Notes of a Native Son
Ratings39
Average rating4.3
So well written and thought out, with great commentary and interwoven personal experience. Both of which cannot be separated.
Some of these essays feel like they could have been written now ... Not 50 years ago. Informative, serious, provocative and moving. I'm so very glad I read this book.
“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”
This hurt to get through but felt overwhelmingly like a text I should have read in high school. It hurt to be seen–for Baldwin's title essay Notes of Native Son reflected my inconsolable, depthless yet invisible rage at a young age. I honestly didn't know why or how, because I consider myself to have had a happy childhood (ignorant of the conformity happening outside the walls of my home). But as a second generation American, I acclimated as best as I could and was proud of a job well-done until the exact time I realized what exactly that pride meant. Spanish was my first language, at a certain point I was desperate to know everything about my mom's heritage. It's amazing and awful how completely alienation descends when you're confined to an identity that you shall never embody.
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
James Baldwin always leaves me thinking about the words he strings together. If you haven't read anyone of his work before, please, please take this as a sign to start.
Short Review: Some of the best essays I have read. The start of the book is literary and film criticism. And although I was vaguely aware of the plots of the books, I haven't read the two books or the movies. So that wasn't a great start to the book. But Part 2, about life in Harlem, about his brother's musical group's ill fated trip as political entertainment act in the south and a eulogy to his father were good. I think the eulogy of his father is the best essay of the book.
Part three is about his time in Europe.
What is striking about this series of essays is how race impacts every aspect of Baldwin's life. That isn't because Baldwin is trying to turn everything into a discussion about race, but because every aspect of his life is impacted by the fact that he is an African American man writing in the 1950s.
I look forward to reading some of his fiction in the future.
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/notes-of-a-native-son/