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Loading... The Human Stain (2000)by Philip Roth
00002104   cavlibrary | Apr 11, 2013 |  Non so perché, questo libro giaceva da anni nei miei scaffali, senza che mai fosse venuto il suo turno. Invece è stata una rivelazione, di certo il migliore di Roth che io abbia letto finora (e soppiantare Pastorale americana non era semplice). Geniale l'intreccio, straordinaria la costruzione dei personaggi, il tutto condotto con una tecnica scrittoria che mi ha incantata. Pochi come Roth sanno mettere sotti i riflettori le assurdità di questo mondo. MI ha peraltro colpita l'assonanza con Solar: là lo scienziato viene accusato di neonazismo per aver detto una verità banalissima, cioè che uomini e donne hanno attitudini differenti. Qui il letterato viene accusato di razzismo per aver usato una parola nel suo senso appropriato, vale a dire "fantasmi, spettri". Purtroppo per lui, in gergo significa anche "negracci". Se nel Buio oltre la siepe ci si indigna per un mondo in cui il razzismo era la normalità, in cui se nascevi nero eri colpevole anche se innocente, ora si ha l'impressione di essere caduti dall'altra parte, in una paura ossessiva del razzismo che è, essa stesso, razzismo. Ma tutto questo, nel libro di Roth, non è che uno dei temi, tanti temi che vanno a ricomporre la confusione e l'incertezza in cui vive l'uomo di oggi. Magistrale e indimenticabile l'invettiva di Faunia, protagonista femminile, quando grida che dei pompini presidenziali (siamo nell'estate del 1998) a lei non gliene può fregare di meno, lei, violata dalla vita in tutti i modi possibile, costretta a convivere con sopportazione e disperazione. E' come se in quelle righe tutti noi comuni mortali gridassimo con lei. Davvero. Lilliblu | Aug 4, 2012 | Roth is our greatest living American writer of fiction, and this is my favorite of his books. An emotional powerhouse treatise on love, lust, race, religion, politics, academics, and family. Contains the single greatest "twist" of surprise I've ever read, and one that occurs so subtly, a mere third of the way into the book, you have to go back and make sure you read what you thought you read. Masterpiece. (  ) Grendelschoice | May 21, 2012 | Great characterizations, especially the parts about how our moral selves are formed. If Roth could have been more deft with the plot at the end it would have got five stars. (  ) librarianbryan | Apr 20, 2012 | Philip Roth’s “Human Stain“ surprised me. I’ve wanted to read the last part of his American Trilogy series for years, but all I remembered from a summary I'd once read was that it is about a college professor’s affair with a younger woman. How inept a description of the novel that is! It is a book that cries out for a re-read, because only in the end you realize the depth of the plot and the connections between the characters. Suddenly you see that despite their superficial differences, within they are all dealing with the same insecurities. I had to fight for the first 100 pages or so to continue reading, but as soon as the whole enterprise crystallized there was no stopping me and the pages just flew by. Set against the 1998 Lewinsky scandal, it is a book about perception and deception. Nobody is who you think they are. This is a book about the depth of human existence. There are so many sides to us that we cannot be summarized in or described by one or two characteristics. Given the many acquaintances we make during our lives, the many turns we take along the way, we only reveal fragments of ourselves to the people around us. Nobody can say that they know us to our full extend. What essentially makes us human is our capacity to be so many things at the same time. So that maybe even we ourselves can't always be sure of who we really are. ( ) BriannaNo2 | Mar 10, 2012 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0375726349, Paperback)Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk--formerly "Silky Silk," undefeated welterweight pro boxer--strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies."But shocking, intensely dramatized events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication," and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble," and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado," Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux. In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced retirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. "Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard" is for Coleman Silk. "Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery--that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?" Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:30:51 -0500) Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid the controversy, Silk must struggle to keep his greatest secret, a secret he's held for the majority of his life, from becoming made public.… (more) |
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