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The Stone Face
A roman à clef about racism, identity, and bohemian living amidst the tensions and violence of Algerian War-era France, and one of the earliest published accounts of the Paris massacre of 1961.
As a teenager, Simeon Brown lost an eye in a racist attack, and this young African American journalist has lived in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension ever since. After a violent encounter with white sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with Hossein, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where his true loyalties lie.
As a teenager, Simeon Brown lost an eye in a racist attack, and this young African American journalist has lived in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension ever since. After a violent encounter with white sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with Hossein, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where his true loyalties lie.
214 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1963
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About the author
William Gardner Smith
12 books28 followersWilliam Gardner Smith was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry. His third book, South Street, is considered to be one of the first black militant protest novels. Smith's last published novel, The Stone Face, in its account of the Paris massacre of 1961, "stand[s] as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s".
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December 15, 2021This is a fast-paced novel, surprisingly so because not a lot happens. It's the story of Simeon Brown, an African-American man (from my neck of the woods) who moves to France in the 1960s. He is treated without racism there, though he remains on edge about it. Instead he finds the French treating Algerians as African-Americans were treated in America.
The flashbacks to the hatred he faced in America are extreme. Simeon wears an eye patch to cover the absent eye, carved out in a racist attack. The "Stone Face" of the title is the face of hatred on his attacker. And later the cops who beat him. And the shouting faces screaming at the young girls walking a gauntlet to integration. It's a face he's painting, in the abstract, on a canvas in his room. But it's also the face of Frenchmen, coldly transferring their hatred to the Algerians among them. It is the time of the Algerian War and the shift in Simeon's focus shows one stone face to be like any other.
A reader will necessarily have to confront his own thinking about race as he reads this book. An old school liberal, taught to be color-blind, I do not applaud the recent efforts (mostly educational ones) that seem to divide us even further. That said, I know that there are things I do not understand. There is a slice of dialogue between Simeon and his Polish girlfriend that I think speaks to that:
She frowned, looking toward the street. "I don't understand it. I read some things about it, you know, what happens there with the race problem. But I don't understand it. Is it really so terrible, still?"
"You mean, do they chase black men down the streets of Philadelphia and New York with lynch ropes? No. And in an ordinary day, nothing striking happens, people don't even notice you on the street. But a hundred tiny things happen--micro-particles, nobody can see them but us. And there's always the danger that something bigger will happen. The Beast in the Jungle, you're always tense, waiting for it to spring. It's terrible, yes. And, we want to breath air, we don't want to think about the race business twenty-four hours a day. We don't want our noses pushed down in it for the seventy-odd years of our lives. But you have to keep thinking about it; they force you to think about it all the time."
The Polish girlfriend, by the way, is a fascinating character, and I suspect perhaps a key to understanding this work. She too has eye issues, although hers are genetic. A looming operation may help, or render her blind. She will act in her own self-interest, but kindly. And she offers this, what she sees: Why ruin things by defining them?
Maybe the author wanted this to be eye-opening.
Anyway, this caused ruminations, if not solutions, and I'm the better for it. But that's not why I read it. I read it as a softening-up for the next one: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.
The flashbacks to the hatred he faced in America are extreme. Simeon wears an eye patch to cover the absent eye, carved out in a racist attack. The "Stone Face" of the title is the face of hatred on his attacker. And later the cops who beat him. And the shouting faces screaming at the young girls walking a gauntlet to integration. It's a face he's painting, in the abstract, on a canvas in his room. But it's also the face of Frenchmen, coldly transferring their hatred to the Algerians among them. It is the time of the Algerian War and the shift in Simeon's focus shows one stone face to be like any other.
A reader will necessarily have to confront his own thinking about race as he reads this book. An old school liberal, taught to be color-blind, I do not applaud the recent efforts (mostly educational ones) that seem to divide us even further. That said, I know that there are things I do not understand. There is a slice of dialogue between Simeon and his Polish girlfriend that I think speaks to that:
She frowned, looking toward the street. "I don't understand it. I read some things about it, you know, what happens there with the race problem. But I don't understand it. Is it really so terrible, still?"
"You mean, do they chase black men down the streets of Philadelphia and New York with lynch ropes? No. And in an ordinary day, nothing striking happens, people don't even notice you on the street. But a hundred tiny things happen--micro-particles, nobody can see them but us. And there's always the danger that something bigger will happen. The Beast in the Jungle, you're always tense, waiting for it to spring. It's terrible, yes. And, we want to breath air, we don't want to think about the race business twenty-four hours a day. We don't want our noses pushed down in it for the seventy-odd years of our lives. But you have to keep thinking about it; they force you to think about it all the time."
The Polish girlfriend, by the way, is a fascinating character, and I suspect perhaps a key to understanding this work. She too has eye issues, although hers are genetic. A looming operation may help, or render her blind. She will act in her own self-interest, but kindly. And she offers this, what she sees: Why ruin things by defining them?
Maybe the author wanted this to be eye-opening.
Anyway, this caused ruminations, if not solutions, and I'm the better for it. But that's not why I read it. I read it as a softening-up for the next one: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.
November 28, 2015
Read for English 4850: Literature in Context
I can't believe that this book is out of print. It was a good read-very enlightening. I mainly enjoyed learning about The Algerian War that took place between France and Algeria during the late 1950s to early 1960s. The brutality that the Algerians faced at the hand of the French was outrageous. I had no idea.
The story is from the POV of an African American man that moves to France to escape the racism that he has faced in the states. At first France appears to be an almost utopian society. Simeon, the main character, is treated as an equal in France. He meets other refugees from the states and feels at home in France. That is until he learns about the struggle for freedom that the Algerians are facing. The ending of the book was brutal. Every country has its black spot in history and this was certainly France's.
I can't believe that this book is out of print. It was a good read-very enlightening. I mainly enjoyed learning about The Algerian War that took place between France and Algeria during the late 1950s to early 1960s. The brutality that the Algerians faced at the hand of the French was outrageous. I had no idea.
The story is from the POV of an African American man that moves to France to escape the racism that he has faced in the states. At first France appears to be an almost utopian society. Simeon, the main character, is treated as an equal in France. He meets other refugees from the states and feels at home in France. That is until he learns about the struggle for freedom that the Algerians are facing. The ending of the book was brutal. Every country has its black spot in history and this was certainly France's.
December 15, 2015
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.
July 25, 2021
The Stone Face is a flawed novel, one which would have moved me if I had read it thirty years ago, as a novel examining the milieu of black expats in the Paris of the early 1960s, the role of the exile--yet one padded by the influence of hard currency, it is a narrative exploration of racism, the treatment of Algerians in France, one torn by the infallible calculus of relativism, so it isn't a surprise that we have a Holocaust survivor, and a few disguised portraits of the Parisian African-American community including Chester Himes.
The novel is episodic and extreme. There isn't just a flashback to poverty and brutality, but that the protagonist loses an eye. He doesn't just empathize with the daily struggle of the Algerians, indeed he hears of their being genitally mutilated and personally witnesses their being beaten to death. It is a frustrated fiction but one in earnest. The novel has a restlessness, but a confident one.
The novel is episodic and extreme. There isn't just a flashback to poverty and brutality, but that the protagonist loses an eye. He doesn't just empathize with the daily struggle of the Algerians, indeed he hears of their being genitally mutilated and personally witnesses their being beaten to death. It is a frustrated fiction but one in earnest. The novel has a restlessness, but a confident one.
December 19, 2022
Μόλις τελείωσα ένα σπουδαίο, σημαντικό, βιβλίο. Δεν είχε τίποτα καινούργιο, ήταν άλλωστε παλιό, του '63. Είχε, όμως, σημασία.
