CHARMAIN NAIDOO: It's time to rethink race
'Philip Roth, who died this week at the age of 85, wrote about uncomfortable things funnily. He spared no blushes'
When I was 13, my father caught me reading Philip Roth’s controversial book, Portnoy’s Complaint, the eponymous first person narrative of a tortured middle class Jewish New Yorker. Portnoy’s crime, in my dad’s eyes, was masturbation: fleshy assaults on a cored apple; a piece of fresh liver specially bought from the butcher, an empty milk bottle. I barely understood any of it, new teen that I was, but it did put me off offal for life. The book, published in 1969, was tucked into the back of my parents personal book shelf and we were told that those were books we could read later, when we were older. This forbidden list included D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.Philip Roth, who died this week at the age of 85, wrote about uncomfortable things funnily. He spared no blushes. He wrote about the neurotic obsession of Jewish Americans – with more grace than Woody Allen and his existential ramblings I’ve always thought. I...
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