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The Human Stain (The American Trilogy #3)

3.77 of 5 stars 3.77 · rating details · 14,340 ratings · 1,001 reviews

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 astonish his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, o...more

Paperback, First Vintage International Edition, 361 pages

Published May 8th 2001 by Vintage International (first published 2000)

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Nov 14, 2011 Paul marked it as assorted-rants-about-stuff · review of another edition

So I watched the movie, and I really shouldn't have. To quote Pope Pius VII, it sometimes makes you wonder if you're on the right planet. Anthony Hopkins plays an extremely white black man! And the ever-crushingly beautiful Nicole Kidman plays an illiterate woman who's a janitor! Yes! And we're supposed to take this seriously! And the actor who plays the young Anthony Hopkins looks absolutely nothing like him! It's so insane. I believe they take a lot of drugs in Hollywood, and this movie appear...more

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Aug 10, 2007 Lee rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

oh, phillip roth! you CARD. you IMP. no one makes me laugh like you.

around this time last year i was on vacation on the cape reading american pastoral, another roth novella of fun and good humor! (read brinda's perfect description for an idea of that one.) i ended up forgetting the book there, with about forty pages left to read, and i never bought a new copy. i didn't care that i hadn't finished it because I WAS SO EXHAUSTED. the book wasn't bad. the book was great. but reading a roth opus is...more oh, phillip roth! you CARD. you IMP. no one makes me laugh like you.

around this time last year i was on vacation on the cape reading american pastoral, another roth novella of fun and good humor! (read brinda's perfect description for an idea of that one.) i ended up forgetting the book there, with about forty pages left to read, and i never bought a new copy. i didn't care that i hadn't finished it because I WAS SO EXHAUSTED. the book wasn't bad. the book was great. but reading a roth opus is sort of like being in an abusive relationship, at least in my warped imagination. it seduces you with its seeming simplicity, its effortless brilliance. but it's so often cold, manipulative! but so interesting, so unlike anything you've ever read before. and then it BEATS YOU CEASELESSLY OVER THE HEAD WITH ITS UNRELENTING DARKNESS AND TRAGIC HUMANITY. sort of like that.

in a major "groundhog day" moment i found myself on the cape THIS year with the human stain, which is no departure for roth. this time around, however, i finished it and lived to tell the tale.

roth chooses, it seems, to tell the story of the seedy underbelly of ALL OF AMERICA. you know, something light and fun for the beach. but he does it beautifully and without pretense or haughtiness, which i think is his biggest accomplishment. parts of the human stain left me wishing roth had chosen to continue to focus on the jewish american experience, and not tackle issues of race in america. however, he successfully writes about race in new jersey (no one creates a sense of place quite like roth does with new jersey). he also brilliantly uses the ever-annoying character of delphine roux to reveal the small-minded mob mentality of private academia.

as great as this book was, it left me yearning for goodbye, columbus, both the novella and the collection of the same name that contains it. the former proves that roth was not always so very serious, not always the self-appointed biographer of the american psyche. he's capable of being simultaneously funny AND undeniably relevant. for me, it's not only more entertaining but thankfully less emotionally athletic.
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Sep 03, 2007 Katie Lynch rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: not really anyone

Shelves: yuck

Hey Roth, I know you have a great vocabulary...Just tell me a damn story.

Let me explain: I just read a very positive review of this book stating that Roth has such an expansive vocabulary, and every word seems painstakingly chosen, etc. That is exactly what I hate about this book! A narrative is supposed to flow, not make you resolve to study the dictionary more fastidiously.

For the record, I have a pretty good vocabulary and I thorouoghly enjoy creative uses of the English language. But I des...more

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Nov 06, 2012 Paula rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The author sums it up perfectly on page 81
"You area a verbal master of extroadinary loquatiousness[P. Roth]. So Perspicatios. So fluent. A vocal master of the endless, ostentatious overelaborate sentence."

Yup.

