Another Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

I really wanted to like Another Country. I had read a brilliant essay by Baldwin and thought I'd like to read more, and while the most sensible thing might have been to read one of his non-fiction books, I'm more a fiction reader so I started with this.

It's interesting and literary but it's also slow and seems to lose energy as it goes along. It does a number of interesting things, such as changing focus to show you into the mind of a character you've only seen from the outside, but I didn't care deeply about any of those characters.

Another Country has a fairly strong, very desperate beginning, but when its most tortured character exits it leaves a hole Baldwin doesn't seem inclined to fill, and the more muted unhappiness of its cast left me enervated.

At the point I stopped, the only real reason to keep reading would be to see if one eventually sees the world from the one major character who, two-thirds in, has only been seen from the third person. She's the most intriguing character for most of the book. But I can't work up enthusiasm to keep going.

Guess I'll try something non-fiction after all.

Another Country is a novel about love. But it is also about much more. It is a book about racism, sexism, homophobia, religion and intolerance. It is a book about life. It is set in the late 1950s in Greenwich Village, NY and explores the intersection of race, gender and sexuality in the United States in the mid-1950s.

It also explores what means to be an African – American in the Unites States in the 1950s, not only in physical terms, but also mentally and emotionally in the context of racial domination and white supremacy.

The main character is Rufus Scott, an African-American musician whose world has fallen apart. Although Rufus does not appear throughout the entire book, he remains one of the main characters, an absent protagonist. His life, but most of all his death, connect all the other characters, people that lack direction, who struggle for life and love. But love is not always pretty. Love can be painful. And as the characters re-examine their lives and talk endlessly about their passion and the pain – “a powerful and poignant self-examination – always on the brink of despair,” – in the end they are “holding on to a tragicomic hope…..”, they say Yes to life, knowing though, that they will have to pay their dues.

The beauty of this book is just unbelievable, the writing itself is brilliant, sensual, painful and provocative. James Baldwin is making a direct address to the reader, the reader then has no option but to get involved in the story. Another Country is a challenging novel, both shocking and inspirational; it does not make it an easy reading. But I am grateful to have discovered it. It repays more than one careful readings.