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greyemk 's review for:

Another Country by James Baldwin
3.75

I truly don’t know how to rate or review this one. It was a good book, for sure. Beautiful writing. These characters give stunning monologues, I almost want to see this as a play.

Where I’m stuck is on themes. The negative way to describe this book would be “a bunch of lonely people complain very eloquently about being lonely”. I could live in this world for a long time, carried by Baldwin’s prose, but I’m not sure it went anywhere or had much of an arc, which I did expect. It’s a pretty pessimistic novel, taking seriously the idea that love and hate are neighbors, and further elaborating that idea in interracial relationships.

All that said, I want to give Vivaldo a hug and tell Cass that 33 is not that old.