This book is the ellswoth-kelly of our literary time. I got news for you, the emperor is naked. Just like some dope spent a million dollars for red circle on white canvas then his blunder perpetuates when MOMA hangs it in the gallery next to Monet's water lillies with a page long descripti...more

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Dec 08, 2011 Jeremy added it

Shelves: american-fiction

This is extremely well written, the characters, the narration, the dialogue, they all have this very thoughtful, measured quality that makes the whole thing seem incredibly believable. Yet the human stain feels, somehow, not exaclty dated, but maybe just too much of its time. The way it touches upon the fallout from the Lewinsky scandal and the often asinine identity politics of 90's academia struck me as just too concerned with the sort of petty moral dramas that seem almost laughable in light...more

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Apr 16, 2008 Kevin Quinley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-for-school, thought-provoking

Set in the fateful summer of '98, the Lewinski scandal sets the backdrop for Roth's provocative exploration of the conflict between unbridled individualism and social conformity. This friction manifests most obviously in race, epitomized by Coleman Silk's decision to subvert his ancestry and pass as a white Jew, an effort to avoid characterization as part of the larger 'we' associated with his black identity. Roth is careful to extend the notion of 'stain' beyond race, Les the embodiment of hist...more

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Nov 15, 2007 Katie Abbott Harris rated it 3 of 5 stars

This novel was disappointing - I expected much more from it. The story details the life of an African American college professor who has been "passing" as white since he was in his late teens. He hid this fact from everyone he knew, including his wife and children. His secret begins to unravel when he refers to two absent students as "spooks." Because the students are black, the remark is deemed racist, when he had actually intended the word to mean "ghosts." The writing is extremely dull and ra...more

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Jun 19, 2007 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: writers

THINGS I LIKED ABOUT The Human Stain
1. The amazing language. Philip Roth has such an amazing vocabulary, first off. Every word he uses seems painstakingly chosen and every sentence carefully constructed. Honestly, the writing itself is what kept me interested.
2. The idea of the educational playing field being decimated by politics. My favorite sections of the book were the few scenes that took place on campus.
3. I liked the parallels between Coleman and Clinton. Very clever. The title alone gave...more

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Oct 08, 2012 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american, favorites

How does he do it? The last book of the American Trilogy doesn't disappoint. I was sucked in pretty early and held captive by all of the beautifully written and insightful words. There were times when I was hideously laughing, hysterically cackling, but not from the humor. This is the laughter one blurts out in the face of danger and disgust. The kind of laughter you might remember emitting at your grandmother's funeral, or the snickering you let out in front of the bully that was poised to kick...more

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Jul 07, 2008 Vincent Saint-Simon rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Post-modern hipsters

Mr. Roth,

Your banal prose and elementary gimmicks do nothing to endear yourself to me, sir. If, in the future, a thought flies into your head and you would like to put it down on paper, I would first suggest that you hide or burn every John Updike novel you've been petting to sleep each night, get yourself a fistful of fresh adjectives, and wipe your nose. Far too much of you gets onto the page, sir, and none of it is to your credit.

Many people are impressed because you wrote American Pastoral....more

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May 14, 2013 Claudia Putnam rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction

This is one of the best books I've ever read, or that's how I feel about it right now.

I've put off reading Roth for a long time. No real defense; guess I just thought it was going to be a lot of neurosis. I can't stand neurotic men going on and on. But if the others are like that, this one is not.

The first pages were a bit rough, as our author narrator seems a bit long-winded and long-sentenced, in ways he is not later on, so I'm not sure Roth chose this style initially, or why his editors all...more This is one of the best books I've ever read, or that's how I feel about it right now.

I've put off reading Roth for a long time. No real defense; guess I just thought it was going to be a lot of neurosis. I can't stand neurotic men going on and on. But if the others are like that, this one is not.

