinguished by an incomparably elegiac tone.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 2, 2013
    ISBN9781466846463
    Unavailable
    The Professor of Desire: A Novel
    Author

    Philip Roth

    PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004” and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice. In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2012 he won Spain’s highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France’s highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.

    Read more from Philip Roth

    Related to The Professor of Desire

    Related ebooks

    Jewish Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Will There Ever Be Another Writer Like Philip Roth?

      May 23, 2018

      I first discovered Philip Roth at age fifteen. My parents, bless them, placed Goodbye, Columbus in my hands. Having grown up in the suburbs of Detroit—the rock-ribbed WASP enclave of Grosse Pointe—I found him exotic, thrilling. His audacity staggered

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reconstructing A Self-destructive Life

      Oct 27, 2022

      JOSEPH ROTH LIVED HIS LIFE on the peripheries and between the gaps of European civilisation. He was born in Brody, now in Ukraine but then a shtetl at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He yearned to escape west to Vienna, where he

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Boozy Muse

      Jan 18, 2019

      SHEILA REGAN On the terrestrial globe there is an uncounted, unnamed multitude, whose suffering would not be sufficiently allayed by sleep alone. For them wine composes its songs and poems.—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “ON WINE AND HASHISH” FROM THOMAS DE QUI

      12 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Jul 28, 2022

      Woman About Town
      5 min read

    • Article

      It's Crying Time

      Nov 15, 2023

      I was about 13, on a sofa in front of the television on a wet Saturday afternoon. I was carelessly able to do that once – sigh. I was watching a black-and-white film. Or maybe the TV was black-and-white – probably. It was a story about a nanny caring

      4 min read

    • Article

      Insurgent Hoop

      Sep 2, 2022

      Insurgent Hoop
      12 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2021

      Hooknose, Canada Goose, slit-eyed Toucan.Porch monkey, baboon, trash-talking magpie.I cover my head in adoration, just as you doff your hat.Do not rub my head. Don’t even think about it.I bob as I chant, I pray as I breathe. Does that disgust you?I s

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lawrence

      Dec 8, 2022

      Lawrence
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Tim Lane

      Dec 8, 2021

      We stopped at the Topaz Internment Camp, where my wife’s family was held during World War II, near the tiny town of Delta, Utah. We found the apocalyptic remnants of one of our country’s great shames. The post A Year in Reading: Tim Lane appeared fi

      7 min read

    Reviews for The Professor of Desire

    4/5

    4 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I have read a lot of Philp Roth and I very much like his books. I'm not sure I liked this one as well as most of the others I have read. It's quite obvious when reading the literary talent that Roth possesses is far and above most writers. Ahgain The Prefessor of Desire follows Roth's recurring theme of erotisism and struggles with identy and relationships. In this case the sorty of a young professor who struggles with a relationship to a highly erotic woman that ends and a new relationship with a woman that has the qualities any man would want. Ultimately the conflict is between these two relaationships and the struggle that many men have towards self destruction. In other words when things are going well even if you know they're good amny men just want to find ways to mess it up. Roth draws out all these conflict. Even though it's not may favorite Roth book it's still a good read.
    • 4/5
      I very much enjoyed "The Professor of Desire." It seems to me that it is one of the more perceptive works to be found in Roth's early oeuvre. Perhaps it even marks a transition for him.David Kepesh struggles with the way in which his desires and inclinations grate against his conscience and often prevent him from attending to his obligations. He is at once both a lascivious pervert and a caring, dutiful lover and son. And, what makes the book and the character true to life is that this contrast of character is true of ever so many people. Inclination pulls us one way, reason and duty pull us the other. Most of the time, however, we don't fully capitulate to either of these forces and we don't privilege one over the other. We value desire fulfillment (obviously), but we realize that we cannot live wholly uninhibited lives. Further, most we're OK with making that concession. What makes Roth's Kepesh an interesting character is that, although we relate to his struggle, he is different from most of us in that he DOES privilege desire (or some version of it) over duty, but at the same time, cannot truly follow through on his desires...and isn't even sure he wants to.He sometimes *wants*, at the meta-level, to be uninhibited, but he's too smart and too reasonable to really ditch his inhibitions, so in the end he tends to drive himself crazy. But Kepesh also vacillates, so it seems, even at the meta-level. He isn't always so sure he wants to have the kind of desires he has and often wonders about why he's so hung up, at his own peril, on being able to live without inhibition.Roth, in other works, often seems to champion perversion and immediate gratification, but in "the Professor.." he isn't so decisively pulling for one side. I think that makes the character study more effective. There's some Kepesh in all of us, but few of us have much Portnoy.
    • 2/5
      Sex and relationships. That's all this book is. I have never read any Roth, but I always run across references to his work, views on society, politics, religion, etc. I found this very slim book and thought it'd be a great introduction to Roth and his ideas. Well... none of that is here.This story follows a your Jewish man as he navigates the globe, women and the academic world.It was immediately apparent that Roth has great skill in identifying "truths" in life through the woes of relationships. The drama his characters suffer, though a little larger than life, is spot on for what happens in the real world in real relationships.The book dragged in more than a few places. Roth has a tendancy to be long winded. I read an 85 word sentence followed by a 123 word sentence followed by a 67 word sentence. It wore me out!I guess eventually I'll give Roth another go. No doubt, this one is a must read for Roth fan's. But I found it severly lacking in everything I was hoping for and hopped up on too much soap opera drama.