Customer Reviews

Another Country (Twentieth Century Classics S)

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I just finished this novel and I have to say that I was blown away by Baldwin's writing. I disagree with one of the reviewers who wrote that this should be required text for high school or jr. high students. For one thing, the subject matter is way too mature for their brains to digest at such a young age. This is a novel for intelligent adults with an open mind. If you are a homophobe or have any racism residing in your heart then don't read this novel, because you will not enjoy it whatsoever. If I would have read this before the age of thirty I would not have liked it and probably wouldn't have finished reading it(this is unequivocally a very adult novel). That being said, you will be hard-pressed to find a more gritty, brilliant, fiercly told story than this one. I personally believe that the dialogue between the main charactiers is excellent and very real. As complex, flawed, and often times even repugnant the main characters are, you still can't help but to care about each one of them as if they were your friend or loved one. This is the beauty of this novel in my opinion - Baldwin's ability to really develop each character. This is definitely a novel that is character-driven and upon finishing the novel you can't help but feel a bit disheartened knowing that your time spent with them is now over. It leaves you yearning for more!

This is my first novel by Baldwin and I am off to the bookstore (sorry Amazon, I just can't wait) to purchase a few more (Go Tell It On A Mountain will be my next). He was such a brilliant, brave, unique writer who displays so much courage in his prose that it's impossible to not admire the man. Also, I really enjoy reading authors like this who paint a completely different picture of Americana than we are typically accustomed to (i.e. Kerouac, Bukowski, Vonnegut, etc...).

Overall, the book was great. Once you get into it (for me it started on page 1) it's very difficult to put down no matter how heavy and often times disturbing it can be. However, racism is always disturbing no matter how you slice it. Baldwin just doesn't slice it in thin easy to digest pieces that's all. So if you want to read a 'nice', 'sweet' interacial love story don't purchase this. However, if you want to challenge yourself and allow your mind to expand and actually THINK, then by all means this is the perfect book for you.

In my opinion the first third of the novel contains some of the best writing in contemporary American literature: urgent, and gripping. This is the story of Rufus, a Black jazz musician living in New York City. Once this tightly written character makes his exit, however, the novel loses its momentum.

Baldwin does not create a gradual buildup of tension and emotion. Instead he leaps almost immediately into a bellowing peak and stays there all the way through the conclusion, an ungraceful pace that brings to mind a recording by Celine Dion or Michael Bolton. This is a novel that could easily have descended into kitschy melodrama, and it's a tribute to Baldwin's talent as a writer that he somehow weaves enough subtlety and complexity into the characters and events to maintain some sort of balance.

Some themes are reoccurring: knowing and seeing vs. willful blindness, friendship vs. betrayal, art as a profession vs. art for its own sake, and the impassable chasm of the racial divide. Other themes are less clear, especially when it comes to love. All of the characters in Another Country burn bright, and they love in a way that is all-consuming. No one writes love and sex like James Baldwin, and these scenes make an impact. The contradiction comes in the casual disregard for fidelity that these same characters show. Is Baldwin making the point that love, when so passionately felt, is an overwhelming burden that chases the lovers into other arms? Is it that we as humans are afraid of happiness and that we seek to destroy situations in which we truly would be happy? Is it that love is a weak bond next to the relentless persecution of the outer world? Looking at the characters and their actions, none of these explanations seem to stick; the reader simply ends up feeling jerked around, in that the emotions and passions narrated in the thoughts of the characters are so very often directly contradicted by the same character's actions in the very next scene.

The one theme that seems to clearly emerge is one of victimization. Baldwin paints a world in which no one is responsible for their own actions, and all of the characters see themselves headed towards their destruction. The characters feel helpless to steer their own fates, even to control their own violent and destructive actions (towards themselves and others). This isn't just a self-fulfilling prophecy - they don't destroy themselves simply because they believe themselves destined to fail; Baldwin actually seems to create a world in which no one can win. This conclusion struck me not only as bleak, but as a bit wrong-headed.

Another Country has a five star opening and a three star follow-up. There are passages of brilliance throughout the book, but I finished this wishing that Rufus's story had been told as a novella or a short story, and that the exploits of the other characters in the last two thirds of the book were left to the imagination of the reader.