The first pages were a bit rough, as our author narrator seems a bit long-winded and long-sentenced, in ways he is not later on, so I'm not sure Roth chose this style initially, or why his editors allowed it. Look, people are tired at the end of the day, which is when most of us read. We're not sitting on porch swings with books in our hands. We're decompressing after a long, rotten day staring at computers, we've had a couple of glasses of wine, maybe taken an Ambien, and the page is a bit blurry. So don't hack up a hairball like this:

"...William F. Buckley wrote, 'When Abelard did it, it was possible to prevent its happening again," insinuating that the president's malfeasance--what Buckley elsewhere called Clinton's 'incontinent carnality'--might best be remedied with nothing so bloodless as impeachment but, rather, by the twelfth-century punishment meted out to Canon Abelard by the knife-wielding associates of Abelard's ecclesiastical colleague, Canon Fulbert, for Abelard's secret seduction of and marriage to Fulbert's niece, the virgin Heloise. Unlike Khomeini's fatwa condemning to death Salman Rushdie, Buckley's wistful longing for the corrective retribution of castration..."

Dude. Why can't you just say: William F. Buckley went as far as to imply that Clinton should be castrated?

History lessons have their places in certain novels, but this Abelard/Fulton/Heloise thing doesn't sound interesting at all. I wasn't once tempted to Google and find out more about it.

But a few pages on this whole voice drops away, and the novel becomes vivid, engaging, compassionate, grounded in the local and clearly connected to the societal. Often I read some author and I think, Oh, I can see how s/he does it. I might one day be this good, or I can incorporate this or that element into my own writing. But this guy? I'll never touch him.

I did wish that one string had been tied up at the end. There's a point where the man we're told is responsible for the deaths of two major characters is taken away to a locked ward. I'd like to see how the authorities came to know he was guilty, if they did, if this wasn't the author's (the narrator is an author) imagination.

And I wasn't sure I liked all of the final scene between that man/villain and the author character. Roth's hand didn't feel quite as sure to me there.

Just a quibble. I got the book from the library, but I'll be buying a treasured copy. (less)

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Jul 23, 2011 Alex rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The "human *spot*" by Philip Roth
My reading interest has caught
By very strange, to my mind, plot,
To be described below in one shot
Afro-American smart and ambitious male, while in his youth,
Decided to conceal (for the career sake) the veritable truth,
About whom he really was at very moment of his birth
When naked he has come to be, on this quite sinful earthly planet Earth
Being by complexion to appear white with fairly light skin,
Decided he to claim that he belongs to ancient Jewish kin
He lived...more

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Mar 22, 2010 K.D. Oliveros rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Shelves: 1001-core

New Jersey. 1940's to 1998. The main protagonist is a 71-year old former boxing champion and Athena's dean of faculty, Coleman Silk. He was dismissed from the university, called Athena because he referred, though innocently, the two absent black students as "spooks." Prior to his dismissal, he was having an affair with Faunin Farley, a 34-year old janitress of the school.

This 2000 novel of Philip Roth won the PEN/Faulkner Award and said to be the best novel he has written. This is my 3rd book b...more New Jersey. 1940's to 1998. The main protagonist is a 71-year old former boxing champion and Athena's dean of faculty, Coleman Silk. He was dismissed from the university, called Athena because he referred, though innocently, the two absent black students as "spooks." Prior to his dismissal, he was having an affair with Faunin Farley, a 34-year old janitress of the school.

This 2000 novel of Philip Roth won the PEN/Faulkner Award and said to be the best novel he has written. This is my 3rd book by Mr. Roth. Many years back, I read his Letting Go and last year his Pulitzer-award winning book, The American Pastoral. I like the latter better than this one. In American, he is more focused on the Levov family particularly the relationship between Seymour Levov and her daughter who became a terrorist. In this novel, The Human Stain although the main character is Coleman, Mr. Roth took the trouble of giving life to all the people that have relationship with him. From his great grandparents, grandparents, wife, children, girlfriends, the husband of his mistress, his co-teachers, his protegee, his lawyer, the parents of his son's classmate and of course the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman. You may say that this is part of what I say I like: a novel with the characters going old. That is true but not in a way where all the little details of these secondary characters be covered. Not in a way with seemingly what I would like to say as "verbal diarrhea" where at times, I would like to just scan the page and look at main phrases just to follow what is happening. Mr. Roth just keeps on going. Not bad though, because he has a wide and impressive vocabulary so some people might actually like it.

