Another Country

My first Baldwin. This whole work contains this deep melancholy, infused into nearly every sentence. A deeply human hurt propels the narrative forward, and it gets uglier, and it hurts you in turn because at some point, you start to remember the pains you've accumulated, forgotten or not, and Baldwin pulls them out of you and forces you to confront them in stark black and white. I'm unsure if it was akin to therapy or confession, but there is a piece of the human soul in this book, and I found myself deeply moved by it.

Shoutout to Vivaldo, maybe the most resonant character I've ever read.

4.5

Baldwin's writing is 10 out of 10 in this book. The way you can deeply feel every emotion, picture every landscape and seamlessly immerse yourself into the minds of each character with all their complex relationships and emotions...
I really don't care that this didn't have a plot at all. It's a character study of all the characters that share center stage and their complicated yet undeniably human interactions with the people they love.

J'aime beaucoup la plume de James Baldwin, ainsi que sa capacité à rendre vivants des personnages complexes et riches. Ce roman m'a semblé moins percutant que ses deux premiers, peut-être parce qu'il est plus long, mais il y aborde malgré tout avec force des thèmes qui lui étaient chers : l'amour, l'amitié, la France et les États-Unis, et les relations raciales aux USA. C'est là-dessus que ce roman se distingue des deux précédents : là où le premier mettait en scène quasi-exclusivement des personnages noirs et où le deuxième n'offrait que des personnages blancs, celui-ci propose la rencontre des deux mondes et le regard de chacun sur l'autre, à travers notamment du couple mixte formé par Vivaldo et Ida.

Cela n'a pas toujours été une lecture aisée, en raison de quelques faiblesses dans le rythme du roman, mais ce fut toutefois une expérience intéressante et enrichissante, en plus d'être un plaisir littéraire.

Beautifully written, but pretty dang depressing. Basically everyone cheats on everyone, love is fleeting, race relations are incredibly tense, and life sucks... but Baldwin is a fantastic writer of one's consciousness, it's easy to get swept up in this sensuous writing.
Favorite quote that really resonated, exploring paradoxes of the intimacy you can feel with strangers and the strangeness you can feel with the one you love:
“But the face of a lover is unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

What a painful, ugly, complex, beautiful, simple story. Baldwin succeeds in creating intoxicating imperfect characters and weaving their lives together in a web where the wrong seems right and the right seems impossible.

A bit explicit. Not for children.

It's tough to give this one five stars, only because Baldwin's depiction of women in the book is lacking the nuance and intensity that his depiction of men excels at. But I have to give it five stars because it's the sort of book that I can honestly say: I have never read anything like this. Lots of amazing queer characters, lots of the deep sadnesses and amazing joys of everyday life, amazing comments on race and economics that don't stray into heavy-handedness too often. I know the book has critiques that it is uneven, and perhaps it is, but this book's unevenness is better than most of the even “masterpieces” I've read.

I'm embarrassed to say this is the first Baldwin book I've read. Can't wait to read more.