Der Titel ist Programm... Ein junger Mann lamentiert sich durch das Buch. Das mag stilistisch gut ausgeführt sein, mein Fall ist das nicht. Deshalb bei gut 35% abgebrochen.

I was sifting through a box of old books from my shed and found this edition without a cover and missing page 37 (where one of Portnoy's testicles retreats into his body). Nevertheless, I began to read and Phillip Roth rapidly sucked (yes, sucked) me in to this damnable, relentlessly pejorative, monologue of Jewishness. There were many times I felt almost contaminated by the endless guilt, insecurity and Yiddish hatred of non- Jewish goyim, girls or shikses and just wanted it to end or go somewhere else.

But the shikses, ah, the shikses are something else again […] I am so awed that I am in a state of desire beyond a hard-on. My circumcised little dong is simply shriveled up with veneration. Maybe it’s dread. How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde? My contempt for what they believe in is more than neutralized by my adoration of the way they look, the way they move and laugh and speak.

Is this why an essentially Jewish Hollywood movie industry fetishized and then spat out the blonde temptress? Is it Jewishness that is responsible for what is seen today as the objectification of women? Portnoy in name (Port Noir) is the black gate to, depravity, guilt, insecurity or what? By culminating in Portnoy's failed attempt to rape a red-headed Jewish/Israeli girl (his monstrous mother) due to lack of an erection, it is as though nothing is resolved. It's an extraordinary diatribe of a book that eventually just peters out (literally in a series of dots) with a weak punchline - exhausted.

The blurb says it is a funny book and I did laugh out- loud a few times:

...my father is a man who has a certain amount of worrying to do each day, and sometimes has to forgo listening to the conversations going on around him in order to fulfill his anxiety requirement. It can well be that he hasn't heard a word that she's been saying.

( )

I am most assuredly female and there were many parts of this book that caused great eye-rolling from me. I sympathized with The Monkey more than Portnoy. I hope I spell a bit better. I recognized a couple of my Jewish boyfriends.

Overall, it was an enjoyable read. ( )

not hard to understand the popularity of this book. there really is 'something for everyone' (male readers only). ostensibly, we have the humorous aspect of the work. there are some nice 'tongue in cheek' (so to speak) riffs. however, the real achievement here is the sleek embodiment of the modern reactionary (and curiously freudian) notion that all so-called 'do gooders' are motivated, at least in part, by psychosis. ( )

Gibberish ( )