A Clergyman’s Daughter – George Orwell

Another step in my quest to read all of Orwell’s novels (not because I love him or because they’re many, but because I have, well, his “complete novels”).

Orwell himself seems to have disliked A Clergyman’s Daughter, written at a time of financial difficulties and little literary inspiration. Oddly enough, I didn’t dislike it – compared to the dullness of Keep the Aspidistra Flying this was a welcome journey of self-discovery, and I did enjoy the writing (except for the chapter set in Trafalgar Square, the only one the author apparently found worth something).

This is not to say that I particularly liked the book though – I kept on thinking how (literally) miserable the hop pickers were compared to the peach pickers of Grapes of Wrath, and attacks on Christianity (despite my remarkable distance from it!) normally bore me to death, as in this case.  

The Human Stain – Philip Roth

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 20^th 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.