Octavio Solis’s Reviews > Philip Roth: Zuckerman Bound A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985 > Status Update

The Prague Orgy begins! And it’s a wickedly funny novella.

My deep-dive into Philip Roth and his altar ego Nathan Zuckerman continues. Three novels done and one to go. Thoroughly enjoying his crackling sentences.

“But once one’s writing, it’s all limits. Bound to a subject. Bound to make sense of it. Bound to make a book of it. If you want to be reminded of your limitations virtually every minute, there’s no better occupation to choose. Your memory, your diction, your intelligence, your sympathies, your observations, your sensations, your understanding — never enough.”

“But what became colossal was the next page. He thought he had chosen life but what he had chosen was the next page. Stealing time to write stories, he never thought to wonder what time might be stealing from him. Only gradually did the perfecting of a writer’s iron will begin to feel like the evasion of experience, and the means to imaginative release… like the sternest form of incarceration.