One of the few cases in which the writer is recognized when he has already died. Caprices of fate or tricks of being born at the wrong time. The thing is that the originally Ukrainian henry roth he is today that classic of literature that he never would have suspected of being. And perhaps there is also something suggestive of magic, of powerful literary magnetism conceived as the ideal of writing to tell it, without further pretensions or at least without many achievements in life.
Perhaps it was because of the fact of writing novels with biographical overtones, with an undeniable point of ideology. The powerful voice of Roth, who was not yet thirty years old and who channeled concerns in the novel, was silenced until many decades later. And one can become disenchanted with literature without ever ceasing to be a writer.
To look for some similarity in a closer panorama, I could cite the triumphant today louis landero, the writer discovered beyond forty, to climb onto the podium of Spanish narrative without previously imagining himself in those struggles. And maintaining that Guadianesque point of the writer that emerges only when he has something to tell. The paths of literature are inscrutable. But today we are with Henry Roth. And here we go with his best novels.
Top 3 recommended novels by Henry Roth
call it sleep
Everything is subjective, even the American dream. The labeling is only a brief announcement of what it can become, of the best option if luck goes to the side. The other Roth, as Henry is often called in comparison to Philip Roth, with whom he shared Jewish origins and a writing profession, offers us a more threatening glimpse of that United States in which a child descended from newcomers to the Big Apple.
That is how we see that the dream is an old hope to wake up from the nightmare unscathed to try and point to some kind of destiny between deep-rooted fears, mistrust and that strange sifting that, despite everything, the writer always wants to discover in childhood. whatever the context.
A brilliant novel that reaches us from the shared semblances of a childhood vision trying to make its way to maturity, learning from the blows and disappointments that almost never touch at that age and that, precisely for that reason, reaches us deeply.
In the thirties, in the midst of the economic crisis, a Jewish boy grows up in New York. As he confronts the closed environment of the ghetto and the peculiarities of his family, he makes his own discovery of a world too hostile.
At the mercy of a wild stream
Henry Roth surely holds the record for the time between the debut and the next novel. 58 years passed between "Call it a dream" and this second work. When everyone thought, rediscovering the quality of his, until then his only novel, that there would be no more, this other novel emerged with pretenses of biography. And the best things are told when they have to be told... And boy did Henry Roth have to tell us.
The notice for his next play was actually an immense tetralogy composed of A Star Shines Over Mount Morris Park, A Stone Stepping Stone Over the Hudson, Redemption, and Requiem for Harlem. The reception of the news was tremendous and came to be compared to the literary reappearance of JD Salinger.
As the story unfolds, we follow the turbulent odyssey of Ira Stigman, whose family had moved to the Jewish part of Harlem, New York, in the "dismal summer of 1914." From the turbulent years of our protagonist's youth until we meet an Ira already aged and cornered by his own sins, we follow Ira on an almost Proustian journey in which he will understand that modernity has corrupted his values ​​and the faith of his family.
The juxtaposition of both voices "that of the children throwing themselves into the sea with enthusiasm and that of the adults being dragged out to sea by the undertow" reveals the true message that lies at the heart of this prophetic American novel, a message that starts from memory and leads to the meaning of our life.
an american
There are works that reach us without complete certainty about the author's will to make them public. But the most unexpected heirs are like this. And in a way there is something morbid about knowing what a great author discards. It is not a disruptive work, but a continuation of that turning point that for Henry represented his discovery of the world and its impact on everything to come.
The manuscript of An American sat untouched for a decade in office files before it fell into the hands of Willing Davidson, a young fellow in The New Yorker's fiction department who, with a "growing sense of elation and of having made a discovery", he recognized that this unpublished manuscript possessed "a surprising vigor".
An American reintroduces us to Roth's alter ego, Ira, who abandons his dictatorial lover for an aristocratic blonde pianist. The conflict that this produces between his roots in the Jewish ghetto and his literary aspirations forces her to temporarily abandon his family and head to the promising Wild West. Roth's posthumous work is not only the last personal testimony of the Depression, but also a harrowing novel about the reinvention and transcendence of love.