On the positive side, this novel has a very powerful message: the importance of human stain or imprinting. This can be compared to life paradigms or mind conditioning. In the story, Coleman was accused of being a racist when in fact he is a "closet" black (he is white but he has black as a recessive gene which means he can have black children or grandchildren even if he marries a white woman). Even prior to his death, he chose not to disclose this secret to his children or friends except to his mistress who died with him in a car accident. During his younger years, he tried to tell his family about this but in the 1940's in New Jersey, people still practiced segregation of white and black people. Also, there was that incident when his wife Iris had to support her friend who just found out that her husband had another family.

There are many other lessons that one can take away from this 361-page novel. One of my favorites was when Mark Silk, the troubled son of Coleman read a Jewish prayer before his father was put to rest. He cried and cried after saying the prayer and regretted not giving the respect and time to his father when he was still alive. Through Mr. Zuckerman, Mr. Roth says: Mark Silk apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever. What a waste.

If this can be shortened to a more reasonable length, I would agree that this could be Mr. Roth's best novel. However, as one of the blurbs seems to hint, in this novel, Mr. Roth seemed to have matured as a novelist as he has learned and tried to incorporate the realizations and experiences that he had in this previous works. Maybe that is the reason why this novel although definitely with excess and excessive words, is still something that I enjoyed and learned a lot from.

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Dec 12, 2008 Heidi rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, own-hardback, living-room, written-review

So I read this book because I hadn't opened the covers of a Philip Roth novel since "Goodbye Columbus" (and that was more in homage to the film with Ali McGraw and Richard Benjamin) and decided it was time to punch this ticket. I have to admit I found the experience excrutiating. It was well written, at times fascinating, but there really wasn't a moment when I didn't want the experience to be OVER. It was like hearing nails scratching on the blackboard. One angry rant after another. Everybody i...more

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Jul 15, 2008 David Rim rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: last5

Looking for a book to read in the airport in Mexico, I see a small book store with a tiny shelf of english novels. On this shelf are some Danielle Steels, Harry Potters and Dean Koontz'es. I move a few around, a little disappointed, and also (not for the first time on this trip) ashamed of being American. I see a Philip Roth book (another Zuckerman? really?) Yes, the "Human Stain."

So I reluctantly make my purchase, read for awhile, get back to the gate and my friend asks "Human Stain? So...."

"...more

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Nov 12, 2007 Michelle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So I've given this five stars not because I was particularly blown away by the story, and not because Philip Roth is incredibly smart with a great vocabulary, because I wasn't that amazed by that either really. I just really appreciate how Mr. Roth has created these characters, how indepth he got, showing their incredibly human imperfections. The part that really made me think, Oh gracious, she's a person and she's scared and she's really messed up now, was when Delphine claimed Coleman broke in...more

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Sep 25, 2007 Darcy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: twentieth-century-novels

[warning: spoiler!]

The thing that attracts me about this novel is quite simply how it is told. The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is also a character (albeit a relatively minor one although he grows in importance as the story continues). He is not, therefore, omniscient, although this becomes easy to forget. The novel is written as though he were omniscient, and then draws attention to this gap repeatedly at moments where Zuckerman explains who told him what, how he knows certain bits of informatio...more [warning: spoiler!]

