Operation Shylock : A Confession (Vintage International)

This book raises lots of interesting and important questions about the Zionist dream, the place of Israel in the middle east, the place of Jews in Europe, the holocaust, etc. But the envelope story of the doppelganger is tedious and goes on for too long and in too much detail.

In OPERATION SHYLOCK, the character Philip Roth travels to Israel, where he plans to interview Aharon Applefeld, a gentle writer whose subject is the disappearance of the Jews from Europe and the effect of the Holocaust on survivors. This literary activity is a form of therapy for the character Roth who is not completely recovered from a battle with Halcion, a medication that gave him suicidal thoughts and a sense of mental disintegration. On the verge of this trip, Roth also learns of an impostor Philip Roth in Israel. This impostor espouses a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict--so-called Diasporism--which is the migration of Ashkenazi Jews back to Europe, where they will live without threat of extermination by the Arabs. Concurrent with Roth's trip is the public trial of Ivan the Terrible, a brutal Ukrainian and Nazi guard who drove the Jews into the gas chambers at Treblinka.Interestingly, Roth explores these parallel story lines-- the near destruction of Philip Roth and his fight for identity; and the near destruction of the Jews and their fight for survival in Israel--through the presentment and analysis of myriad doubles. For example, there is Roth, the emotionally delicate writer who identifies troubling moral issues but not their answers. And, there is Roth the impostor, who boldly seeks the limelight for his wacky ideas. Further, there is Applefeld, a writer who creates art as he explores his terrible childhood in the Holocaust. And, there is Apter, Roth's stunted fearful child-like cousin who never overcame the effects of the war. Then, there is George Ziad, a hysterically angry Palestinian who tries to shape Roth's perspective on Israel. And there is Smilesburger, an agent for the Mossad who seeks to persuade through his knowledge of Chofetz Chaim, a Polish rabbi who was insightful but critical of the Jews. Since OPERATION SHYLOCK is fiction, it's important to state that all the characters forming these and Roth's many other doubles are credible and interesting. At the same time, their diametrical natures open huge issues for Roth to explore, with his characters taking the reader to both sides. It's great work.Even so, OPERATION SHYLOCK does occasionally feature an element of Roth's writing that can stall his narrative. Defining this quality is Roth, himself, who in the final chapter of SHYLOCK writes: "...instead of being fortified by your victory over him, you self-destructively build into the letter egregious ambiguities that you then exploit to undermine the very equanimity you are out to achieve." Roth, in other words, sometimes seems attracted to a line of writing and reasoning because he is compulsively contrary. But since this is a book of doubles, Roth gives the opposite analysis a few pages later. "To do so ran counter to all the inclinations of one whose independence as a writer, whose counter suggestiveness as a writer, was simply second nature and had contributed as much to his limitations and his miscalculations as to his durability." Certainly, this helps to explain the richness of Roth's amazing oeuvre.To further validate this contrariness, I point out that OPERATION SHYLOCK refers, in this novel, to an undercover mission that the character Roth undertakes for the Israeli government, describes in a long chapter for this novel, and then expunges at the urging of Smilesburger, the Mossad agent. And this missing chapter is the contrary double of the novel OPERATION SHYLOCK, where Roth explores all his themes at length and in frank and revealing detail.Fascinating and highly recommended.

I have ALL fiction books by Roth, but I have only read 6. I had high expectations for this one, and although it did not disappoint, my expectations were I guess too high. This is something I of course knew already, because when you are expecting too much of something, usually things don't go as expected.Anyway, as for the book, I loved the approach to Zionism that Roth brings to the table, and I also loved the idea of the double Roth character.

I normally don't feel comfortable evaulating fiction because I simply haven't read enough of the classics to have a good handle on it (although I do like reading these Amazon reader reviews and find them helpful).I decided in the past year to read most of the NY Times best fiction of the past 25 years ("Beloved", the Rabbit novels, McCarthy, DeLillo...see [deleted by Amazon...]). For me, this one is the very best of that group.Roth's writing is just super crisp and hits the sweet spot of a good story with some action but also evokes lots of major themes. In some sense it is almost too bad that Roth writes so much about Jewish issues and growing up in Newark NJ in his novels, in that those cast a big shadow over the artistry of the writing. Don't let the Jewish themes in this book distract you from the great writing. Israel is actually the perfect template to raise these issues of duality in life and in the world. Operation Shylock is a rare work of fiction that seems to build up throughout the book and doesn't start off too great, remain bland, or only have good patches (ie, DeLillo Underworld's beginning, Updike's predictability, or Beloved's good patches). If you can only read one book on that NY Times list, I would recommend this one.

