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A review by corinnekeener
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
5.0
We read If Beale Street Could Talk for episode 35 of The Bookstore Podcast. You can listen to it on any podcast platform, or you can find it at www.thebookstorepodcast.com!
Unsurprised that I liked yet another James Baldwin book.
If Beale Street Could Talk feels like an incredibly special novel. When Fonny is imprisoned after a false arrest, Tish and her family take it upon themselves to do whatever they can to get him released. Unconditional love in the face of such adversity is difficult to pull off in a convincing way for me. Where many authors might fall into trite narratives, Baldwin manages to balance the love this family shares with one another and their immense pain. You get the idea that love will not fix everything, but it's what is worth trying to fix everything for. In that way it was very powerful.
My one criticism of the novel is that the crime Fonny is imprisoned for is a rape. The book definitely makes it clear that the woman making the accusation was a victim of rape (good), but that she cannot identify her rapist (a little tricky here). In 2018 I think this topic requires a little bit of examination. Clearly this book is a product of it's time (and there are even bigger complicated racial factors to take into consideration), but it's always important to bear in mind where our cultural ideas about rape and rape accusations come from.
For an interesting assignment, contrast If Beale Street Could Talk with a great novel from 2018, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. Both make for great reads with similar themes, and they were written nearly 45 years apart from one another.
Unsurprised that I liked yet another James Baldwin book.
If Beale Street Could Talk feels like an incredibly special novel. When Fonny is imprisoned after a false arrest, Tish and her family take it upon themselves to do whatever they can to get him released. Unconditional love in the face of such adversity is difficult to pull off in a convincing way for me. Where many authors might fall into trite narratives, Baldwin manages to balance the love this family shares with one another and their immense pain. You get the idea that love will not fix everything, but it's what is worth trying to fix everything for. In that way it was very powerful.
My one criticism of the novel is that the crime Fonny is imprisoned for is a rape. The book definitely makes it clear that the woman making the accusation was a victim of rape (good), but that she cannot identify her rapist (a little tricky here). In 2018 I think this topic requires a little bit of examination. Clearly this book is a product of it's time (and there are even bigger complicated racial factors to take into consideration), but it's always important to bear in mind where our cultural ideas about rape and rape accusations come from.
For an interesting assignment, contrast If Beale Street Could Talk with a great novel from 2018, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. Both make for great reads with similar themes, and they were written nearly 45 years apart from one another.