Requiem for Harlem

by Henry Roth

Book Overview

Completed just months before Henry Roth's death, Mercy of a Rude Stream has, since the publication of Volume I in 1994, become a literary event of epic dimensions. In Requiem for Harlem, Roth... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312169809
• ISBN13: 9780312169800
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 291 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Scruffy and slummy

Ira Stigman thought he was a glutton. Ira went through a crisis when he thought he had made his cousin Stella pregnant. He enjoyed the company of his friends, Edith and Larry. He told Edith secrets he thought would discredit him in her eyes. It is May, 1987, the author recalls that his (fictitious) father, born in 1878, was singled out for an interview in 1966 when he was eightly three years old. He described his job as a Roll Call waiter. His father was honored because in the previous year the author had a best seller. The author notes that the interview was typically a matrix of confusions, confabulations, inventions, contradictions. He said most of this was for reason of his father's incurable tendancy to evasions. The author ponders the question, what made the inhabitants of East Harlem scruffy and slummy. He had been raised with superstitions. He was to leave home and live with Edith. Mrs. Shapiro, one of the neighbors, had once saved Ira from a terrible thrashing. He sees her when he comes to move his things and tell his mother and his father good by. The volume contains an editor's afterward by Robert Weil. It is the last book of a quartet, MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM, completed by a very old man who died October 13, 1995.

AN AMAZING REQUIEM FOR HENRY ROTH

There is an extraordinary pain and energy to REQUIEM FOR HARLEM which makes you remember it long after you have finished it. It also has the feel of a thriller -- fast, daring, sexual, morally challenging, yet when you are confronted at the end with the unspeakable crimes, not so much of Ira but of his father, you begin to understand the psychic pain that belonged both to Roth and his alter-ego, Ira Stigman. One only wishes that Roth had been younger and could have written more fiction on this level, but there is a sad wisdom to be gleaned that could only come of an author nearing the end. For anyone who thinks that contemporary American literature lacks big or philosophically probing themes, I urge them not only to read REQUIEM FOR HARLEM but also the entire quartet of MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM. Roth has yet to be rediscovered for his final masterpieces, but the time for these books will come, as surely as it did for CALL IT SLEEP.

One of the most important novels in American literature.

Henry Roth wrought one of the most overwhelming, literate and important works in late 20th century American literature with "Mercy of a Rude Stream." Never in my young life have I read a contemporary work of fiction with as much raw frustrated energy and literary intellect. If there could be an American Hugo of the soul then perhaps Roth is it. This final book, and the three before it, have profoundly and fundamentally changed my view of the world and of my beloved city, New York, for ever more. I only wish that there was more of Roth to read, and that there were more readers of Jewish fiction who care to create a groundswell of appreciation for Roth. The pain in these four novels is worth it, I feel as if I have ended a long frienship now that "Requiem" is over.