To much personal angst ! Get over religious identity crisis after a lifetime !

I am a fan of Roth's. However, as it happens with every writer, I feel sometimes disappointed with his work. Too huge to always meet expectations. This was the case with Opreation Shylock. The idea is intriguing and, at the beginning, one gets very involved with the plot. But then, well, it is, in a single word, too much. The dialogues (and musings)are so long, one loses track of the story. The characters end up playing, in some ways, their parts to the extreme. All this said, Operation Shylock remains "a must". Be patient and read it to the end, because Roth's creativity and andimagination is worth the endeavor.

Item received as expected

Another 'page turner' from PR.

It's sometimes hard to read his prose but it's almost always worth the effort.It would be interesting to hear the reaction with in Israel's right wing to the novel's argument on the need for Zionism to reverse itself because its historical justification is now. outmoded.Also, on the generally bogus role of religion for other than the fearful and desperate-"There was also some question as to whether he was sane, or was entering that stage of chronic ailing known as the Hysterical Search for the Miraculous Cure.............If so, beware, astrology lies just around the corner. Worse, Christianity. Yield to the hunger for medical magic and you will be carried to the ultimate limit of human foolishness, to the most preposterous of all the great pipe dreams devised by ailing mankind, to the Gospels, to the pillow of our leading dolorologist, the voodoo healer Dr. Jesus Christ."

Philip Roth's 1993 novel Operation Shylock is an eminently readable, though undeniably at times confusing, literary mix of (apparent) fact and fiction and a biting satire on human identity (primarily that of Philip Roth). In the book, Roth uses the premise of a relatively traditional, albeit also fantastic, political thriller, but layers on top of this his all too familiar obsessions of the art of the novelist, human mortality and his (potentially contradictory) views on the Jewish question.For the core narrative of Operation Shylock, Roth narrates as himself, who, recovering from a mental breakdown, travels to Israel to interview a fellow Jewish novelist. Here he discovers that another person, also calling himself Philip Roth, has been touring the country espousing anti-semitic views, effectively in his name. At the same time, the real-life trial of alleged war criminal John (Ivan the Terrible) Demjanjuk is also taking place in Jerusalem. Roth uses these devices, and the associated characters, to develop the novel's themes around the confusion of identity - whether this be that of a war criminal, the Jewish state, or of Roth himself. At the end of the novel Roth suggests that he (the character in the novel) has, in fact, been sent to Israel to gather intelligence for Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service).Given the apparent blurring of fact and fiction in Operation Shylock, Roth appears to add some clarity as to the basis of the book by declaring at the end that it is a work of fiction. However, Roth has separately claimed that he did actually undertake such a spying mission for Mossad (presumably another piece of Roth fantasy).Operation Shylock is undoubtedly a hugely ambitious book from a conceptual standpoint, and it could be argued, a provocatively complex and deliberately confusing one. Roth has tried his hand at such fact/fiction blurring in other of his novels. The Plot Against America, for example, arguably achieves such a mixture more effectively, and certainly in a more straightforward manner. However, despite the undoubted flaws in Operation Shylock, it is a book (novel) well worth reading.

...now he writes self regarding fairy stories. I would defy most people to get as far as I did (a third of the way in) before losing the will to live.

Another great book by Roth - I prefer his books lightly toasted with butter and marmalade rather than baked.

Roth's prose is unquestionably of the top tier, superbly accurate and well written. I have to admit, however, to not finding him especially funny, as other admirers profess to. He is witty, yes, and frequently comic, and for the most part amusing, but actually funny - well only just. No part of this book made me do anything more than smile. Furthermore, the self-referentiality of using himself as the central character can grate at times, although in compensation, it does allow him to explore difficult themes (of Jewish identity and its relation to the Israeli state) in a way that made immediate, personal sense to me as a reader. This is the triumph of Roth's writing here: a rendering of complexities that never collapses back into reassuring political simplicities.