February 13, 2025
Γραμμένο πριν από 60 χρόνια χωρίς αυτό να προδίδεται πουθενά στο ύφος του, ο Smith περικυκλώνει το θέμα ρατσισμός και μας το παρουσιάζει από όλες τις πλευρές. Όλοι τελικά είναι ρατσιστές με κάποιον.
Ο λευκός με τον μαύρο, ο Γάλλος με τον Αλγερινό, ο Αλγερινός με τον Εβραίο και πάει λέγοντας.
Ο ρατσισμός είναι τόσο ύπουλα φυτεμένος μέσα μας που σε στιγμές ειλικρίνειας κάπου θα τον ξετρυπώσουμε κι εμείς.
Τολμηρό βιβλίο γραμμένο σε μια δυσκολη, πιο δύσκολη, εποχή γι αυτό το θέμα, ακουμπάει το θέμα των μαύρων στις ΗΠΑ και των Αλγερινών στη Γαλλία φτάνοντας και στη σφαγή 200 ανθρώπων στη διαδήλωση του 1961 στο Παρίσι.
Άγνωστο, μα διαμαντάκι.
Ο λευκός με τον μαύρο, ο Γάλλος με τον Αλγερινό, ο Αλγερινός με τον Εβραίο και πάει λέγοντας.
Ο ρατσισμός είναι τόσο ύπουλα φυτεμένος μέσα μας που σε στιγμές ειλικρίνειας κάπου θα τον ξετρυπώσουμε κι εμείς.
Τολμηρό βιβλίο γραμμένο σε μια δυσκολη, πιο δύσκολη, εποχή γι αυτό το θέμα, ακουμπάει το θέμα των μαύρων στις ΗΠΑ και των Αλγερινών στη Γαλλία φτάνοντας και στη σφαγή 200 ανθρώπων στη διαδήλωση του 1961 στο Παρίσι.
Άγνωστο, μα διαμαντάκι.
May 30, 2022
This book should have never gone out of print.
Smith's work counters the view of France as free of racism and examines the racism in the US at the same time.
Look, if you like James Baldwin, check this book out.
Smith's work counters the view of France as free of racism and examines the racism in the US at the same time.
Look, if you like James Baldwin, check this book out.
October 6, 2021
The Stone Face is a novel about racism. The stone face is racism itself and it's the face of individual racists who're portrayed in the novel. As you might expect, it's an ugly story, but it's compellingly told, a novel of discovering the world rather than the self.
Simeon Brown is a Black man in Philadelphia. He's a victim of America's particular brand of racism.
Victim, too, of the violence bred by such racism, he loses an eye in a rather casual attack on the city's streets. Perhaps aware of the anxiety-free lives led by such expatriate Blacks as James Wright and James Baldwin, he goes to live in Paris. There he finds acceptance as the man he is. He's often even considered white. And his relationship with the white woman Maria--who also suffers damaged vision--is okay within French society and especially welcomed in his circle of friends, who're mostly Algerian. But he can't escape racism. It's the time of the Algerian war for independence, and France's bigotry directed against its Algerian population has risen to the level of persecution. Another complication for Simeon is his growing awareness of the intolerance his Arab friends feel for Maria, a Jewish survivor of WWII's camps. Eventually he realizes he can't even escape American racism. He agonizes over the news from home of the Arkansas school integration crisis and of lunch counter sit-ins across the South. How he comes to terms with all this and learns how to confront racism is the arc of the novel. It's an ugly subject told through events which are sometimes predictable, but William Gardner Smith has written it with flashes of moral insight and beauty.
Simeon Brown is a Black man in Philadelphia. He's a victim of America's particular brand of racism.
Victim, too, of the violence bred by such racism, he loses an eye in a rather casual attack on the city's streets. Perhaps aware of the anxiety-free lives led by such expatriate Blacks as James Wright and James Baldwin, he goes to live in Paris. There he finds acceptance as the man he is. He's often even considered white. And his relationship with the white woman Maria--who also suffers damaged vision--is okay within French society and especially welcomed in his circle of friends, who're mostly Algerian. But he can't escape racism. It's the time of the Algerian war for independence, and France's bigotry directed against its Algerian population has risen to the level of persecution. Another complication for Simeon is his growing awareness of the intolerance his Arab friends feel for Maria, a Jewish survivor of WWII's camps. Eventually he realizes he can't even escape American racism. He agonizes over the news from home of the Arkansas school integration crisis and of lunch counter sit-ins across the South. How he comes to terms with all this and learns how to confront racism is the arc of the novel. It's an ugly subject told through events which are sometimes predictable, but William Gardner Smith has written it with flashes of moral insight and beauty.
May 4, 2016
This is one of my favorite books that I've read. Set in Paris during the Algerian War, its the story of an African American man who expatriates to France to escape the harsh racism of the United States. While he initially feels at ease with his decision, he begins to see how the French are treating the Algerians in Paris, and he begins to feel guilt about being there while African Americans are suffering in the United States.
Having spent the past Fall in Paris, I related a lot to Simeon and the way he felt about being in a place that was so distant from the things he would have been experiencing in the U.S., and I think that its something that any member of an oppressed group who spends time in a place away from that oppression can relate to this.
Also, if you've ever been to Paris, then this book is a great trip down memory lane. The details of the city are so vivid that I was taken right back to the Latin Quarter every time I opened this book.
Having spent the past Fall in Paris, I related a lot to Simeon and the way he felt about being in a place that was so distant from the things he would have been experiencing in the U.S., and I think that its something that any member of an oppressed group who spends time in a place away from that oppression can relate to this.
Also, if you've ever been to Paris, then this book is a great trip down memory lane. The details of the city are so vivid that I was taken right back to the Latin Quarter every time I opened this book.
January 8, 2022
Appeals: contemplative, anti-racist, critical of white supremacist culture, anti-status-quo, brutal, brooding, realistic
This 1963 novel, about a Black American expat in Paris, was never published in French because it depicts the brutality of the French towards the Algerians. According to the introduction by Adam Shatz, it also is one of the few novels to capture the massacre of Algerians on October 17, 1961 when men, woman, and children took to the streets in protest of a curfew.
In the introduction, Shatz said "Smith's perspective--a radical humanism both passionate and wise, sensitive to difference but committed to universalism, anti-racist but averse to tribalism, disenchanted yet rebelliously hopeful--feels in dangerously short supply these days. It's time for his books to be repatriated to the one country where he found a lasting home: the republic of letters."
At the center of the novel is a painting and image Simeon Brown returns to--the cold, stone face of the kinds of white men who attacked him and took an eye, the kind of banal evil he grew up around and sees everywhere, even in the more accepting world of expat Paris.
Smith's main character Simeon Brown undergoes a transformation of moral consciousness. In finding more acceptance in Paris among the expats, where interracial relationships are normalized, he is slow to see how racism and bias shows up there, too, and how easy it is to look away. He encounters anti-Semitism and a dismissal of the oppression of Algerians and Muslims from his fellow countrymen. This book challenges all kinds of status quo and posits a humanist approach to the interconnectedness of oppression and moral responsibility, and shows how you may have to leave the comforts of complacency and community in order to stand up for and with others.
Simeon learns that Europeans, many of whom are more accepting of interracial relationships, don't understand American racism:
"You mean, do they chase black men down the streets of Philadelphia and New York with lynch ropes? No. And in an ordinary day, nothing striking happens, people don't even notice you on the street. But a hundred tiny things happen--micro-particles, nobody can see them but us. And there's always the danger that something bigger will happen. The Beast in the Jungle, you're always tense, waiting for it to spring. It's terrible, yes. And, we want to breathe air, we don't want to think about this race business twenty-four hours a day. We don't want our noses pushed down in it for seventy-odd years of our lives. But you have to keep thinking about it; they force you to think about it all the time." (76-77)
"It's sad, the poor Southerner was probably a nice guy. He might not even have been a racist. But any member of the privileged group in a racist society is considered guilty. Every white South African is guilty. Every Frenchmen is guilty in the eyes of the Algerians. Every white American is guilty. The guilt can end only when racism ends." (120)
"Had his attack on the policeman been a deliberate act of courage, or the result of momentary fury and hallucination. That didn't matter; what mattered was that he had struck at the face.
