I read The Breast a year or so ago but when I recently read The Professor of Desire and found that it was a part of a trilogy that began with The Breast I decided to re-read it before reading the 3rd installment.
I also wanted to re-read it because the first time I read it, I thought that Roth was gently mocking Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I enjoyed because I'm not a huge fan of Kafka. However, after reading the continuing Kafka parallels in The Professor of Desire, I realized that he's actually paying homage to him. Clearly I missed the point the first time I read The Breast.
The first time I read it, I didn't care much about it, either way. It's the story of a man who wakes up one morning to find that he's turned into a giant, human-sized breast. The book is from his perspective as he learns to live in this new and unexplainable world.
The second time around, it wasn't any better. It wasn't bad - in fact I thought it was an interesting book that made me think about common things in strange ways. But it also wasn't something that I related to at all or that made me feel particularly excited to get back to it when I took a break.
Overall, there are many people I would recommend this book to - namely Kafka fans or those more interested in Science Fiction than I am. For me, however, it was a pleasant though not all together satisfying break from my norm, and from Roth's.
6/10
YTD:
Books read : 29
Pages read : 8,404
Currently reading : The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter - Katherine Anne Porter & The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
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