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The human stain

By Philip Roth

(91)

| Others | 9780224060905

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Book Description

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth abouContinue

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

Critics

  • The gripes of Roth

    The Human Stain Philip Roth Jonathan Cape, £16.99, 361pp After dissecting the secret torment of Swede Levov in American Pastoral and documenting the public humiliation of Ira Ringold in I Married A Communist, Philip Roth consummates his trilogy of in ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Roth in a hard place

    The Human Stain Philip Roth Jonathan Cape £16.99, pp368 Indian summers don't come much more blazing than the surge in Philip Roth's literary production that stretches from Sabbath's Theater in 1995 at least as far as the last pages of this new novel. ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

6 Reviews

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  • 1 person find this helpful

    A masterpiece. Wonderful.

    To read my entry in Spanish about this book, click on the following link: http://lunairereadings.blogspot.com/2012/03/human-stain…
    This book is the story of Coleman Silk; a prestigious professor who at the end of his life (72) is having an affair with a 34 year-old knockout girl. Sil ... (continue)

    To read my entry in Spanish about this book, click on the following link: http://lunairereadings.blogspot.com/2012/03/human-stain…
    This book is the story of Coleman Silk; a prestigious professor who at the end of his life (72) is having an affair with a 34 year-old knockout girl. Silk has been recently widowed and has retired himself from academic work because he was accused of being a racist. He called two students "spooks", meaning "ghosts", but Silk's enemies researched other convoluted meanings for the word, and found another meaning: "nigger". He had a lot of enemies because he was the dean of the faculty, and no dean has a lot of friends if they want to keep good academic quality under budget. The paradox is that Coleman silk, despite his green eyes and his white skin is in reality a black man himself. He comes from an African-American family, and he has been keeping that a secret because he was raised in the 1940-s, the most terrible years or segregation and racism.

    What I loved about this novel is the way the author has to explain the situation and the psychology of the characters. He is able to speak with so many voices, and in so many tones, that reading his book is like going to the real world and seeing the characters live and talk. He is a creator and he can blow life into his character's skins. This book gave me great pleasure while I was reading it, and in the same time it taught me a lot of new words and styles of writing and talking. I thank the author for that. I think that is the valuable part of the relationship between a reader and an author.

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    ariadna73 said on Mar 8, 2012 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

  • 1 person find this helpful

    One of my favourite book

    I recommend this book, i think it's the best book of p. roth

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    Emiliux said on Aug 23, 2007 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • Beautiful but frustrating.

    At times this book was breathtakingly beautiful. His writing is sublime, and the way the book changed from 1st person to 3rd person, and then from one character to another was done in such a way that you rarely saw it happen.
    However I did find myself wishing that he'd just get a move on occasionall ... (continue)

    At times this book was breathtakingly beautiful. His writing is sublime, and the way the book changed from 1st person to 3rd person, and then from one character to another was done in such a way that you rarely saw it happen.
    However I did find myself wishing that he'd just get a move on occasionally - sometimes moving the story on isn't necessarily a bad thing.
    On the whole I admired the book rather than enjoyed it, but I would recommend it for the beautiful writing.

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    Paul Arman said on Apr 18, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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