The pain in his eye had diminished somewhat, and before dropping off to sleep he thought: the face of the French cop, the face of Chris, of Mike, of the sailor, the face of the Nazi torturer at Buchenwald and Dachau, the face of the hysterical mob at Little Rock, the face of the Afrikaner bigot and the Portguguese butcher in Angola, and yes, the black faces of Lumumba's murderers--they were all the same face. Wherever this face was found, it was his enemy; and whoever feared or suffered from, or fought against this face was his brother." (200)
This 1963 novel, about a Black American expat in Paris, was never published in French because it depicts the brutality of the French towards the Algerians. According to the introduction by Adam Shatz, it also is one of the few novels to capture the massacre of Algerians on October 17, 1961 when men, woman, and children took to the streets in protest of a curfew.
In the introduction, Shatz said "Smith's perspective--a radical humanism both passionate and wise, sensitive to difference but committed to universalism, anti-racist but averse to tribalism, disenchanted yet rebelliously hopeful--feels in dangerously short supply these days. It's time for his books to be repatriated to the one country where he found a lasting home: the republic of letters."
At the center of the novel is a painting and image Simeon Brown returns to--the cold, stone face of the kinds of white men who attacked him and took an eye, the kind of banal evil he grew up around and sees everywhere, even in the more accepting world of expat Paris.
Smith's main character Simeon Brown undergoes a transformation of moral consciousness. In finding more acceptance in Paris among the expats, where interracial relationships are normalized, he is slow to see how racism and bias shows up there, too, and how easy it is to look away. He encounters anti-Semitism and a dismissal of the oppression of Algerians and Muslims from his fellow countrymen. This book challenges all kinds of status quo and posits a humanist approach to the interconnectedness of oppression and moral responsibility, and shows how you may have to leave the comforts of complacency and community in order to stand up for and with others.
Simeon learns that Europeans, many of whom are more accepting of interracial relationships, don't understand American racism:
"You mean, do they chase black men down the streets of Philadelphia and New York with lynch ropes? No. And in an ordinary day, nothing striking happens, people don't even notice you on the street. But a hundred tiny things happen--micro-particles, nobody can see them but us. And there's always the danger that something bigger will happen. The Beast in the Jungle, you're always tense, waiting for it to spring. It's terrible, yes. And, we want to breathe air, we don't want to think about this race business twenty-four hours a day. We don't want our noses pushed down in it for seventy-odd years of our lives. But you have to keep thinking about it; they force you to think about it all the time." (76-77)
"It's sad, the poor Southerner was probably a nice guy. He might not even have been a racist. But any member of the privileged group in a racist society is considered guilty. Every white South African is guilty. Every Frenchmen is guilty in the eyes of the Algerians. Every white American is guilty. The guilt can end only when racism ends." (120)
"Had his attack on the policeman been a deliberate act of courage, or the result of momentary fury and hallucination. That didn't matter; what mattered was that he had struck at the face.
The pain in his eye had diminished somewhat, and before dropping off to sleep he thought: the face of the French cop, the face of Chris, of Mike, of the sailor, the face of the Nazi torturer at Buchenwald and Dachau, the face of the hysterical mob at Little Rock, the face of the Afrikaner bigot and the Portguguese butcher in Angola, and yes, the black faces of Lumumba's murderers--they were all the same face. Wherever this face was found, it was his enemy; and whoever feared or suffered from, or fought against this face was his brother." (200)
March 13, 2026
Very poignant and still incredibly relevant 60 years on. Though a bit on the nose with its metaphors at time and though you could call it 'moralising', it very much needed to be so. To tackle these ideas, these feelings, these sore points, one needs to blunt and write an essayistic novel
February 28, 2025
I don’t usually write reviews after finishing a book, but this book deserves one. The Stone Face is a significant work that remains relevant for its timeless themes and insightful commentary on race and identity.
It follows a Black man dealing with his identity and the harsh realities of racism. The story dives deep into his emotional journey, showing the struggles of trying to fit into a world that doesn’t understand him. It’s a bit heavy but definitely thought-provoking and gives a powerful look at personal and social challenges.
It follows a Black man dealing with his identity and the harsh realities of racism. The story dives deep into his emotional journey, showing the struggles of trying to fit into a world that doesn’t understand him. It’s a bit heavy but definitely thought-provoking and gives a powerful look at personal and social challenges.
May 1, 2025
Taken sequentially, this novel’s causal inevitability of root; diaspora; liberation; enchantment; willful ignorance; suspicion; confirmation; disillusionment; _____; and _____ (redacted so as to spoil naught for you) is handled with an uncanny subtlety and no small grace toward its subject matter. My very amateur tip for pros & adjuncts: getting overly concerned about the more overt and ‘symbolisme no plus évident’ (still not coding for you, Goodreads) is part of this book’s game; should you find yourself incredulous while unpacking, say, ‘the eyes of Poland,’ you’ve fallen for William Gardner Smith’s first and easiest snare. While it’s just my reading, the novel’s symbol/metaphor-drunk obviousness is a parodic, though not unloving, homage of French Symboliste works from around the turn of the 20th-Century. So, should you find yourself thinking ‘—Really? Wha-?! THAT fucking blatant?!?—,’ then, well, no; don’t let yourself get bogged down in them. Trust me: choosing between the legitimate and the feint in The Stone Face is a rare specimen of literary interpretation you get to undertake on/in the comfiness of your favorite reading chair/couch/bed/driver’s seat/barstool/et. al. There are no wrong answers here, only poisonous roots.
My advice? Bring cigarettes. But that’s my advice for any situation so…grain of tobacco and all that.
My advice? Bring cigarettes. But that’s my advice for any situation so…grain of tobacco and all that.
February 25, 2022
// Liberté, égalité, fraternité ... Ou non? // Black expat life in France, circa 1960
• THE STONE FACE by William Gardner Smith, 1963, reissued by NYRB @nyrbooks in 2021.
Quite an immersive story, this one.
In this loose autobiographical novel, Smith constructs his fictional alter ego, Simeon Brown, a young Black artist and writer from Philadelphia who relocates to Paris in 1960 after a series of violent racially motivated assaults. In one of these incidents, Simeon loses his right eye.
In Paris, he joins a vibrant community of expatriates from Europe, the Caribbean, and the US - and is amazed by the way he is received with open arms in France. He starts a relationship with a Polish Holocaust survivor, befriends other artists and musicians, and enjoys the night life.
This welcoming and friendly French spirit is not extended to everyone, however; Simeon does not go long before he witnesses police brutality and rampant racism towards France's Arab / Muslim population, primarily Algerians. He befriends an Algerian medical student and hears hauntingly familiar stories of brutal racism that he has encountered in the US, now perpetuated by the same country that has welcomed him so warmly.
"He could not help thinking about race in Paris or anywhere. How can you help thinking about the thing that dominates your life?" (pg 116)
A fascinating short novel of perspective and social consciousness, also capturing a specific time of decolonization.
Continually grateful for NYRB reprinting materials long out of print and bringing them to the fore. This would be a great book to study in university or a book club, as it is sure to spark discussion.
• THE STONE FACE by William Gardner Smith, 1963, reissued by NYRB @nyrbooks in 2021.
Quite an immersive story, this one.
