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A review by thechanelmuse
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
5.0
James Baldwin once said, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father. He was my model; I learned a lot from him. Nobody's ever frightened me since.”
Go Tell It on the Mountain is a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age novel that largely centers on John Grimes (Baldwin) and three members of his family (his father, aunt, and mother) during the evening of his fourteenth birthday at a storefront church in 1930s Harlem. The story unfolds with John's contemplation of following in his father's path to become a preacher. But his internal tug-of-war with ideals of the church opposed with those of "the world" signals shifts throughout the novel, in which the footsteps of his family members travels back in time.
“There are people in the world for whom 'coming along' is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”
Unveiling their complexities as individuals and as a family unit as a whole, Baldwin ties their present-day internal struggles into biblical allusions before artfully sweeping to and fro through memory, addressing generational parent/guardian-child relationships, morality versus immorality (sex) per the church, gender, race, and other themes.
Baldwin was truly a master of the pen.
Go Tell It on the Mountain is a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age novel that largely centers on John Grimes (Baldwin) and three members of his family (his father, aunt, and mother) during the evening of his fourteenth birthday at a storefront church in 1930s Harlem. The story unfolds with John's contemplation of following in his father's path to become a preacher. But his internal tug-of-war with ideals of the church opposed with those of "the world" signals shifts throughout the novel, in which the footsteps of his family members travels back in time.
“There are people in the world for whom 'coming along' is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”
Unveiling their complexities as individuals and as a family unit as a whole, Baldwin ties their present-day internal struggles into biblical allusions before artfully sweeping to and fro through memory, addressing generational parent/guardian-child relationships, morality versus immorality (sex) per the church, gender, race, and other themes.
Baldwin was truly a master of the pen.