Everyman - Audio CD - Unabridged Author:Philip Roth, George Guidall (Narrator) Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centers on the summoning of the living to death and whose hero, "Everyman", is intended to be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth's "Everyman" is traced from his first shocking confro... more »ntation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries and relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. "Everyman" is a painful human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
Audio Review:
Philip Roth's extraordinary book examines the decline and death of a Jewish advertising executive. Though its subject matter -- human deterioration and death -- may not seem like the first choice for the morning commute, the narrative is compelling and, in the hands of narrator George Guidall, thoroughly listenable. Guidall conveys the full spectrum of Roth's palette -- fear, bewilderment, anger, humor, denial, and acceptance -- with a transparency that's present in the best audiobooks. It's as if you are inside the author's mind. From the opening funeral scene to (some four hours later) the unsuccessful surgery at the end, this is great literature that seems to become more universal in spoken-word format. -- AudioFile
I appreciate good writing so this was a winner for me. It was my first Philip Roth experience and definitely is leading me to another. It also is one of those books that makes you stop and think.