In this loose autobiographical novel, Smith constructs his fictional alter ego, Simeon Brown, a young Black artist and writer from Philadelphia who relocates to Paris in 1960 after a series of violent racially motivated assaults. In one of these incidents, Simeon loses his right eye.
In Paris, he joins a vibrant community of expatriates from Europe, the Caribbean, and the US - and is amazed by the way he is received with open arms in France. He starts a relationship with a Polish Holocaust survivor, befriends other artists and musicians, and enjoys the night life.
This welcoming and friendly French spirit is not extended to everyone, however; Simeon does not go long before he witnesses police brutality and rampant racism towards France's Arab / Muslim population, primarily Algerians. He befriends an Algerian medical student and hears hauntingly familiar stories of brutal racism that he has encountered in the US, now perpetuated by the same country that has welcomed him so warmly.
"He could not help thinking about race in Paris or anywhere. How can you help thinking about the thing that dominates your life?" (pg 116)
A fascinating short novel of perspective and social consciousness, also capturing a specific time of decolonization.
Continually grateful for NYRB reprinting materials long out of print and bringing them to the fore. This would be a great book to study in university or a book club, as it is sure to spark discussion.
October 10, 2024
”Along the Seine, police lifted unconscious Algerians from the ground and tossed them into the river.
Meanwhile, most of the city slept or went its carefree way. Laughing women and men danced the touiste or the cha-cha-cha to candlelight in the Club Privé at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, danced at the Epi-Club, danced at Chez Regine, danced in the ballrooms and cabarets.”
Adam Shatz, in the introduction of the NYRB edition, points out that The Stone Face was the very first novel to broach the topic of the October 17, 1961 massacre of Algerians by French police — William Gardner Smith’s publisher wouldn’t publish the novel in French because of this fact. The entire book sort of leads up to the massacre — you know it’s coming, and you know what Simeon is going to do. This novel isn’t an unpredictable or shocking one, but it still manages to be so impressive.
Simeon realizes quickly that Paris is flawed — the Algerians, a people he had never known, are treated as he had been treated in the United States. Walking through Arab neighborhoods, he’s reminded of Harlem — if Harlem had an even greater police presence. His Black expat friends try their best to ignore the Algerian problem, not wanting to jeopardize their comfort or security; they treat the Algerians just as the white Frenchmen do. Over the course of the story, Simeon wrestles with his discovery that Parisian society is altogether backwards in much the same way as American society. Though he had once felt shackled by his inability to do anything for his people back home, he finally comes to realize that he can fight the same fight in Paris alongside the Algerians.
I’m better off having read this book, and am really grateful that I came across it.
”The pain in his eye had diminished somewhat, and before dropping off to sleep he thought: the face of the French cop, the face of Chris, of Mike, of the sailor, the face of the Nazi torturer at Buchenwald and Dachau, the face of the hysterical mob at Little Rock, the face of the Afrikaner bigot and the Portuguese butcher in Angola, and yes the black faces of Lumumba’s murderers — they were all the same face. Wherever this face was found, it was his enemy; and whoever feared, or suffered from, or fought against this face was his brother.”
Meanwhile, most of the city slept or went its carefree way. Laughing women and men danced the touiste or the cha-cha-cha to candlelight in the Club Privé at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, danced at the Epi-Club, danced at Chez Regine, danced in the ballrooms and cabarets.”
Adam Shatz, in the introduction of the NYRB edition, points out that The Stone Face was the very first novel to broach the topic of the October 17, 1961 massacre of Algerians by French police — William Gardner Smith’s publisher wouldn’t publish the novel in French because of this fact. The entire book sort of leads up to the massacre — you know it’s coming, and you know what Simeon is going to do. This novel isn’t an unpredictable or shocking one, but it still manages to be so impressive.
Simeon realizes quickly that Paris is flawed — the Algerians, a people he had never known, are treated as he had been treated in the United States. Walking through Arab neighborhoods, he’s reminded of Harlem — if Harlem had an even greater police presence. His Black expat friends try their best to ignore the Algerian problem, not wanting to jeopardize their comfort or security; they treat the Algerians just as the white Frenchmen do. Over the course of the story, Simeon wrestles with his discovery that Parisian society is altogether backwards in much the same way as American society. Though he had once felt shackled by his inability to do anything for his people back home, he finally comes to realize that he can fight the same fight in Paris alongside the Algerians.
I’m better off having read this book, and am really grateful that I came across it.
”The pain in his eye had diminished somewhat, and before dropping off to sleep he thought: the face of the French cop, the face of Chris, of Mike, of the sailor, the face of the Nazi torturer at Buchenwald and Dachau, the face of the hysterical mob at Little Rock, the face of the Afrikaner bigot and the Portuguese butcher in Angola, and yes the black faces of Lumumba’s murderers — they were all the same face. Wherever this face was found, it was his enemy; and whoever feared, or suffered from, or fought against this face was his brother.”
October 18, 2021
I found this short novel succeeded most as a fascinating glimpse into the lives of African-American expatriates in Paris of the early 1960s and their reckoning with various forms of racism. We follow Simeon, who has left America due to a brutal racist attack for Paris where he meets a cast of expats, and grapples with his inability to fully enjoy his freedom from oppression as he observes the oppression of Algerians at the hands of the French government. The issues he and his new friends discuss are ones that are still part of the national conversation and their thoughts on the origins of racism, anti-Semitism, and why France was so welcoming made for some compelling reading. As a novel, this was less successful-- none of the characters really came to life, especially the Algerians, and the relationships were described very superficially. Still, I was glad to have read this for the expat discussions and the historical relevance.
July 13, 2021
A year ago, I joined the New York Review Books Classics book club - each month, I get a new book that has been chosen from a carefully curated collection. This one was out of print for a long time before NYRB Classics chose it, and wow -- what a book. I seem to say this so often that it loses impact, but this was an incredible book. I learned a lot from it, and I won't be forgetting it for a long, long time.
January 20, 2022
La fin du livre était vraiment poignante, le début moins mais quand même un bon roman sur la guerre d’Algérie, le racisme et les problèmes socio-politiques
May 19, 2025
I imagine that Smith found these words pouring out with an unremitting hand and mind eager for release. I find it difficult not to write a review of such honesty. In a similar mold to James Baldwin and Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith was an expatriate in Paris, where black intellectuals escaped the stone face's depravity and momentarily enjoyed the repose of whiteness. The French-Algerian War in the 1950s/60s presented a perplexing question for black American expatriates in Paris. How long until the illusion fades and solidarity emerges? Set in the 1960s, The Stone Face follows Simeon Brown, a young black journalist from Philadelphia, as he can no longer stop himself from destruction. Simeon first faces "the stone face" as a young boy and loses an eye for it. Up until his exile to Paris, he finds himself haunted by the stone face's appearance in encounters with men rotting from the cost of its hatred. While at a bar with a young white co-worker, Simeon faces the stone face again and becomes terrified of his compulsion to kill the face's most recent bearer. He escapes to the comforts of Paris and the soothing embrace of Tournon cafes with their colorful fellow black expatriates. As he is faced with the brutal repression of Algerians and the indifference of his compatriots, the injustice prods and thrusts against the line of his conscience before emerging as a forceful release in the form of international solidarity. I come away from this novel with a renewed wonder for fiction and admiration for the moral clarity of student activists across time.
October 18, 2023
Never read a novel that describes the concept of race so clearly and in such an encapsulating way. The plot is fairly minimal, but the setting is superb, as is witnessing the slow development of Simeon's consciousness throughout the book. My only complaint is how reductive many of the women characters are - they only seemed to be mentioned in relation to their affairs with male characters, or to disclose horrific acts of sexual violence. Even the only woman character who plays a main role in the novel - Maria, a Polish-Jewish holocaust survivor - is seemingly defined by her fickleness and lack of depth, and her speech is presented on the pages in crude broken English that isn't attributed to any of the other characters.
