I don't know about this one. I picked it up from my mother's holiday home, summer-reading bookshelf for a light read. As a 57 year old male, of course I was drawn into this story of a 60+ professor who has affairs with his students - rather than remain loyally married. But it felt a more than a little lurid. And to what point? ( )

Philip Roth never fails to make me loathe his characters, and humanity in general. ( )

Desde que la revolución de los sesenta lo liberó de sus ataduras familiares, David Kepesh, profesor universitario, un hombre seductor, inteligente y culto, ha vivido sin compromisos. Y tiene una rica fuente para sus conquistas dentro de sus propias clases.
A sus setenta años, confiesa una de sus últimas experiencias sentimentales: la que mantuvo con Consuelo Castillo, una joven cubana, casi cincuenta años más joven que él, que le enfrentó con las claves de su vida.

It comes as no surprise that Roth handles death, dying, sex, and the effects of all three on the human psyche with more honesty, more ease, than any writer this country has produced. The Dying Animal is a perfect book that accomplishes so much more in its allotted pages than the average novel in twice, three times as many. David Kepesh has come a long way from the lit student-turned mammary - oh, how breasts reprise their role! In Deception-like fashion, Kepesh tells the story to some other figure in the room about an affair unlike any other. Consuela, a twentysomething Cuban immigrant, and one of Kepesh's students, is one of the fiercest and most interesting (female) characters that Roth has invented. She's the contender in the room that has Kepesh, whose list of sexual episodes reads something like an anonymous survey of male fantasies, damn near trembling with insecurity. Roth's mastery over the series of events that has these two meet, fuck, separate, and meet again, is nothing short of brilliance. And with Dying in the title, the reader can expect this novel, in which a Casanova Jewish intellectual is caught in the middle of a war between eros and thanatos, to come with painfully beautiful Rothian meditations on the inevitable end of life. Kepesh is finished. ( )

Decadente. Sexual. Difícil. ( )