The thing that attracts me about this novel is quite simply how it is told. The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is also a character (albeit a relatively minor one although he grows in importance as the story continues). He is not, therefore, omniscient, although this becomes easy to forget. The novel is written as though he were omniscient, and then draws attention to this gap repeatedly at moments where Zuckerman explains who told him what, how he knows certain bits of information, and when he found out about specific details. This slippage isn't accidental. Roth handles the narrative very delicately, repeatedly setting the readers up to prejudge a character before we met him or her. As a result, we find ourselves constantly reevaluating the various people in the novel--attempting to decide over and over again what type of people they are. This is, of course, Roth's point about Coleman Silk--he lives his life as a white man (which is how the reader meets him) only for us to discover that he is black. And we are suddenly forced to rethink our first assessment of him and of our own prejudices and definitions of race and racial identity.

Silk is the most prominent figure in the novel and the one who absorbs most of the reader's focus. When we first meet him he rages constantly about his unfair treatment at the college. As Dean Silk, Coleman was responsible for culling the faculty--getting rid of the deadwood professors and bringing in new staff to reignite the college. He's tough, but respectable. He's a classy guy--adept at making ancient Greek literature seem alive and resonant, even for bored undergraduates. Then he is unfairly accused of being racist and Coleman Silk finds himself friendless and alone.

Much later in the novel, we get the same events, retold through the perspective of Delphine Roux, one of Silk's former colleagues. A Yale graduate, Delphine arrives at Athena College only reluctantly, seeing it as a stepping stone to launch her into a position at one of the ivy leagues. Needless to say, she and Coleman don't get along. They disagree on just about everything, including how literature should be taught and discussed. It is from Delphine's perspective that we learn Silk has little patience for some of his students. When a female student complains that the plays he assigns are degrading to women, Silk responds to Delphine:

"Providing the most naive of readers with a feminist perspective on Euripides is one of the best ways you could devise to close down their thinking before it's even had a chance to begin to demolish a single one of their brainless 'likes'."

This type of switch occurs endlessly in the novel--our expectations of one character are torn away as we switch perspectives and see through the eyes of another. The result is a novel that seemingly lacks a core--a clear narrative thread upon which we can depend. Here, even Nathan Zuckerman's voice is suspect (or perhaps his voice is the most suspect)--there is no authority, there is no single narrative, and there is no reliable account of events. This is a narrative that constantly tempts us, as readers, to draw metaphorical lines in the sand--he's wrong, she's right (Silk is a bastard, Silk is misunderstood)--and yet repeatedly makes this impossible.

For me Roth seems to be questioning, at the very least, what we want out of our literature--characters who are cut and dried, good or bad, about whom it is easy to make a judgment and easy to decide if they've acted correctly or incorrectly. A perfect counterweight here would be Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Or, perhaps another way of thinking about it--Roth is forcing us to question why we read literature--do we want that authorial narrative voice that we lack in our daily lives?(less)

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Mar 20, 2008 Martin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008books, favorites

This is just an incredibly written book. The first Philip Roth novel I read was "American Pastoral," and I remember thinking as I read it that I was consciously aware of how beautiful the writing was. Not the subject matter or anything, but the simple arrangement, placement, sequence, and flow of the words on the page. I cannot remember a book before I read "American Pastoral" that so swept me away with the language and dexterity of prose, simultaneously gripped by reading and yet with a part of...more

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Feb 20, 2009 Leslie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

When I started this book, I didn't really know anything about Philip Roth or his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. This is possibly the most peculiar book I've ever read. I'd never read a book in first person where the main character wasn't the narrator.
I usually give a book forty pages or so before giving up on it, and it took me those entire forty pages to get into it, but it was worth it. It wasn't an easy read and it took me over a month, but I'm glad I got through it. It wasn't an uplifting book...more

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Dec 27, 2007 Shana rated it 4 of 5 stars

I always meant to read some Philip Roth, but I imagined him as the sort of uber-masculine, perhaps even sexist, writer who would turn me off. I was wrong. I deeply enjoyed this book, even though there were some parts that some people might think of as sexist. (The Monica Lewinski bit, for example.)

