The Human Stain

by Philip Roth | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0099282194 Global Overview for this book
Registered by Molyneux of Oxford, Oxfordshire United Kingdom on 5/21/2005
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3 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by Molyneux from Oxford, Oxfordshire United Kingdom on Saturday, May 21, 2005
Amazon.co.uk Review
Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk 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 dramatised 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.

The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey become just as important as his turbulent-forced retirement when he reveals a secret that he has been hiding his entire adult life and 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, 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 and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo

Journal Entry 2 by Molyneux at on Wednesday, May 25, 2005
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On it's way to Birmingham!

Update: Another book which didnt quite make the journey to the BC Unconvention!

Journal Entry 3 by Molyneux at on Monday, July 11, 2005

Released 18 yrs ago (7/11/2005 UTC) at

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Journal Entry 4 by cosmogenist on Saturday, August 13, 2005
Passed to me ina controlled release.

Journal Entry 5 by cosmogenist on Thursday, May 11, 2006
I really felt rather indifferent to this book. I've heard so much about Philip Roth as a writer, and the blurb on the back says "There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief." I thought it would be brilliant, clever, unputdownable. The only brilliance it the basic premise of Coleman Silk's secret, the rest of it drags on, rather. And the only reason I went over and over something was that I didn't understand it the first time, and generally I didn't understand it the second time either. Hypothesis: Roth is just too clever for me to understand. Alternative hypothesis: Roth isn't as good as he's cracked up to be. Shame, I was looking forward to really enjoying this book.

Released 17 yrs ago (5/13/2006 UTC) at Queen Mary's College in Basingstoke, Hampshire United Kingdom

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Not sure where I'll leave the book, but it'll be there somewhere...

Journal Entry 7 by faunia from Basingstoke, Hampshire United Kingdom on Sunday, December 10, 2006
13th May I am saying thankyou and goodbye to Cicely as we take the paper cloths from the tables at the end of the Basingstoke Art Club's coffee morning for the Spring Show, where I came after work and a visit from the beekeeper, who placed a box with comb to entice a swarm out from my front porch roof, when I notice "The Human Stain' by Roth sitting on the rubber tiled floor of 'The Street', Queen Mary's College, below the window, by the wall, and ask her 'Is that yours?' 'No, but it's been there all morning.' Thinking I'd (id) like to read it, but I'd better hand it in at the reception desk to the woman I'd sung to from one of my pieces (a ballad to the tune of 'Linden Lea') the DELIGHT of finding it is a 'bookcrossing' volume, so, graspingly with gladness I announce to Cicely that I shall take it home to read! A really resonant find with a memory of '86 Charing Cross Road' and Anne's 80th in Melbourne today (had watched the old film at hers last year, then taped a Radio 4 programme about book crossing which i think mentioned the book that preceded the film, and its crossings history), and the fun of explaining the 'id' and the 'superego' in one of my works. I didn't get far in May, but am really enjoying it now, 10th December.

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