Well that just messes up my head. I have Roth's novel I Married a Communist out from the library because, well, Philip Roth's recent novels are amazing.
I knew the book was part of a loose trilogy which contained the Pulitzer Prize winning American Pastoral and The Human Stain (which I feel is superior to American Pastoral).
Turns out, the trilogy goes like this:
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)
So naturally I read The Human Stain first, then American Pastoral and now I'll be reading I Married a Communist.
Figures.
On the plus side this is only a loose trilogy without a continuing storyline or characters in common (except for the Roth stand in Nathan Zuckerman).
2 comments:
Those three books are some of the greatest I've read. Keep crossing my fingers that Roth'll win the Nobel each year, but I guess he must be too "standard" for the fellas in the Swedish Academy.
Human Stain was amazing but it's some of the passages in American Pastoral that I keep coming back to (especially that paragraph on how we always get each other wrong).
The Nobel for literature just doesn't have the meaning to me that the Pulitzer does even though I've been underwhelmed by most Pulitzer winning works.
That said, I'd love to see Roth pick up a second Pulitzer (I was hoping for The Plot Against America, but that didn't happen)
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