Nonetheless, despite these criticisms, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel. May we live in a world where wherever the stone face rears its face, its smashed into a million piece.
Nonetheless, despite these criticisms, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel. May we live in a world where wherever the stone face rears its face, its smashed into a million piece.
February 6, 2026
"Simeon lay on his back and closed his eye tight against the pain. What would happen to him? He did not care. For the first time in a long while he felt reasonably at peace with his conscience. Had his attack on the policeman been a deliberate act of courage, or the result of momentary fury and hallucination. That didn't matter; what mattered was that he had struck at his face."
V interesting for its historical context (in addition to the central Black/Algerian racial dynamics, it's also the first novel to mention the 1961 Seine police massacre of Algerians, which didn't show up in a French novel until 1984), but nondescript in terms of prose + structure. It's quick read though!
V interesting for its historical context (in addition to the central Black/Algerian racial dynamics, it's also the first novel to mention the 1961 Seine police massacre of Algerians, which didn't show up in a French novel until 1984), but nondescript in terms of prose + structure. It's quick read though!
January 8, 2025
the stone face of discord and destruction
this is a whole portion of history i was never taught about. the constant parallel between america and paris and their respective forms of racism and prejudice was so interesting to read. every character had their own way of living in a world of prejudice, and the book doesn’t really say one way is wrong or right- it simply observes it happening. i especially thought the dynamic between maria and simeon was fascinating, with their respective backgrounds and paths.
this is a whole portion of history i was never taught about. the constant parallel between america and paris and their respective forms of racism and prejudice was so interesting to read. every character had their own way of living in a world of prejudice, and the book doesn’t really say one way is wrong or right- it simply observes it happening. i especially thought the dynamic between maria and simeon was fascinating, with their respective backgrounds and paths.
September 28, 2025
مؤلمة، سرد ثقيل على القلب.
March 21, 2026
Circa 2013, middle school me is bopping my head as the indignant lyrics sear through my Apple wired earbuds :
from Nekfeu’s verse on 1995’s « Pleure salope ».
From a decade+ of following French rap along with binging Au service de la France on Netflix in college (« Tamponné, double tamponné ! » still lives in my head) and pirating La Haine in 7th grade (I can still karaoke the « Jusqu’ici tout va bien » monologue), I was well aware of France’s prejudice against Maghrébins without ever having done a deep dive on the subject. The Stone Face is so niche for me as Simeon, through his POC American outsider’s viewpoint, sees in the Algerians’ mistreatment in France a sister struggle to the black plight in the US. I, also an outsider POC American, came to a similar realization, drawing parallels with how French rappers talked about being beurs in the banlieue/cité/tiekson to how American rappers described the urban black experience in the hood. While this book is deeply entrenched in 1960s Paris, the themes reverberate through space and time as racism is still alive, hate knows no borders, and as MLK said, “An injustice somewhere is an injustice everywhere”.
On the Stateside of things, Simeon suffers unprovoked brutality from white kids and police on account of his dark skin. Benson sums it up concisely : « [E]verybody’s a n[****]r if he ain’t white gentile American or English or German or maybe Scandinavian or Canadian » (p. 103). (In 1972, John Lennon would add “man” to that list of criteria.) We readers know how illogical this racial hierarchy is, and this point is further driven home when Simeon is heckled by a stranger in Paris who mocks : « Hey! How does it feel to be a white man? [... I]n the States, they considered me [an Algerian] and people like me white! » (p. 59). This introduces the interesting notion of whiteness as—rather than some immutable characteristic of having been born with fair skin—it’s a social rank that can be attained and lost through something as arbitrary as traveling abroad. As in Paris, the French do not treat Simeon as a black man on the bottom of the totem pole, but as the national of a peer Western civilization: an American. For the first time, he has access to the benefit of the doubt from police, standard service in cafés/bars/restaurants/hotels, free love, and [while not mentioned in the book, I have to imagine] actually good chocolate!! (Hershey’s is a stain on Simeon’s home state.) Initially, Simeon revels in the post-racial utopia of Trente Glorieuses-era France … except c’est pas si rose.
A white French student, Raoul, feigning l’intégration républicaine à la française™, asserts that : « The French don’t believe in race theories [...] The French don’t understand racism » (p. 65). After all, the French government is legally color-blind, with it being illegal to even collect race-based statistics in censuses or administrative records. (During the George Floyd protests, Doudou Diène once said : « Le racisme prospère quand il est nié » but ok go off, Raoul ig.) Throughout the book, we see Raoul’s claim debunked via anecdotes of gratuitous clubbings of « bicots » by police, horror stories involving concentration camps and torture in French-controlled Algeria, arabophobic servers in bars, poverty tours in the Algerian-dominated ghettoes of north Paris. Of course, we also have Henri literally fact-checking Raoul on the same page : « Cut it out, Raoul. [...] The French are racists as far as the Algerians are concerned » (p. 65). Racism does exist in France; it’s just aimed at a different group. Having experienced racist treatment in America, Simeon feels a trauma bond with the Algerians. But having had a taste of the good life in France, Simeon feels indebted to the French. How do you reconcile these conflicting allegiances? Simeon is the typical bleeding-heart—or bludgeoned-eye—liberal whose conscience is too empathetic to fully ignore the oppression going on around him. (Well, he did kinda try to ignore it in that one chapter in Part 3, but hey … what happens in Corsica stays in Corsica.) The other characters incarnate the different ways of reckoning with this awareness of everyday evil.
There is the path of apolitical self-preservation, manifested in Simeon’s Jewish Holocaust-survivor paramour Maria. She prefers to take the post-going-electric Bob Dylan approach to current events: that is, retreating deeper into her art—in this case, her acting career—and shunning political topics to repress the « nightmares [of the Holocaust] in her head » (p. 23). For her, avoiding politics is a way of avoiding reliving her trauma. (For the record, my favorite Dylan album is The Times, They Are a-Changin’.) Also party to this train of thought is Simeon’s circle of black expats. There is the composer Harold, who « always amazed Simeon, he rarely thought of problems of race or anything else. He thought, worked, and lived his music » (p. 175). Like Maria, Harold believes in a strict separation of music and topical subjects, dismissing the racial struggle as merely « temporary causes and problems [that] are the death of art » (p. 175).
[Tangent Alert] As an Asian-American music fan, the case of Harold hits home. I listen to a lot of Asian diaspora musicians, and they rarely address race in their lyrics. Mitski and Laufey both have one song each—“Your Best American Girl” and “Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self”—that only barely touch on it. Neither Karen O of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs nor Keshi have ever written about it. The closest Beabadoobee has come to highlighting her Asian roots was filming the music video for “The Glue Song” in the Philippines. If you skim the YouTube comments under that video, you can see how much it means to the Pinoy community to have that representation. Though I guess it is technically racist to heap expectations of social consciousness on minority artists just because of their race. Okay, revenons à nos moutons.