In fact, this book made me realize that some of my favorite writers--Kundera, for example--are masculine types accused of being sexist. This is perhaps odd considering that I have never, ever had a pro...more

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Dec 30, 2007 Jackie rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was just awful. I either threw it out or gave it away (hopefully to someone I don't like). I picked up it up because was a great idea for a story--unfortunately, Roth spends so much time showing off his prowess with language that he never gets around to telling it. I felt somewhat the same way about John Banville's The Sea--it was so beautifully written I had to (somewhat) excuse the fact that it was frankly boring--but the difference between that and the Human Stain was that Roth's wr...more

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Aug 02, 2007 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-fiction

The scope of this novel is amazing. Roth is a very skilled character author. He can really put you inside a character's world and perspective. Here, Roth explores "big topics" (truth, justice, human nature, etc.) and frames his exploration within different characteristics of the US sociocultural psyche, where each character represents one aspect of that psyche. So cool. Since reading "Everyman," though, I've decided that I like Roth best when he's more focused. I found myself just not caring abo...more

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Apr 09, 2009 Debbie Robson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For sheer power of narrative Philip Roth is exceptional. I don't think I've read a writer, since I read William Styron's novels many years ago, that literally picks you up by the scruff of the neck and drags you along. You can kick and scream against the intensity and speed that you are travelling but somehow you just can't put the book down. This is an amazing look at the ridiculous, hypocritical society that is small town America, brilliantly done. Thank you, Cat. I hope to read Deception soon...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Ariadna73 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature

To read my entry in Spanish about this book; click on the following link: http://lunairereadings.blogspot.com/2...
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...more

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Jan 22, 2012 Artemisia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Se la mente ha un corpo, se esiste una modalità fisica attraverso cui leggere un autore cerebrale come Roth, se esiste davvero qualcosa del genere, beh, io credo che sia l'unico modo giusto per affrontare le sue storie ed uscirne, se non indenni, almeno sulle proprie gambe. Ho fatto l'errore di pretendere di proteggermi da lui: la mia lettura era macchiata da pregiudizi che mi ero fatta leggendo commenti un po' ovunque. Credevo di conoscerlo già ancora prima di prendere lo scontrino in libreria....more

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Dec 31, 2008 Mark rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Philip Roth appears to be a decent writer and I'm going to trying reading something else by him, but unfortunately after a good start this book makes a sudden postmodernist turn and disappears up its own backside.

We start out thinking this is a book about the relationships and secrets of four people surrounding a New England college. Then after a third of the way into the book, surprise, this is actually a book about a fifth character who is writing about the other four characters. Except the fi...more

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Dec 06, 2008 Aaron rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If “Election” perfectly captured the “why me worry?” side of post-Reagan Washington, “The Human Stain” was a snapshot of the ultimate outcome of the Culture Wars playing out between the New Right and the remnants of the New Left. Unlike Roth’s other political works, there is something approaching nihilism at the end of this work; the systems destroy people, but those individuals are not tragic heroes brought low by their goodness, or even their idealism, they are simply victims of human choice (...more

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May 01, 2013 Krystal Vittles rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Roth at his best. Truly. A book like this reminds you of the awesome power of a well written book. After trudging through a quagmire of mediocrity I came across this wonderful book and fell in love with it.

Coleman Silk has a secret. I don't intend on giving it away here, but rest assured, it's a biggie. One, if discovered, would change his life as a moderately successful, ageing Classics professor at a New England university beyond all recognition. Roth, rather cleverly doesn't use this secret a...more Roth at his best. Truly. A book like this reminds you of the awesome power of a well written book. After trudging through a quagmire of mediocrity I came across this wonderful book and fell in love with it.

Coleman Silk has a secret. I don't intend on giving it away here, but rest assured, it's a biggie. One, if discovered, would change his life as a moderately successful, ageing Classics professor at a New England university beyond all recognition. Roth, rather cleverly doesn't use this secret as the device which rips Silk's life apart. Rather he uses it as a tool of redemption which could, if he allowed it, piece back his fragmented existence and bring about a nice sense of justice. However, Roth being the tortured artist that he is doesn't believe that life can be wrapped up so easily and doesn't allow for an easy conclusion which would tempt many an author. What he does do is allow events to run naturally and let the story develop like it would in the real world. Roth's use as Zuckerman as the narrator of this story was excellent as he could be used as a means of balancing thought and opinion of other characters without looking to preachy.

