A book that I picked up for a
small donation from 1LoveCommunity in Canary Wharf – absolutely lovely place
and a really, really, really good book. I saw the cinematic version of The Human Stain when I was still a
teenager trying to woo my high-school crush with my intellectual profile. I
thought the movie was average at best, and so was the high-school crush at the
time.
The novel is objectively a
very easy sell with me: an odd kind of “campus novel”, written by one of the
greatest American Jewish writers of the 20th century, with a fair
bit of racial problems, Vietnam, family violence and mysterious pasts. It also
has a lot of sex. Actually, a bit too much of that and of related
overconfidence (or overcompensation?).
The Human Stain is probably as good an “American” novel as American Pastoral. At times Dean Silk appears a bit too eloquent
and articulate, but then again he probably wouldn’t have been able to live a
life like his without exceptional intellectual dexterity. The one thing that
bothers me, though, is that I couldn’t picture Faunia as anyone other than
Nicole Kidman (the actress who portrayed her in the movie) and I really don’t
think she should have had her face.
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