I'm saving, I mean, saving humanity. And yet I can't do it without my psychoanalyst
In 1966 he lay down on the couch of a famous New York shrink and would like to confess to him, because his faith does not count on any other form of sinful relaxation. Alexander Portnoy - a Jewish role model in his... er... Christ years, a successful lawyer in the fledgling field of human rights and, most of all, a woman-hunter obsessed with sex and social altruism - has a beam-like neurosis.
How, under the supervision of Dr. Spielvogel delves into the depths of his disillusionment, fishing out from there, like a conscientious self-tormentor, injustice after injustice. And because at the same time not and not cut the umbilical cord of frustrations, which he attributes to the loving tyranny of petty bourgeois parents, binding Jewish taboos and the world of prejudice, that even the most radical hippie couldn't handle, cannot be expected, that he could get some inner peace. And so Alex's scandalously straightforward and wonderfully bawdy confession, spiced with the vicissitudes of his last relationship with a racy barbie, offers the audience a comedy unprecedented in the days of the sexual revolution.
Roth's masterpiece waited for a Czech edition for the whole "normalisation" twenty years - and then he showed our prudery how far it can go in the interests of literature. Who would be surprised, too, at an author who opened up entirely new horizons with the gift of a subversive Jewish anecdote?
