Monday, April 11, 2011

Top 10 deranged characters

Edward Docx is the author of The Calligrapher, Self Help, and The Devil's Garden.

For the Guardian, he named a list of literature's top ten deranged characters, including:
Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

"Stop it! Stop it, please, being a maniac!" So begs the lover of our hero, Mickey Sabbath, on page 21. Epic, vital, savage, relentless, insane, existentially incandescent, horrifying, excruciating, not funny, very funny, this is the great tragicomic howl of a madman at full Shakespearean tilt. One of the greatest novels written in my lifetime.
Read about another novel on the list.

Sabbath's Theater is one of Howard Jacobson's five best novels on failure.

--Marshal Zeringue