I felt after reading this book almost as if I had just finished viewing a round table discussion about racial conflict, class conflict, and bisexuality all wrapped in one. I am blessed to have known such rich and visionary literature. This is a very insightful book. Baldwin comes at his subject matter fired up, yet without extreme bias. His pendulum is shifty, and raises quizzical emotions from the reader. Baldwin tackles issues of mammoth social and political porportion with profound insight. I had heard that this book was an insider's look at Homophobia in the late 50's and early 60's- I had heard wrong. This book is a study of diversity, acceptance, and love. It forces the reader to probe the age old query- Is it really possible to be in love with two people at the same time? I can only conclude that juggling 2 or more lovers, like some of these characters do, must be like walking into a pit of fire- the endeavors are certain to scar you, and change your view of love and the world for ever. I think at least one of the characters is in love with the existential high of being wanted and being a lover, more than being eternally and unconditionally loved in general. It forces one to really question norms and prohibitons, how fickle and momentary they actually are- how we change our own prohibitions to suit us personally.

This book is a profoundly courageous exhibit of power, rage, societal pressure and persuasion, desperation, and violence. It is not a book that corrupts an OPEN mind, yet a glimpse at all of the corruptive evils that still exist in the U.S. after nearly forty years.

It is a glimpse at the journey toward capturing the "brass ring" in one's life, the writing probes the question: Is all of the pain and suffering really worth it? Baldwin leaves this reader feeling that the lessons learned along the way in one's coming of age echo far more deeply into the cavern of one's soul, than obtaining the brass ring itself. This is a profound, ground shattering breakthrou! gh in writing for ANY era. His writing will never go out of style for the intelligent and savvy literary thinker----

An open mind is an estuary, abundantly seeking the richest minerals that the tide has to offer! Read this vividly moving tale with a blind fold, and seek to learn from it.

Like many of the other reviewers of this book, when I began to read this book I truly believed my mind to be as open as it could be. 400 pages later, I was on my way to a whole new spectrum of thought and perception about racial and sexual identity. This book made me cry 10 or 15 times and I became so attached to all of the characters that I found myself scouring the internet when I finished in the vain hope that Baldwin had written another book that picked up the stories of their lives at some point in the future. Unfortunately, it seems as though he did not, but that's life...a snapshot of time that means whatever it means to anyone who happens to observe it in action or in history. This book really taught me something about love, hate, struggle, and really gave me my first opportunity to view the world from the eyes of a gay African American man. No book could ever capture that experience fully, but this one at least gave me an idea of what it might be like, and I found myself as drawn into the allure of exploring a completely different lifestyle as much as the characters inside were.

I absolutely loved this book and it definitely had a positive impact on my life. I'm sure that sounds cliche, but it really did teach me more than a thing or two about human beings and gave a great snapshot of the '50s, much like On The Road by Jack Kerouac, but from a very different perspective.

Gay, straight. Man, Woman. Black, White. Foreign, American. Poor, Rich. Abuser, Abused. This novel deconstructs each of these binaries and challenges so many notions on so many levels it can be called no less than a masterpiece. This book takes the reader on a journey around the world and through the human heart. It asks the reader what it is to love. It speaks to all levels of the human experience. A book one can read over and over finding new things each time. In Book One, we are introduced not only to the white elite of Manhattan, but the homeless dirt poor of that same isle. We are confronted with suicide, domestic violence, and the taboos and non-chalance of a different time. In Book Two, we learn of another character, his lover, and the story of staying true to one's loyal companion while confronting the temptations that come with fame, loss, and familiarty. Baldwin succinctly wraps up this near-epic in Book Three. This book still affects me today. Rocking some of my true hardcore ideals. A must read for anyone with a mature mind.

Baldwin offers the most unique insight to race and sexuality in America ever offered the reading public. This book is a must-read for anyone with half a brain (those without, like the customer who thought it "pollutes the mind" with its sexual themes, will do best to stick to John Grisham and Tom Clancy. Fight through the dreary first chapters and let yourself be sucked in by the rich characters' inexplicable humanism.

