Call It Sleep : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps The great American novel.
Review: Quite simply, this is one of the greatest novels ever written. If you want to experience the galvanic and redemptive power of language, read this book. Roth was a genius, and his writing will change you.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful. Just plain beautiful.
Review: This is a book to cherish. Funny, touching, evocative. It's an amazing read. One of the all time best.

Rating:
Summary: Very powerful book
Review: This, for me, captures the pure terror that often attends childhood, and the process of dealing with things you can't understand. It's also a brilliant evocation of the alienation of the Jewish experience-- you can't really compare it, as one of my fellow reviewers did, to the experiences of other ethnic groups. The Scherls are a family profoundly alienated from everyone else-- which serves to heighten the terror. This book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that is really brilliant in that it is completely convincing and totally natural on the part of the author-- it never seems forced-- and in that it beautifully evokes the thought process of childhood. I read this when I was very young and it has stuck with me ever since-- it helped me to understand the feelings of my own childhood.

Rating:
Summary: Ramblings of a child
Review: Took me forever to get through, slow and difficult to follow