The only criticism I could level at this book would be his skewed perception of women (common to many of this books). In Roth's world women are not nearly as finely nucanced as men and tend to encapsulate many negative personality traits. I wouldn't go so far as calling his work as outright mysoginistic, but there are definite shades of it.

Also, his continual need to reflect the American zeitgeist at the time of the Clinton Impeachment through his moral reflections on the sexual politics in the novel did sometimes become a little trying. However, if you're going to pass commentary on the sexual double standards of America why not use this significant event of modern history to make your point? It may have been a laboured point from Roth, but it was pertinent.

All pretention aside, a thoroughly enjoyable read and probably the best place to start if you're new to Roth.(less)

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Apr 11, 2013 soul is currently reading it · review of another edition

Харесвам много Филип Рот, но въпреки това ще чета тази книга вероятно до следпенсионна възраст. Не защото е скучна или зле написана (дори напротив) или защото историята ми е добре позната от филма. Причината е, че Алтера са я издали сякаш не за читателите, а в подкрепа на българските офталмолози:
"До последната страница на "Човешкото петно" стигни
и (по-силни/нови) очила си заслужи!"
За 21 лв. биваше да се отпуснат с още малко хартия, вместо да отпечатват книгата с най-ситния си възможен шрифт (е...more Харесвам много Филип Рот, но въпреки това ще чета тази книга вероятно до следпенсионна възраст. Не защото е скучна или зле написана (дори напротив) или защото историята ми е добре позната от филма. Причината е, че Алтера са я издали сякаш не за читателите, а в подкрепа на българските офталмолози:
"До последната страница на "Човешкото петно" стигни
и (по-силни/нови) очила си заслужи!"
За 21 лв. биваше да се отпуснат с още малко хартия, вместо да отпечатват книгата с най-ситния си възможен шрифт (еднакъв с този на бележките под линия), взирането в който предизвиква обилно сълзене.

Още по-обилно става сълзенето, когато човек зачете малко по-внимателно. Нямам представа от Рот в оригинал, сигурно е много труден за превод и може би заради това почти всяка от преведените му у нас книги или е носител на наградата "Кръстан Дянков" (тази например), или е била номинирана за нея. И от критериите на журито също нямам представа, но това е втори случай, втора книга на Рот (първата за щастие си остана само с номинацията), в която катастрофирам в нелепици.
* Повишението (в колежа) си е повишение, а не промоция, макар на английски и двете думи да се изписват еднакво - promotion (има си контекст при такава многозначност все пак ...).
* "...ми казваше да се кача на колата..." (която не е нито кон, нито самолет, затова качването е в нея)
* А "...талантливата ми колега, която писала...", повторено няколко пъти, ме остави безсловесна. Наистина новият ни правописен речник разреши едва миналата година (т.е. 4 години след превода) на колегата да бъде и колежка, но думата в женски род е отдавна приета в обращение и най-вече - звучи много повече на български език.
(и това е само от първите двайсетина страници!)
Голямото ми желание ми да изчета всичко възможно на Филип Рот победи в дългогодишната борба дали да си купя книгата или не, предвид отдавна известните слабости на родното издание. Тръпна какво ли още ме очаква до последната страница ... (less)

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Apr 02, 2013 Mariam Odent rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was reading this while reading A Note of Music and wow, what a stylistic contrast. While Lehmann is quiet, subdued and simple, Roth's authorial voice is brash and quick. At times it feels like a rant against America. For a guy who won a lot of awards, there's nothing dull about his writing. I was pretty harsh with the book when I finished it, but I think I misunderstood a major element of the book where the main character is interracial (I thought he was 100% Jewish, not half black and half Je...more

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About Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint, and has continued to write critically-acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and inc...more

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