Customer Reviews

Patrimony: A True Story

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this work we see a kinder and more humane Philip Roth than we see in his fictions. His devotion to his father through the father's illness and loss of his own powers is moving. In the course of it Roth himself suffers a near fatal heart attack. With Roth there is always a special intensity and often beauty in the writing. This is one of his best books. It portrays a painful and difficult human reality that most come to know at one time or another, with dedication and real art.

Patrimony is a non-fiction account of the last years of Philip Roth's father, Herman, covering as well the family history which was so important to Herman. Not only is Roth a fine stylist, but the sensitivity of this account transcends even the exceptional style. By turns tragic, sardonic, humerous and moving, this book is a window into the values of late twentieth-century America, both good and bad

Heard the CD version of PATRIMONY: A TRUE STORY

by Philip Roth, the touching story of how his 86-year-old

father battles with the brain tumor that eventually kills him.

If you've ever been in the situation where you have had a parent

or grandparent get old right before your eyes, then this

is a book for you . . . it will help you deal with the situation

better and, also, to understand the aging process.

I really felt I got to know Herman Roth and enjoyed in

sharing his reminisces about growing up in Newark, as

well as about life.

In addition, I could relate to the difficulties that Philip Roth

was going through in attempting to care for his

father--especially when he, too, had to deal with a serious

illness during the process.

The narration by George Guidall was excellent . . . his interpretation

of the elder Roth's voice was truly amazing.

With such clarity, love, and understanding of both sides, Philip Roth writes an autobiographical account of his relationship with his father, who is 86 years old at the time the book begins. Philip Roth is to be commended for showing not only the duality in taking on such a role, but also how roles reverse...This is a must read for those who are in the role reversal, and coming to terms with a parent!

There is something sad, something utterly painful about book tributes to fathers. When reading Wiesel's "Night", Franzen's "My Father's Brain" or Roth's "Patrimony", one comes to grips with a difficult reality, of the unnatural heart ache and grief that accompany aging and what they do in the mean time to the father-son relationship.

"Patrimony" offers a glimpse of this aging, of the deterioration of the body. As one reads, one physically partakes into the burden of loosing a loved one, of facing the difficult decisions of what comes next, of recalling memories, of learning to struggle, of the heartbreaking doctor appointments...Philip Roth never holds back. He doesn't protect from the sorrow, or grief. He tells his life's story with honesty and shameless openness that requires not only brilliant clarity, but also the strength of love, love of the kind passed down from a good father to a worthy son.

This is a difficult book with an extraordinary writing and should be considered by anyone who has, is or will ever care for an aging parent.

- by Simon Cleveland

Roth's very moving account of his father's passing could serve as a model for the treatment of our aging parents. Despite the subject, the story lacks even a hint of the maudlin. I loved his rant about trying to buy a good cantaloupe. What a writer!!

This novel was called "A True Story" by Mr Roth. Indeed, many parts in "Patrimony" have a personal tone. The author talks about his mother's sudden death in a restaurant in 1981 and about the sad and painful last year of his father's life. Herman Roth was diagnosed with a massive brain tumou so that little by little he became more and more disabled and needed constant attention. It is impressive to see the author's devotion and attention to his ageing father, all the more since his condition required an almost constant care. One also feels the father's shame and embarrassment as his physical condition worsens.
Mr Roth manages to create an irrepressible and irresistible hero, his father.

I gave this book five stars, not because it ranks among the greatest of literary creations but because it is just about perfect in what it attempts to do. It is not a novel, it is a personal memoir, perhaps the most personal that Roth has ever written. It depicts the final deterioration and ultimate death of Roth's father Herman, and Roth's role in functioning as his personal caregiver. In this book, the caustic and biting Rothian wit that has come to characterize Roth's writing is gone. In its place is a moving personal memoir. There is no attempt to sanctify or even sanitize Herman Roth. He is depicted as a stubborn, difficult, and at times nasty man. Yet he is Roth's father and Roth loves him. And even though Herman Roth has executed an advance directive ordering that no extraordinary measures be taken to keep him alive, his son finds that when the responsibility falls on him to let the plug be pulled, it is not that easy. The only thing I have read that surpasses this as an account of someone's final days and hours is Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," and that is no mean comparison.

Read this book in two seatings. First rate non-fiction from my favorite author. Vivid scenes put you in his shoes; sad and happy at the same time.

Just bought it for my father for father's day.

While Patrimony's title hints at a postmodern game, there is nothing playful about the clear-eyed, plain-spoken integrity with which Roth observes his father's dying and remembers his father's life. The father lives on in the "modest no-frills style," and the book is remarkable as a strong tribute paid by a strong son to a strong father. Despite simplicity of style, Patrimony is an epic, with Roth as a Hercules labouring on his father's behalf. In fierce, moving, often comic vignettes he takes on a ghoulish, hate-filled neighbour, a psychotic cab driver, denial of anti-Semitism by Metropolitan Life, a pornographic Holocaust survivor, a quintuple bypass, his father's cack [euphemism used to circumvent squeamish Amazon filter], and, repeatedly, his father himself. In a previous book, The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, Roth had said of his father that "narrative is the form his knowledge takes." In Patrimony: A True Story, he links his father's narrative gifts to memory: "You mustn't forget anything--that's the inscription on his coat of arms. To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory--to him if a man's not made of memory, he's made of nothing." Memory and narrative, along with the cack of "nothing less or more than lived reality" are Roth's patrimony... a patrimony which he transmutes into this profound and heartfelt testament. Book, son and father merge into "the vernacular, unpoetic and expressive and pointblank, with all the vernacular's glaring limitations, and all its durable force."

Andre Gerard,
Editor of Fathers: A Literary Anthology