Scan barcode
A review by daja57
Another Country by James Baldwin
5.0
Greenwich Village, New York ("that city which the people from heaven had made their home." - 3.2), late 1950s. Rufus is a black jazz drummer in a love-hate relationship on a downward spiral with a white girl from Georgia. Other characters include Rufus's sister Ida who wants to be a singer Vivaldo, a wannabe novelist of Italian extraction, Richard, an older novelist and his wife Cass, and Eric a gay actor with a French boyfriend. These artists live a bohemian life but at the bottom of it all they yearn for love; but love involves another person and that creates problematic power dynamics, especially when there is the complication of race.
A deeply troubling analysis of inner city life and the problems involved when a boy meets a girl (or a boy). Baldwin's other books include Giovanni's Room, a masterful treatment of repressed homosexuality, and If Beale Street Could Talk, a superb novel about racism. This novel seems to encompass both. His characters leap off the page in their brutal glory. His settings both shape and resonate for the characters. This is writing at its best.
A deeply troubling analysis of inner city life and the problems involved when a boy meets a girl (or a boy). Baldwin's other books include Giovanni's Room, a masterful treatment of repressed homosexuality, and If Beale Street Could Talk, a superb novel about racism. This novel seems to encompass both. His characters leap off the page in their brutal glory. His settings both shape and resonate for the characters. This is writing at its best.