At its best, James Baldwin's fiction is lyrical, intense, poetic, outrageous, improvisatory, brutal, and transcendent. The first time I read his short story, "Sonny's Blues," I was sitting in one of those massive chain bookstores, drinking coffee and trying to block out the pabulum coming from the Muzak. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself choking back tears. The last three pages of "Sonny's Blues" are as good as it gets: Sonny breaks into a blistering piano solo, finally finding a voice for his repressed pain. Baldwin follows suit capturing the rhythms, the longing, the give and take of the best jazz in some of the most stunning prose I've encountered.
Unfortunately, Another Country is not Baldwin at his best. In fact, it's possibly the most frustrating novel I've ever read. Here, Baldwin is so determined to explode the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality and judging by the variety of sexual relationships on display here, he must have plotted those......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 725
Approximate Pages: 3 (260 words per double-spaced page) |