263 pages
English language
Published Nov. 15, 1985 by Dell.
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
Surprisingly can't read 4 books at once ! I'll come back to this when I finish everything else I'm working through :))
Le premier roman de James Baldwin nous parle d’un adolescent afro-américain et de sa famille, dont son père pasteur. A travers les pensées de John et les souvenirs de son père, de sa mère, et de sa tante, nous suivons le destin des afro-américains dans la première moitié du XXe siècle, et le rôle essentiel que joue la religion dans leur vie.
Le récit est lent, certains diront qu’il ne s’y passe pas grand chose, mais c’est une plongée subtile et riche dans l’âme humaine, avec les contradictions qui nous animent sans doute tous. Un beau roman, assurément.
Go Tell It On The Mountain is about hypocrisy, loss, death, abuse, piety, pretense, denial, and self-delusion in a Pentecostal preacher’s household in 1930’s Harlem. The main story takes place in a day, with several vignettes reaching back.
John is navigating his sense of himself and his sexuality as a black teen in 1930’s Harlem. Because of when this was written there’s a lot that remains heavily implied, couched behind religious language and “holy” kisses. Some passages are shocking in their language, because the rest of the book is so carefully phrased, the few explicit sections have an impact that they might not have had otherwise.
John’s father (Gabriel) is a pastor whose religious devotion seems to have been unable to put a dent in his capacity to bring grief and pain to those around him. Indeed, the book seems to argue that it’s that very search for piety which …
