Il m’arrive très peu de lire de la fiction, encore moins de m’y régaler. Mais là avec Philip Roth, je n’ai presque pas eu le choix…

Il s’agit là du premier roman de sa trilogie « Zuckerman Bound » dans lequel il introduit son personnage « Nathan Zuckerman », ce narrateur-témoin qui s’efface derrière les histoires des personnages qui l’entourent. Il s’agit donc du parfait alter ego de Philip Roth, et d’un un troublant jeu de miroir entre la fiction et le réel, l’écrivain et son personnage.

Ce roman a été adapté à la télévision en 1984, attention à ne pas confondre avec le film « The Ghost Writer » produit en 2010 par Roman Polanski.

Philip RothL’écrivain : Philip Roth

In 1998 Philip Roth won the Publitzer Prize for American Pastoral and received the national medal of arts at the White House. In 2002 he received 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 has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2005 Philip Roth will become the third living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

Philip Roth – Le site officiel

 

Le livre : The Ghost Writer
Philip Roth - The Ghost Writer
Vintage, juin 2005
192 pages

Présentation de l’éditeur :

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s; a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his literary idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff’s, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life…

The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tension between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency – and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

Le livre sur Amazon.fr