There is Benson who used to be a political novelist « when [he] was young and indignant », but has since renounced activist literature for he no longer « believe[s] in something to be indignant » (p. 37). Most significant is the character of Babe, a black American expat who has been in Paris for ten years and acts as Simeon’s guide to The City of Lights. At one time, Babe was politically active as an official in the NAACP, but he eventually came to view the end goal of integration with white Americans, whom he considered irredeemable enemies, as null, admitting : « [I]f I was in America, I wouldn’t do a thing. I’d curl up and die » (p. 145). He settled into a resigned complacency, preferring to run away to France where he intends to live out the rest of his life as a bon vivant. You can’t blame him for not trying to change things, so can you blame him for surrendering? It was Shurik’N of IAM who once rapped :
There is the folkie pre-electric Dylan path of resilient militantism (seriously, Dylan and Joan Baez performing “When the Ship Comes In” at the March on Washington is so iconic and powerful). This approach is embodied by the character of Ahmed, an Algerian medical student who stands in as an even-more-principled foil to Simeon. Like Simeon, Ahmed was once jostling over his current trajectory of se la couler douce in France versus aiding the cause back home. He reasoned he would study medicine to one day help the Algerians in an auxiliary role, tending to wounded revolutionaries. But is taking college classes to be a future help really helping when Algerians are getting killed in the now? When Ahmed’s fellow Algerian friend Hossein is shipped off to a concentration camp by the French, Ahmed is finally galvanized to action and goes full-on Jules-in-Dekada-’70, returning to le bled to take up arms on the frontlines.
Animated by Ahmed’s sacrifice for his people’s struggle and his own overloaded cognitive dissonance, Simeon ultimately eschews the politically aloof, indulgent lifestyle that his girlfriend Maria attempted to talk him into. Instead, he resolves to go back to America, renouncing the whiteness that France had accorded him, reclaiming his blackness in all its beautiful struggles.
An amazing recommendation from my friend that just so happened to coincide perfectly with my current fixation on the mid-20th-century French colonial period, initially sparked by my serendipitous find of a French edition of L’Étranger at the Rittenhouse Barnes & Noble—ik ik, I should’ve been patronizing an indie shop. (Btw, I wonder if Smith intentionally played on Camus’ two most famous novels with « They’re a plague; you’re a foreigner » (p. 56). For that matter, I also find Smith’s word choice of Maria’s « I want froth of life for once » (p. 22) curiously evocative of L’Écume des jours.) The last time I liked a book this much was probably a year ago (merci, Annie Ernaux). Diving into this right after reading and being disappointed by If Beale Street Could Talk, The Stone Face is what I thought James Baldwin would be like. I didn’t even expound upon the jaw-dropping « prejudice of the oppressed » lateral violence scene (p. 127) or the blindness/eyepatch symbolism or the stone face symbolism or SiMaria's situationship or the massacre du 17 octobre 1961, et cætera ... there's just so much meat to this book 1985 Morrissey would scream bloody murder. And this word vomit of an essay is already ~1,700 words long; I need literary Zofran.
Simply, I recommend this book. Black people are still suffering from racism in the US—hello, George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and too many others. Maghrébins are still suffering from racism in France—bonjour, Merzouk Nahel, Zyed Benna, Hichem Miraoui et bien trop d'autres.
Rappelle-toi, pendant la guerre d’Algérie, t’aimais t’occuper
De les torturer, ces femmes et enfants électrocutés
T'es qu'une merde atterrie !
from Nekfeu’s verse on 1995’s « Pleure salope ».
From a decade+ of following French rap along with binging Au service de la France on Netflix in college (« Tamponné, double tamponné ! » still lives in my head) and pirating La Haine in 7th grade (I can still karaoke the « Jusqu’ici tout va bien » monologue), I was well aware of France’s prejudice against Maghrébins without ever having done a deep dive on the subject. The Stone Face is so niche for me as Simeon, through his POC American outsider’s viewpoint, sees in the Algerians’ mistreatment in France a sister struggle to the black plight in the US. I, also an outsider POC American, came to a similar realization, drawing parallels with how French rappers talked about being beurs in the banlieue/cité/tiekson to how American rappers described the urban black experience in the hood. While this book is deeply entrenched in 1960s Paris, the themes reverberate through space and time as racism is still alive, hate knows no borders, and as MLK said, “An injustice somewhere is an injustice everywhere”.
On the Stateside of things, Simeon suffers unprovoked brutality from white kids and police on account of his dark skin. Benson sums it up concisely : « [E]verybody’s a n[****]r if he ain’t white gentile American or English or German or maybe Scandinavian or Canadian » (p. 103). (In 1972, John Lennon would add “man” to that list of criteria.) We readers know how illogical this racial hierarchy is, and this point is further driven home when Simeon is heckled by a stranger in Paris who mocks : « Hey! How does it feel to be a white man? [... I]n the States, they considered me [an Algerian] and people like me white! » (p. 59). This introduces the interesting notion of whiteness as—rather than some immutable characteristic of having been born with fair skin—it’s a social rank that can be attained and lost through something as arbitrary as traveling abroad. As in Paris, the French do not treat Simeon as a black man on the bottom of the totem pole, but as the national of a peer Western civilization: an American. For the first time, he has access to the benefit of the doubt from police, standard service in cafés/bars/restaurants/hotels, free love, and [while not mentioned in the book, I have to imagine] actually good chocolate!! (Hershey’s is a stain on Simeon’s home state.) Initially, Simeon revels in the post-racial utopia of Trente Glorieuses-era France … except c’est pas si rose.
A white French student, Raoul, feigning l’intégration républicaine à la française™, asserts that : « The French don’t believe in race theories [...] The French don’t understand racism » (p. 65). After all, the French government is legally color-blind, with it being illegal to even collect race-based statistics in censuses or administrative records. (During the George Floyd protests, Doudou Diène once said : « Le racisme prospère quand il est nié » but ok go off, Raoul ig.) Throughout the book, we see Raoul’s claim debunked via anecdotes of gratuitous clubbings of « bicots » by police, horror stories involving concentration camps and torture in French-controlled Algeria, arabophobic servers in bars, poverty tours in the Algerian-dominated ghettoes of north Paris. Of course, we also have Henri literally fact-checking Raoul on the same page : « Cut it out, Raoul. [...] The French are racists as far as the Algerians are concerned » (p. 65). Racism does exist in France; it’s just aimed at a different group. Having experienced racist treatment in America, Simeon feels a trauma bond with the Algerians. But having had a taste of the good life in France, Simeon feels indebted to the French. How do you reconcile these conflicting allegiances? Simeon is the typical bleeding-heart—or bludgeoned-eye—liberal whose conscience is too empathetic to fully ignore the oppression going on around him. (Well, he did kinda try to ignore it in that one chapter in Part 3, but hey … what happens in Corsica stays in Corsica.) The other characters incarnate the different ways of reckoning with this awareness of everyday evil.
There is the path of apolitical self-preservation, manifested in Simeon’s Jewish Holocaust-survivor paramour Maria. She prefers to take the post-going-electric Bob Dylan approach to current events: that is, retreating deeper into her art—in this case, her acting career—and shunning political topics to repress the « nightmares [of the Holocaust] in her head » (p. 23). For her, avoiding politics is a way of avoiding reliving her trauma. (For the record, my favorite Dylan album is The Times, They Are a-Changin’.) Also party to this train of thought is Simeon’s circle of black expats. There is the composer Harold, who « always amazed Simeon, he rarely thought of problems of race or anything else. He thought, worked, and lived his music » (p. 175). Like Maria, Harold believes in a strict separation of music and topical subjects, dismissing the racial struggle as merely « temporary causes and problems [that] are the death of art » (p. 175).
[Tangent Alert] As an Asian-American music fan, the case of Harold hits home. I listen to a lot of Asian diaspora musicians, and they rarely address race in their lyrics. Mitski and Laufey both have one song each—“Your Best American Girl” and “Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self”—that only barely touch on it. Neither Karen O of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs nor Keshi have ever written about it. The closest Beabadoobee has come to highlighting her Asian roots was filming the music video for “The Glue Song” in the Philippines. If you skim the YouTube comments under that video, you can see how much it means to the Pinoy community to have that representation. Though I guess it is technically racist to heap expectations of social consciousness on minority artists just because of their race. Okay, revenons à nos moutons.
