Connections
A major concern of Roth's fiction since the 1970s has been the relationship between a novelist's life and work. Though this topic is thoroughly explored in Roth's series of Zuckerman novels, Operation Shylock even more radically attacks the distinction between art and life by making a fairly mimetic version of the author the protagonist of an obviously invented (though plausible) story.
Despite this effort, separating the real from the fictional in Operation Shylock is not wholly impossible. For example, several minor characters from the novel are actual people including John Demjanjuk, Claire Bloom, and Israeli writer and Roth friend Aharon Appelfeld. The post-operative nervous breakdown mentioned in the prologue and in other books by or about Roth was drawn from Roth's real-life experience of the temporary side-effects of a post-operative sedative (triazolam) which was later banned in several countries after discovery that the manufacturer had not published studies showing a high risk of short term psychiatric disturbance.
Read more about this topic: Operation Shylock
Famous quotes containing the word connections:
“The conclusion suggested by these arguments might be called the paradox of theorizing. It asserts that if the terms and the general principles of a scientific theory serve their purpose, i. e., if they establish the definite connections among observable phenomena, then they can be dispensed with since any chain of laws and interpretive statements establishing such a connection should then be replaceable by a law which directly links observational antecedents to observational consequents.”
—C.G. (Carl Gustav)
“Our business being to colonize the country, there was only one way to do it—by spreading over it all the associations and connections of family life.”
—Henry Parkes (1815–1896)
“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)