Operation Shylock (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Philip Roth
- First Published: 1993
- Type of Plot: Novel of ideas
- Time of Work: 1988
- Setting: The United States and Israel
- Principal Characters: Philip Roth, Moishe Pipik, George Ziad, Jinx Possesski, Aharon Appelfeld, Smilesburger, John Demjanjuk
- Genres: Long fiction, Problem novel
- Subjects: Mistaken or secret identity, 1980’s, Novelists, Surgery or surgeons, Jews or Jewish life, Anti-Semitism, Espionage or spies, 1990’s, Holocaust, Jewish, Israel or Israelis, Comedy, Jews and Gentiles, Split personalities, Jerusalem, Jewish-Arab relations, Palestinian Arabs, Secularism, Zionism
- Locales: New York, London, England, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Jordan
The Novel
Operation Shylock is Philip Roth’s most complex, convoluted and baffling novel, in which he uses the device of the literary double to parallel his identity and history in the text’s two leading personages. He thereby causes the reader to ponder the provocative and probably insoluble conundrums of fiction’s relation to reality and of autobiography’s role in the working of the literary imagination.
Not only does the protagonist-narrator appear under the name, personal history, and likeness of the author as Philip Roth, but from the book’s opening...
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