Betrayal

Philip Roth / 魏立红Shanghai Translation Publishing House · ChinaJun 2020

Rating 4.3
Word count
203K words
Chapters
9
ISBN
9787532782796

Tags

Foreign Literature Fate and FortuneComplex HumanityPsychological InsightSelf-ReflectionSocial Observation

Summary

Ella Ringold lost his mother in childhood and left school early, spending years drifting through the lower reaches of society. During World War II he taught himself through hard study and, favored by opportunity, became a household-name radio drama actor. He married the famous film actress Eve Fleming, but soon after the wedding, the willfulness and caprice of Eve's daughter by her first husband pushed their marriage to the brink of collapse. Just then McCarthyism was sweeping America, and Ella, who harbored grand political ambitions, was blacklisted. Frantic over the marital crisis, Eve was exploited by political opponents and published a memoir accusing Ella of being a Soviet spy, bringing him fatal ruin.

Editor's review

Philip Roth's Deception is a work of remarkable tension and psychological depth, far more than a simple story of marriage and infidelity. Through the intricate triangle between literature professor Kepesh, his mistress, and her husband, the novel probes desire, ethics, self-knowledge, and the illusions of intellectual life. With his signature sharpness, Roth places his characters in the gap between morality and passion and dissects them with near cruelty. Readers will feel not only the dramatic conflicts of the plot but also Roth's precise capture of the subtle recesses of human nature—the self-justification, dread, absorption, and even a distorted sense of liberation that individuals experience before and after betrayal. An important link in Roth's Kepesh series, the novel reflects his mature attention to the spiritual predicaments of the middle class. It tells not merely of a relationship's collapse but reveals how personal identity becomes fragile and fluid under the pressure of desire. For serious literary readers, it is both an intellectual and an emotional challenge.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read this alongside Roth's The Dying Animal and other Kepesh books to gain a fuller view of the character's arc and the author's intellectual trajectory.
  2. Pay attention to how Roth uses interior monologue and dialogue to build tension between the character's self-perception and external reality.
  3. Set aside simple moral judgment for a while and try to understand the psychological motives and historical context behind the characters' actions for a richer reading experience.

About the publisher

Shanghai Translation Publishing House China · Founded in 1978

Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.

Contents

  1. 版权信息
  2. 第一章
  3. 第二章
  4. 第三章
  5. 第四章
  6. 第五章
  7. 第六章
  8. 第七章
  9. 第八章

FAQ

Is this book related to the film Unfaithful? The themes are similar, but there is no direct adaptation. The film Unfaithful drew on multiple sources, while Roth's Deception is an independent literary work focused on the psychological depths of intellectuals, with greater literary and intellectual weight.
What are the hallmarks of Philip Roth's writing in this book? The book typically displays Roth's later style: masterly psychological description, dense and philosophically charged dialogue, frank treatment of sex and death, and a narrative voice full of irony and self-reflection.
Is this book suitable as an introduction to Philip Roth? It can serve as one. It is relatively compact and thematically focused, effectively showing Roth's core style. Note, however, that its themes are heavy; readers who prefer broader narratives might start with American Pastoral.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Philip Roth Author · American · 1933–2018

Philip Roth (1933–2018) was an American novelist, born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, and rose to prominence in 1959 with Goodbye, Columbus. His work often centers on the lives of American Jews while probing the tensions between identity, desire, and history, in a style that blends satire with self-examination. His major works include Portnoy's Complaint, American Pastoral, The Human Stain, Sabbath's Theater, and The Plot Against America, as well as nonfiction such as The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography and Reading Myself and Others. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and died in 2018; the collection holds 33 of his works.

魏立红 Author

Wei Lihong is an author name that appears in the Chinese publishing field in connection with the translation and editing of foreign literature; her public biographical information is limited, and her nationality, dates of birth and death, and educational background are not clearly documented. Judging from the six works held in the database, her work focuses on foreign literature, especially the introduction of contemporary American fiction and African Anglophone literature. Representative works include Philip Roth's American Trilogy and the related boxed set, Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, the second collection of Abdulrazak Gurnah's works, and Betrayal and Dottie. These titles generally fall under classics, foreign literature, and social fiction, and their themes involve identity, ethnicity, family, and contemporary social issues. Her translations and editorial choices emphasize the social observation and narrative texture of the originals, offering Chinese readers a relatively concentrated entry point for understanding modern and contemporary English-language fiction.