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ajkhn 's review for:
The Stone Face
by William Gardner Smith
A book I discovered through researching the 1961 police massacre of Algerians, I wasn't really expecting much. I figured it would be a neat little protest book, but that was really unfair of me: Smith does a really great job balancing and jostling all the very many victimhoods of the 20th century. All the racial hatreds, of Arabs, of Blacks, of Jews are shown in concert and conflicting in a way that's much more elegant than I'm making it sound.
So what you have is this beautiful fragment of life in the 1960s, particularly life in Paris for Black Americans. The book does a great job describing the willfull blindness of expatriates and the ways in which minorities are set off each other.
As a character-driven plot, The Stone Face isn't that great. There's not a ton of growth outside the main character, the well-named Simeon. There's not a ton of delicacy: all the men are manly men and all the women are beautiful.
What it does have is great scenery and an interesting message, displayed engagingly. It's more agitprop than novel. But man, it's really really good agitprop.
So what you have is this beautiful fragment of life in the 1960s, particularly life in Paris for Black Americans. The book does a great job describing the willfull blindness of expatriates and the ways in which minorities are set off each other.
As a character-driven plot, The Stone Face isn't that great. There's not a ton of growth outside the main character, the well-named Simeon. There's not a ton of delicacy: all the men are manly men and all the women are beautiful.
What it does have is great scenery and an interesting message, displayed engagingly. It's more agitprop than novel. But man, it's really really good agitprop.