This is a fascinating, vivid, and amazing book, about relationships between people. Not an easy read, and not a pretty picture of Greenwich Village and its inhabitants (prostitution, infidelity, drug abuse, suicide are among the issues), but an extremely effective and emotionally haunting one. It explores gender, race, and sexuality from a sympathetic and humanistic viewpoint, and has the power to shock even today, forty years after it was written.

First of all, I could not really put this book down while reading. I did get lost in the lives and the time and the city of the characters. I cared for them and understood the phacades they felt they had to put on, however, I often found it too over-emotional. Baldwin does make you uncomfortable with his brutal honesty, the horror of exisiting as an outsider always travels with the reader. That's good, and I do enjoy the book. But it takes away after a while. The dialogue becomes very rhetorical and forced. Everything is just layed out, instead of kind of put through with some drama. Now I'm not saying you always have to hide your message in some hemingwayish way in the dialogue, but I find it hard, at times, to believe that these characters are real people because of the stuff they say. Overall, I loved the book, though. It is timeless, yet it paints a picture of a particular time in NYC that is vivid and brilliant.

In an essay criticizing the works of Richard Wright, James Baldwin surveyed the field of African American literature and found much violence, but very little sex. As biographer James Campbell notes, "Another Country" is Baldwin's attempt to fill that perceived void; it has plenty of "sex" (from lust to romance), and it explores in particular an era in which the intersection of sex and race was increasingly capturing the public's attention.

The storyline concerns six people who are in some way connected to Rufus Scott, a jazz drummer whose suicide affects their lives in unpredictable and emotional ways. There are a straight white couple (the novelist Richard and his wife Cass), a mixed-race couple (Rufus's sister, Ida, and the writer Vivaldo), a gay couple (Eric and Yves), and an unexpected affair between two of the six friends.

The opening chapter in particular is one of Baldwin's most potent, combining both the violence of Wright's novels and the sex Baldwin felt was missing. The rest of the book is a rollercoaster of emotional highs and everyday life. The prose sours when Baldwin describes both the frayed lives of his characters and the steamy streets and seedy watering holes of Manhattan. And the lyrical treatment of Eric and Yves's relationship is especially affecting. The book was a huge best-seller when it was published, and I imagine it's this cutting-edge blend of controversy and passion that appealed to readers in the mid-1960s

But then there's the sex. By today's standard's, the descriptions are hardly explicit. Yet, unfortunately, these passages are so appallingly bad it's hard to believe that Baldwin wrote them: "He felt the bed throbbing beneath them, and heard it sing." "He began to gallop her, whinnying a little with delight, and, for the first time, became a little cold with fright...."--well, I'll spare you the rest.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss the book because of these scenes. The characters are both believable and unforgettable, the racial and sexual tensions are recognizably human, and the social milieu is still familiar to anyone who has lived near or in the bohemian neighborhoods of America.

This is an extremely intense, beautiful, and believable book about the complicated textures of relationships. Not only about the "typical" man-woman union, Baldwin's richly woven story also contains homosexual and bisexual relationships; inter-racial relationships; intricate and deeply explored male friendships; and, to a lesser degree (though with no less accuracy), the careful dance of women's friendships. The relationship between blacks and whites. The relationship between racists and non-racists. The relationship between the rich and the poor, between sell-outs and non sell-outs. So much is touched upon and examined in this novel that the 436 pages seem more like 600, and by the end I found myself taking notes. But the complexity was not at all daunting. Because of Baldwin's deep (but never boring) detailing and because of the fact that all of these topics are limited to the lives of six main characters, I was completely enthralled and moved, and often had to pause to consider my own feelings and viewpoints.

To me, this book is amazing simply because James Baldwin is able to make a thirty year old midwestern girl feel as though she thoroughly knows and understands a fictional group of struggling and eclectic writers and musicians from 1960's New York City. With _Another Country_, so aptly titled because Rufus, Vivaldo, Cass, Richard, Eric and Ida each seem to have their own, Baldwin was also able to further open a mind I thought was pretty wide already.