There is Benson who used to be a political novelist « when [he] was young and indignant », but has since renounced activist literature for he no longer « believe[s] in something to be indignant » (p. 37). Most significant is the character of Babe, a black American expat who has been in Paris for ten years and acts as Simeon’s guide to The City of Lights. At one time, Babe was politically active as an official in the NAACP, but he eventually came to view the end goal of integration with white Americans, whom he considered irredeemable enemies, as null, admitting : « [I]f I was in America, I wouldn’t do a thing. I’d curl up and die » (p. 145). He settled into a resigned complacency, preferring to run away to France where he intends to live out the rest of his life as a bon vivant. You can’t blame him for not trying to change things, so can you blame him for surrendering? It was Shurik’N of IAM who once rapped :
Tenter le diable pour sortir de la galère, t'as gagné, frère
Mais c'est toujours la misère pour ceux qui poussent derrière
There is the folkie pre-electric Dylan path of resilient militantism (seriously, Dylan and Joan Baez performing “When the Ship Comes In” at the March on Washington is so iconic and powerful). This approach is embodied by the character of Ahmed, an Algerian medical student who stands in as an even-more-principled foil to Simeon. Like Simeon, Ahmed was once jostling over his current trajectory of se la couler douce in France versus aiding the cause back home. He reasoned he would study medicine to one day help the Algerians in an auxiliary role, tending to wounded revolutionaries. But is taking college classes to be a future help really helping when Algerians are getting killed in the now? When Ahmed’s fellow Algerian friend Hossein is shipped off to a concentration camp by the French, Ahmed is finally galvanized to action and goes full-on Jules-in-Dekada-’70, returning to le bled to take up arms on the frontlines.
Animated by Ahmed’s sacrifice for his people’s struggle and his own overloaded cognitive dissonance, Simeon ultimately eschews the politically aloof, indulgent lifestyle that his girlfriend Maria attempted to talk him into. Instead, he resolves to go back to America, renouncing the whiteness that France had accorded him, reclaiming his blackness in all its beautiful struggles.
An amazing recommendation from my friend that just so happened to coincide perfectly with my current fixation on the mid-20th-century French colonial period, initially sparked by my serendipitous find of a French edition of L’Étranger at the Rittenhouse Barnes & Noble—ik ik, I should’ve been patronizing an indie shop. (Btw, I wonder if Smith intentionally played on Camus’ two most famous novels with « They’re a plague; you’re a foreigner » (p. 56). For that matter, I also find Smith’s word choice of Maria’s « I want froth of life for once » (p. 22) curiously evocative of L’Écume des jours.) The last time I liked a book this much was probably a year ago (merci, Annie Ernaux). Diving into this right after reading and being disappointed by If Beale Street Could Talk, The Stone Face is what I thought James Baldwin would be like. I didn’t even expound upon the jaw-dropping « prejudice of the oppressed » lateral violence scene (p. 127) or the blindness/eyepatch symbolism or the stone face symbolism or SiMaria's situationship or the massacre du 17 octobre 1961, et cætera ... there's just so much meat to this book 1985 Morrissey would scream bloody murder. And this word vomit of an essay is already ~1,700 words long; I need literary Zofran.
Simply, I recommend this book. Black people are still suffering from racism in the US—hello, George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and too many others. Maghrébins are still suffering from racism in France—bonjour, Merzouk Nahel, Zyed Benna, Hichem Miraoui et bien trop d'autres.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 12, 2025
If I was calling the shots this would be required reading. I went into it wanting to learn more about France's treatment of Algerians, but this book has a lot to say about the guilt of privilege and the convenience of being able to step away from other people's harsh realities. At what point does our own inaction become complicity? And how can we justify cherry picking between which victims are socially acceptable to feel sorry for? To stand up for?
March 22, 2022
Bouleversant
July 5, 2017
This is one of those books that is so impressive that even after you have forgotten the title and author (which happens from time to time), the story itself and how moving it was will creep up on you as you are reading another book (or collection of short stories) set in the same region, and you stop reading said collection (Camus' Exile and Kingdom) and begin searching for the novel your brain is playing scenes from.
I read The Stone Face my senior year of undergrad, and it was one of my favorite novels of that semester. The story revolves around the Paris massacre of 1961 and is told through the eyes of a Black American in Paris who sees how Algerians are treated similarly in Paris as Black Americans are treated in America during this time. Similar to Baldwin, this novel gives the feel of what is to be a Black expat in France during this time and the existential questions that come along with abandoning one's country during a time of racial turmoil to live an easier life abroad, while simultaneously seeing people of a similar skin tone experience a racism that is unique to the region. The Baldwin short story "This morning, this evening, so soon" deals with this subject matter as well, but Smith's novel fleshes out the French/Algerian conflict in more depth.
I'm sorry to see that it is out of print because I think this is a book that should be more widely read for historical context. I hope I can get my hands on a physical copy, because a book this powerful should be reread.
I read The Stone Face my senior year of undergrad, and it was one of my favorite novels of that semester. The story revolves around the Paris massacre of 1961 and is told through the eyes of a Black American in Paris who sees how Algerians are treated similarly in Paris as Black Americans are treated in America during this time. Similar to Baldwin, this novel gives the feel of what is to be a Black expat in France during this time and the existential questions that come along with abandoning one's country during a time of racial turmoil to live an easier life abroad, while simultaneously seeing people of a similar skin tone experience a racism that is unique to the region. The Baldwin short story "This morning, this evening, so soon" deals with this subject matter as well, but Smith's novel fleshes out the French/Algerian conflict in more depth.
I'm sorry to see that it is out of print because I think this is a book that should be more widely read for historical context. I hope I can get my hands on a physical copy, because a book this powerful should be reread.
August 16, 2021
"The Stone Face is an anti-racist novel about identity, but also a subtle and humane critique of a politics that is based narrowly on identity" (x).
"To read Last of the Conquerors today is to grasp that it is out of such 'fantasy worlds' that freedom is ultimately born" (xii).
"Smith's perspective--a radical humanism both passionate and wise, sensitive to difference but committed to universalism, anti-racist but averse to tribalism, disenchanted yet rebelliously hopeful--feels in dangerously short supply these days" (xxv).
"'I'm impatient. I didn't like the big and little humiliations of being a black man there.'
She frowned, looking toward the street. 'I don't understand it. I read some things about it, you know, what happens there with the race problem. But I don't understand it. Is it really so terrible, still?'
'You mean do they chase black men down the streets of Philadelphia and New York with lynch ropes? No. And in an ordinary day, nothing striking happens, people don't even notice you on the street. But a hundred tiny things happen--micro-particles, nobody can see them but us. And there's always the danger that something bigger will happen. The Beast in the jungle, you're always tense, waiting for it to spring. It's terrible, yes. And we want to breathe air, we don't want to think about this race business twenty-four hours a day. We don't want our noses pushed down in it for the seventy-odd years of our lives. But you have to keep thinking about it; they force you to think about it all the time" (76).
"One of the Brazilians had explained it to Simeon that in South America when an Indian or a Negro became rich or became a general, he was officially considered white. It was crazy. The world was a pyramid, and at the apex were the great rich peoples--the Northern Europeans, the English and recently the Americans. They imposed their sliding scale on the rest of the world. Here, the black man was inferior; there the Arab, there the Jew, there the Asiatic--according to where you were. And the people who became rich and great through historical accident were those who ruled. For that particular time" (93).
"Maria said, 'No reason to be sorry. You said what you thought.'" (121).
"Listen, what sense can life have to the average white American with money? What kind of goal can he have? To make more money? Hold on to what he has? That's not much of a goal. But even making money can be some kind of a goal for a poor bugger with a sick wife and nine kids" (139).
"Benson shook his head. 'I say everybody's sick. The whole country's got to be sick, because it's a sick situation. But the white people are worse than we are. They're the sickest of all'" (174).
