Roth's "Confession"
In March 1993, he maintained the veracity of his novel to The New York Times' Esther B. Fein: "'Operation Shylock,' Roth insists with a post-modern straight face, is a 'confession,' not a novel, and he means for us to take this every bit as seriously as the contents labels demanded by the strictures of the Food and Drug Administration. 'The book is true,' Roth said the other day. 'As you know, at the end of the book a Mossad operative made me realize it was in my interest to say this book was fiction. And I became quite convinced that it was in my interest to do that. So I added the note to the reader as I was asked to do. I'm just a good Mossadnik.'"
Read more about this topic: Operation Shylock
Famous quotes containing the words roth and/or confession:
“It isn’t that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“Whoever will imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment without leaning or inclination, on any occasion whatever, has a conception of Pyrrhonism.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)