From Library Journal
This is the first audio recording of this work, tying in with the 30th anniversary of the novel's publication. Author Roth both chose the reader, actor Ron Silver, and supervised the taping.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Roth is the bravest writer in the United States. He's morally brave, he's politically brave. And Portnoy is part of that bravery." —Cynthia Ozick, Newsday
"Deliciously funny...absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious...a brilliantly vivid reading experience." —New York Times Book Review
"Simply one of the two or three funniest works in American fiction." —Chicago Sun-Times
"Touching as well as hilariously lewd.... Roth is vibrantly talented...as marvelous a mimic and fantasist as has been produced by the most verbal group in human history." —Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books
From the Inside Flap
mplaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
With a new Afterword by the author for the 25th Anniversary edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
Unabridged on audio, read by Ron Silver and directed by the author, Philip Roth
Portnoy's Complaint is the famously outrageous confession made to his analyst by Alexander Portnoy, the Huck Finn of Newark, who is trust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood. Thirty years after it was first published, Portnoy's Complaint remains a classic of American literature, a tour de force of comic and carnal brilliance, and probably the funniest book about sex ever written. It was recently designated one of the hundred best books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library judges.
About the Author
PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts atthe White House and in 2002 the highest award of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.He twice won the National Book Award and the NationalBook Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/FaulknerAward three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America receivedthe Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstandinghistorical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.”Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards:in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National HumanitiesMedal at the White House, and was later named the fourthrecipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.
Roth's comic novel, his most popular and most admired, receives a stellar reading by Ron Silver in this vintage recording. The story features Alexander Portnoy's stream-of-consciousness outpouring to his shrink about the emasculating conflict between his overactive libido and his equally overactive neuroses. Portnoy exemplifies that second generation of Jewish-American urban men, born between the onslaught of the Great Depression and the end of WWII--those self-tortured high achievers whose sacrificing parents gave them their tremendous drive, their equally tremendous guilt, and a life-saving self-deprecating humor. The late Ron Silver, himself of that generation, risibly communicates his perfect insight into Portnoy's character and Philip Roth's laughter. Silver has the light touch needed for comedy and the substance to suggest the novel's thematic undercurrents. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