"The pain in his eye had diminished somewhat, and before dropping off to sleep he thought: the face of the French cop, the face of Chris, of Mike, of the sailor, the face of the Nazi torturer at Buchenwald and Dachau, the face of the hysterical mob at Little Rock, the face of the Afrikaner bigot and the Portuguese butcher in Angola, and, yes, the black faces of Lumumba's murderers--they were all the same face. Wherever this face was found, it was his enemy; and whoever feard, or suffered from, or fought against the face was his brother" (200).
"To read Last of the Conquerors today is to grasp that it is out of such 'fantasy worlds' that freedom is ultimately born" (xii).
"Smith's perspective--a radical humanism both passionate and wise, sensitive to difference but committed to universalism, anti-racist but averse to tribalism, disenchanted yet rebelliously hopeful--feels in dangerously short supply these days" (xxv).
"'I'm impatient. I didn't like the big and little humiliations of being a black man there.'
She frowned, looking toward the street. 'I don't understand it. I read some things about it, you know, what happens there with the race problem. But I don't understand it. Is it really so terrible, still?'
'You mean do they chase black men down the streets of Philadelphia and New York with lynch ropes? No. And in an ordinary day, nothing striking happens, people don't even notice you on the street. But a hundred tiny things happen--micro-particles, nobody can see them but us. And there's always the danger that something bigger will happen. The Beast in the jungle, you're always tense, waiting for it to spring. It's terrible, yes. And we want to breathe air, we don't want to think about this race business twenty-four hours a day. We don't want our noses pushed down in it for the seventy-odd years of our lives. But you have to keep thinking about it; they force you to think about it all the time" (76).
"One of the Brazilians had explained it to Simeon that in South America when an Indian or a Negro became rich or became a general, he was officially considered white. It was crazy. The world was a pyramid, and at the apex were the great rich peoples--the Northern Europeans, the English and recently the Americans. They imposed their sliding scale on the rest of the world. Here, the black man was inferior; there the Arab, there the Jew, there the Asiatic--according to where you were. And the people who became rich and great through historical accident were those who ruled. For that particular time" (93).
"Maria said, 'No reason to be sorry. You said what you thought.'" (121).
"Listen, what sense can life have to the average white American with money? What kind of goal can he have? To make more money? Hold on to what he has? That's not much of a goal. But even making money can be some kind of a goal for a poor bugger with a sick wife and nine kids" (139).
"Benson shook his head. 'I say everybody's sick. The whole country's got to be sick, because it's a sick situation. But the white people are worse than we are. They're the sickest of all'" (174).
"The pain in his eye had diminished somewhat, and before dropping off to sleep he thought: the face of the French cop, the face of Chris, of Mike, of the sailor, the face of the Nazi torturer at Buchenwald and Dachau, the face of the hysterical mob at Little Rock, the face of the Afrikaner bigot and the Portuguese butcher in Angola, and, yes, the black faces of Lumumba's murderers--they were all the same face. Wherever this face was found, it was his enemy; and whoever feard, or suffered from, or fought against the face was his brother" (200).
February 10, 2026
This was a very surprising and concise read. The book had so much to say about so many different topics and events and I can see why this 1961 book was republished in 2021.
Where to begin with the story? To start off, the introduction of the book (by another author) was pretty crucial in laying the history out. After WW2 and during the Jim Crow era many African Americans fled America to go to France, the country that “doesn’t have racism”. The books characters are incredibly vast and so much of the fun is having these characters interact and give their opinions. There’s the one-eyed African American who fled for freedom and is the MC, an African American who is carefree and living it up, a white American who hated racism, a Jewish woman who was a child in a concentration camp and many Algerians who live in France. It’s hard to believe the book is slightly over 200 pages when so much happens with all these characters.
This book is extremely pertinent in today’s society when so much is going on to so many people. Would you stay silent? Can you? This African American who was traumatized by the racism of the USA is now finally living a happy life in France, but instead of black people being abused and oppressed it’s the Algerians. People will proudly proclaim France to have nothing to do with racism, and in the same breath state that Algerians are simply dirty and prone to crime. One Algerian even teased the main character by calling him “whitey” since he is now a part of the oppressor group. So the question remains: do you live a peaceful life now that you’re not the one being hurt or do you do something to help those that are now at the bottom? This book shows the main character’s inner thoughts so well and all the characters feel fully realized in who they are. This book is just the word “intersectionality” repeated over and over again haha.
In a way I was trying really hard to think of a criticism that I had to not make it a 5. There’s definitely some characters in his friend group that I completely forgot the names of or what they did. And I the writing is super flowery or beautiful in its prose. Thats about it. I so deeply resonated with the main character and I was nodding my head or smiling at some of the conversations they had in the book. Its awesome to read this after watching the Battle of Algiers some time ago since that showed me the struggles of Algerians in Algeria and this book extended my understanding to include Algerian oppression in France’s mainland. The books story was amazing and what it has to say about oppression, solidarity and hate were really well told. The massive theme of the painting of the Stone Face is also awesome and I’ll leave that out for those who’ll read it. Amazing book, lots to say, super fun, I got sucked in quick, zero fat on it, loved it loved it loved it. Fuck colonialism, fuck imperialism, fuck capitalism and all power to the mother fucking people.
At À la Romance, a softly lighted Spanish bar, Simeon found himself drinking one whiskey after another. One of the waitresses slipped up beside him.
“Drowning your troubles, Simeon?”
“I haven’t got any troubles,” he said.
Where to begin with the story? To start off, the introduction of the book (by another author) was pretty crucial in laying the history out. After WW2 and during the Jim Crow era many African Americans fled America to go to France, the country that “doesn’t have racism”. The books characters are incredibly vast and so much of the fun is having these characters interact and give their opinions. There’s the one-eyed African American who fled for freedom and is the MC, an African American who is carefree and living it up, a white American who hated racism, a Jewish woman who was a child in a concentration camp and many Algerians who live in France. It’s hard to believe the book is slightly over 200 pages when so much happens with all these characters.
This book is extremely pertinent in today’s society when so much is going on to so many people. Would you stay silent? Can you? This African American who was traumatized by the racism of the USA is now finally living a happy life in France, but instead of black people being abused and oppressed it’s the Algerians. People will proudly proclaim France to have nothing to do with racism, and in the same breath state that Algerians are simply dirty and prone to crime. One Algerian even teased the main character by calling him “whitey” since he is now a part of the oppressor group. So the question remains: do you live a peaceful life now that you’re not the one being hurt or do you do something to help those that are now at the bottom? This book shows the main character’s inner thoughts so well and all the characters feel fully realized in who they are. This book is just the word “intersectionality” repeated over and over again haha.
In a way I was trying really hard to think of a criticism that I had to not make it a 5. There’s definitely some characters in his friend group that I completely forgot the names of or what they did. And I the writing is super flowery or beautiful in its prose. Thats about it. I so deeply resonated with the main character and I was nodding my head or smiling at some of the conversations they had in the book. Its awesome to read this after watching the Battle of Algiers some time ago since that showed me the struggles of Algerians in Algeria and this book extended my understanding to include Algerian oppression in France’s mainland. The books story was amazing and what it has to say about oppression, solidarity and hate were really well told. The massive theme of the painting of the Stone Face is also awesome and I’ll leave that out for those who’ll read it. Amazing book, lots to say, super fun, I got sucked in quick, zero fat on it, loved it loved it loved it. Fuck colonialism, fuck imperialism, fuck capitalism and all power to the mother fucking people.
At À la Romance, a softly lighted Spanish bar, Simeon found himself drinking one whiskey after another. One of the waitresses slipped up beside him.
“Drowning your troubles, Simeon?”
“I haven’t got any troubles,” he said.
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