La originalidad y el talento del gran Philiph Roth acaso lleguen a su culminación en esta historia de resonancias alegóricas, divertida y profunda, sobre la kafkiana transformación del profesor David Kepesh en un gigantesco pecho femenino de setenta kilos. Tan peculiar metamorfosis provoca situaciones impagables pero, sobre todo, sustenta una lúcida reflexión sobre la complejidad de nuestra sexualidad y de las relaciones interpersonales.

Man turns into 155 pound breast. Such a quick read it was amusing. Add another 35 pages and it might have been tedious? ( )

This is a short novella by Philip Roth and like Kafka and Gogol, the narrator becomes something else. He becomes a 155 lb female breast. While a cockroach is disgusting and a nose would be odd at least it doesn't require clothing, a breast is sexual and generally kept covered. I will quote, "Roth has a genius for making everything potentially beautiful and joyful filthy and disgusting. . . . Roth writes dirty books, not pornography." https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-New-Fable-for-Critics%3A-Philip-Roth%27s.... There is a good deal of sexual writing that I did not appreciate. The question is, did Roth write this to make some quick money, did he sit down and think, I can write something like Kafka and Gogol. Not long. Fast to the publisher. The Breast is concluded with a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo". The last line, "You must change your life." The breast is an object, a thing that really is just passive. It is not fully human. The breast cannot communicate much on how it feels other than arousal. To live life, you must become more that a statue, you must be active, make changes. ( )

> LE SEIN, de Philip Roth (Folio, 1984)
Se reporter à la critique de Jean-Paul BEAUMIER
In: (1985). Compte rendu de [Commentaires]. Nuit blanche, (19), p. 32. … ; (en ligne),
URL : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/20324ac

This book was suggested to me during a discussion about an irksome segment of the 20thC literary canon: middle-aged male Americans obsessed with adultery, daddy issues or declining sexual appetite, usually relayed through obnoxiously academic or otherwise “intellectual” main characters, who think their navel-gazing is Such Serious Business. My example was John Updike; a friend suggested this novella by Philip Roth as a fun example of the subgenre.

And fun it was: The breast deals indeed with an aging American academic who is full of himself and who is obsessed with grandstanding through bragging about his intelligence and his sexual prowess. One day, though, he finds he has transformed into a female breast unattached to a body, an excessively grotesque development which leads to an unholy amount of introspection.

The fun part is that the novella is run through with a layer of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness: Roth walks the line between playing the subgenre straight and highlighting its pathological absurdity. Its over-the-top quality is what saves it: I don’t think it would have worked if any of it were any less outrageous. ( )