The Professor of Desire

This is so wonderfully readable yet not trivial. It's light yet deep. Evocative, intense unblinking appraisal of desire and its saboteurs.

Good satirical book....upstate New York/Connecticut Woody Allen style! Humerous and tragic at the same time....some passages a little confusing but altogether a good pace read!

It is an amazng novel, one paragraph made me laugh, the next made me cry and this happened repeatedly.

Always well written and excellent character developmentbut to long and slow because ofrepeating plot line.Roth and his sex problems !!

FIRST LINE REVIEW: "Temptation comes to me first in the conspicuous personage of Herbie Bratasky, social director, bandleader, crooner, comic and m.c. of my family's mountainside resort hotel." And the battle against temptation and angst and lust and discontent and...and...and...ad nauseum, makes this short novel feel much longer. Maybe reading it so closely on the heels of "My Life as a Man" enhanced the redundancies. A good writer, but this one wore me down.

Great as a character piece or a fictional glimpse of the underbelly of college life by an author who surely knows from which he writes.

I don't routinely enjoy Philip Roth but this one was recommended to me and I am happy to endorse the recommendation.

Reading `The Professor of Desire' is like trying to track down trails of rambling thoughts as one should have expected from reading Philip Roth, the pleasure one normally derives from the `effect' rather than the `cause', where the plots are generally almost non-existence in this work, instead all efforts are made to explore one individual's inner world through a series of trivial events and fragments, expand from his childhood into his adult life.I can't say I have been successful in my attempt to fully understand the book, and neither I can claim thoroughly enjoy a good story -for there is none to begin with but if one should read carefully into the pagers, one may find Roth at his best for exploring the depths of human mind -I suppose that's where and why one is attracted to Roth in general, his strength in penetrating the deepest human side and relating such to his readers. David Kepesh, our professor of desire, has taken an odyssey of self-discovery and in pursuit for LOVE where he must overcome his own strong inner conflicts of constant longing of DESIRE, and at the end unable to find a balance between LOVE and DESIRE in term of breaching the gap. The relationship between LOVE and DESIRE may also let us draw a distinction between `WANT' and `NEED'. Life poses a series of struggles for the co existence of `WANT' and `NEED', where the `NEED' is more of a psycho-physical being predefined within us while `WANT' is what we expect ourselves to attain in life; and the quest for happiness in life lies in whether we can resort within ourselves a peaceful coexistence for the two.I suspect in reality we must all more or less being predestined to let a bit of such human tragedy lives within us, to face choices for and between `WANT' and `NEED'. Not exactly always a personal choice to be made, like in David Kepesh's case, a person destined to fail in relationship, where fate offers no choice but the impossibility in breaching a gap between LOVE and DESIRE; any choice, one over the other, must surrender him insurmountable sacrifice while no single choice can render him any happiness. Some of us, I for one, should not find it a surprise to cope with this paradox in real life.Philip Roth, I presume a master at his own game as his reputation warrants more credits than I can truly appreciate his talent. Either the philosophical means in this novel is too much beyond my comprehension or I am thinking way too much in term of substance this book never means to offer. To retract my earlier mentioned `cause' and `effect' about reading Roth, for I may not be the best person to pass this judgment base on having read only three of his books, first the `The Dying Animal', then `The Ghost Writer' and now this `The Professor of Desire'; given none of the three is said to best represent Roth except him being praised on achieving high quality in ALL his work.Frankly speaking I can't find such impressiveness in any of the three books I read, and meanwhile, an inner voice keeps reminding me for reading more of him or a second-read on 'The Professor of Desire', in order to find new meaning and greatness I might have missed - can it be another case of `WANT' and `NEED' recurring into real life that I must get myself ready to do battle with Roth?

IM COLLECTING Philip Roths book, this one a lovely hardback , reading a roth book is like entering a room and the heating switches on. a roar of warmth and intimacy. like a best friends.xx

Philip Roth reste un auteur extraordinaire. Son sujet est intéressant et son style magnifique. Un vrai plaisir de plonger dans son univers.

Typically for Roth, started off very funny and lighthearted then became darker and (on behalf of the main character) self-obsessed.

I really enjoy Roth's writing. Such a fine observation of the human conditions of love, generations, possibilities ... Some moments of exquisite poetry but with a good pull of narrative too. Learned much about myself from reading this.

Just an okay read . Don’t know what all the fuss is about concerning Mr Roth ? Plenty of better American authors out there .