Deception MP3 CD – Unabridged, November 1, 2011

He said, She said. It's all very confusing. Or, rather deceptive...Great dialogue. But hard to follow who is speaking to whom. Eventually, it doesn't really matter. It's the conversation that's the backbone of the book.Text voyeurism. Eavesdropping on two people in intimate conversation. It's a shame that voice recognition can't be incorporated in the text!Read a second time around some of the characters come out of anonymity. Deception (in the eternal triangle) remains.The Czech girl episodes... Just great!

I am rereading all the Roth books. This one reads like doodles during a staff meeting. It is interesting how these musings are collected into a book that does not flow in the style of a novel. Reading the books in order of their publication dates is quite a picture into Roth's mental state throughout his career. He is funny, insightful ,sad, melancholy, profound, and sometimes all of the above.

This was not one of Phillip Roth's best efforts. It was somewhat disjunctive making it hard for the reader to tie the story together.

Excellent as all of his books are I intend to read them all

I would have sent the book back, but did not know how to do it. Surprised that Roth could write such a boring book.

Roth is a master. No novelist can touch him.

Couldn't get into it - scanning the pages I can see it's not a typical Roth story - which is what I was searching for.

My least favourite book by Roth so far. Written entirely as a dialogue between two lovers, which is an interesting but limiting style. Seems to be one of Roth's more autobiographical works. Not his best, but worth the quick read if you're a fan.

Big fan of Roth, especially his later works. This was written in the early nineties and is basically all dialogue. He liked to experiment back then, and if you can follow it, then it's classic Roth...sex...desceit, past affairs. It may seem a bit much for some readers.

This was my 18th Roth novel and, honestly, it's comfortably the worst I have read. Pretentious, self-absorbed, narrative all over the place, unclear who is speaking in quite a lot of the dialogue, implausible...I could go on. To have read 17 Roth novels previously you will correctly deduce that I am normally a big fan. Start with Nemesis, Human Stain, American Pastoral ,then explore, but my advice would be to avoid this nonsense like the plague.

Another great Roth

As the title suggests, I think Roth is pulling a deception not only on his wife and his lovers, but also on his readers in this book which reads like a radio play for want of narration, action, or scene depiction.At first the novel seems like a peep-show into an adulterous affair. The man, a 51 year-old American writer living in England is called Philip by his 34 year-old English lover. She is married with a child, a job, a nanny, and a husband who parades his mistress in her face. She is severely conflicted about everything and is contemplating divorce. He is suffering the alienation of an American in England. They meet regularly for sex and talk, in his studio. This talk is the subject matter of the book. Occasionally, they stray into other pet Roth subjects like fathers, mothers, misogyny, his work, and the Jews.But then the talk shifts to other female voices: a jet-setting Czech prostitute who wants Roth to help her write a novel; a 33-year old Polish woman with a child who also wants him to help her write; an English woman from his past in New York who is suffering from cancer; his wife who accidentally discovers his notebook with all these “conversations.” Roth defends his notebook, saying that all the women recorded within are fictional characters. He sums it up as, “But then I am not the only man who thinks about imaginary women while in the bedroom with the woman he regularly sleeps with. There may even be women who behave just as impurely in their bedrooms with the men they regularly sleep with. The difference is that what I impurely imagine, I am impelled to develop and write down. In my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.”During these post-coital periods of euphoria and unburdening, he postulates about adultery and the life of a writer with pearls of wisdom such as:1) “One of the unfair things about adultery, when you compare the lover to the spouse, the lover is never seen in those awful dreary circumstances, arguing about the vegetables, or burning toast, or forgetting to ring up for something, or putting upon someone or being put upon. All that stuff, I think, people deliberately keep out of affairs.”2) “By the time a novelist worth his salt is thirty-six, he’s no longer translating experience into a fable—he’s imposing his fable onto experience.”3) When asked where he stands : “Yes, somewhere between desire and disillusionment on the long plummet to death.”4) When asked why he likes East Europeans (in real life Roth was helping dissident Eastern Block writers at the time) he says: “Displaced persons have things to tell me. I’m interested in suffering.” One wonders whether that is true of his lovers too.5) On the role of the writer: “The nose in the seam of the undergarment—that’s the writer’s nature. Impurity.”6) “But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. Neither is shame.”Other Roth creations flit in and out of the narrative: writers Lonoff and Zuckerman, for instance. In fact, Roth claims he is writing Zuckerman’s biography, the fictional writer having died at age 44 after writing only 4 novels—we know that Roth changed his mind on Zuckerman later, for this alter-ego rose from the dead to write many more novels.So what is this novel all about, then? First of all, it is Roth further exploring the prime subject in all of his books: himself. Second, it covers a period in his life when he was feeling displaced and diminished as an expatriate and took refuge in adultery. Third, it shows his passion for digging up people’s stories and fictionalizing them. And finally he was trying out a new form – dialogue with no attributions, just voices plumbing into human nature and unearthing disturbing truths. I don’t think he had much consideration for the reader – if you are able to follow who is saying what to whom and when, then well and good, if not… put it down to another deception on the part of the author.His (fictional?) lover sums him up well in the end: “You love your typewriter more than you could ever love any woman.”

Ein schönes, ein fieses, ein schwieriges Buch. Purer Dialog. Der Leser kann oft sehr lange nicht zuordnen, wer den Dialog eröffnet hat. Man liest weiter, merkt es dann - und merkt gleichzeitig, dass man die Dialogrollen vertauscht hatte. Aber es funktionierte auch so. Nicht umsonst heißt der Roman "Deception". Hier werden unzählige Menschen getäuscht und belogen, weil sie ihre Ehefrauen und -männer betrügen, aber genauso wird der Leser getäuscht. Die Fiktion färbt ab auf die reelle Welt des Erzählers ("Philip") und diese auf die Fiktion usw usw. Das ist clever konstruiert. Anfänglicher Ärger verschwand bei mir gegen Ende und ich war beeindruckt. Die 200 Seiten lassen sich problemlos in einer längeren Sitzung lesen - und dann gleich noch mal, in der Hoffnung beim zweiten Mal schlauer zu sein.FAZIT: Kein ganz leichter Roth, Lektüre die das Hirn beschäftigt.Empfehlenswert.