My Life as a Writer - Philip Roth

MARCH 2, 2014 - The New York Times

The following is an interview Philip Roth gave to Daniel Sandstrom, the cultural editor at Svenska Dagbladet, for publication in Swedish translation in that newspaper and in its original English in the Book Review.

“Sabbath’s Theater” is now being translated into Swedish, almost 20 years after its original release. How would you describe this book to readers who have not yet read it or heard of it, and how would you describe the main character, the unforgettable Mickey Sabbath?

“Sabbath’s Theater” takes as its epigraph a line of the aged Prospero’s in Act 5 of “The Tempest.” “Every third thought,” says Prospero, “shall be my grave.”

I could have called the book “Death and the Art of Dying.” It is a book in which breakdown is rampant, suicide is rampant, hatred is rampant, lust is rampant. Where disobedience is rampant. Where death is rampant.

Mickey Sabbath doesn’t live with his back turned to death the way normal people like us do. No one could have concurred more heartily with the judgment of Franz Kafka than would Sabbath, when Kafka wrote, “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

His book is death-haunted — there is Sabbath’s great grief about the death of others and a  great gaiety about his own. There is leaping with delight, there is also leaping with despair. Sabbath learns to mistrust life when his adored older brother is killed in World War II. It is Morty’s death that determines how Sabbath will live. The death of Morty sets the gold standard for grief. Loss governs Sabbath’s world.

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Philip Roth in 2012. -Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times