Book 11: Another Country

Written by James Baldwin

I’ll be recording a podcast with Jeremy tomorrow on Baldwin’s Another Country. It’s one of those books that I can’t wait to discuss - that I was floored reading. I read Go Tell It On The Mountain and Giovanni’s Room last year. I loved both, but not to the extent that I loved Another Country. I don’t like to consider a novel a favorite until I’ve read it a few times, or at least sat with it for more than a few weeks. The best books linger, inform all future reading, and change how we think about the world. So while I don’t know for sure, not yet, I think this novel could be one of the best I’ve read.

Baldwin’s descriptions are like photographs. His characters are profoundly human. Another Country was less of an exercise in reading (detached, analytical) and more of an exercise in experience (visceral, relatable, dripping with authenticity). The book moved me, consumed me. I want to read it again- immediately. But I know I have other books to read (89 to go!) I don’t think I’ll forget this one, though, not any time soon. And when I do, I’ll read it again.

More to say on the podcast…

Favorite Passages:

There was something frightening about the aspect of old friends, old lovers, who had, mysteriously, come to nothing. It argued the presence of some cancer which had been operating in them, invisibly, all along and which might, now, be operating in oneself.

New York seemed very strange indeed. It might, almost, for strange barbarity of manner and custom, for the sense of danger and horror barely sleeping beneath the rough, gregarious surface, have been some impenetrably exotic city of the East. So superbly was it in the present that it seemed to have nothing to do with the passage of time: time might have dismissed it as thoroughly as it had dismissed Carthage and Pompeii. It seemed to have no sense whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never—it was the general complaint—left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness.

She was not a singer yet. And if she were to be judged solely on the basis of her voice, low, rough-textured, of no very great range, she never would be. Yet, she had something which made Eric look up and caused the room to fall silent; and Vivaldo stared at Ida as though he had never seen her before. What she lacked in vocal power and, at the moment, in skill, she compensated for by a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of the self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms—while still leaving them standing, mightily, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills.