Nemesis by Philip Roth: A review of a novel about an epidemic during a pandemic.

When you drop a book and then return to it often only to realize that you want to get away from it at the earliest again and won’t return to it any time soon–is a feeling which fills you with sadness.

The changing scenes and the moods of the characters fail to charm you because it all sounds superficial and sterile.

None of the characters seems invested in anything he or she says in dialogues which are dull, rhetorical and devoid of any emotions. They could have said anything or everything without meaning any of them.

The background is perfect for a book as the second world war is going on in far away locations and an epidemic has taken hold of the immediate world. It must have forced anyone with any developed sensibility to look for deeper meanings in the everyday phenomena like God, nature and the inadequacy of human beings to deal with relationships one falls into and other vicissitudes of life.

Out of it something could have come which might have enamoured one, or engaged one, or entertained one; or enlightened one.

So finding nothing that delights or surprises one even after coming back to a book recalling that life around is similarly beset with an epidemic now besides the problems of other hues–as was the times in which this book is set, is a feeling of an infinite loss.

Touching all kinds of emotions without dealing with any of them to an appropriate extent betrays that the work one has in hand, to regale oneself, was done only half-heartedly. Possibly it was already sold before it was even created. So it is not honest and sincere. It is rather smug, self-sufficient and arrogant.

May be you live till another pandemic strikes the world near you to return to this book again, if not earlier. Also hope that by that time you are conditioned or have mellowed enough to appreciate this work from a writer who is mostly regarded very highly. For the other kind of writings available could be even more prosaic.

Or, may be, you develop an art of feigning emotions half-heartedly, like the characters of this novel, to like this book. In any case, the relief is that the book is short and your patience will not be tested long–longer than the time you survive daily life and the periodic pandemics.

Because the failing could be on the part of a reader too. But one can not be sure either.