What is your opinion on James Baldwin?

ZE GAY BLACK (2 FOR 1!) IS A GEENEEUS

>>24556541 (OP)
Martin Luther Queen

I read two of his books this month and personally enjoyed them a lot. He is great in expressing the suffering and psychological issues of the characters. The latest book I've read was Go tell it in the mountain, it was a heavy reading because of how too much feeling it has, everyone is suffering, remembering a really bad past and experience, you get overwhelmed by the narrative and it is hard to keep reading it for a long time.

>>24556560
so whats his best book?

I don't want to hear some darky bitching, I don't want to read about some darky bitching, and I don't want to be around any darkies bitching

>>24557183
Giovanni's Room

>>24556541 (OP)
Looks like the grinch if it was a gay nigger

>>24557512
you shouldn't say stuff like that

>>24556541 (OP)
I loved If Beale Street Could Talk and was less excited about Another Country. He writes in a way that provokes heavy emotion while you read. He’s a worthwhile read

>>24557575
Sorry

Giovanni’s Room and Go Tell it On the Mountain are legit great novels.
His essays have dated, but he’s an excellent prose stylist and they give an insight into his times.
>>24557595
Another Country is a real mess. Too self consciously an effort to hit the Big Important Themes. He wrote a whole essay slamming Mailer for falling into the myths about black sexuality being somehow more potent, more authentic, in The White Negro then writes exactly that theme into Another Country

>>24557595
>Another Country.
Another Country starts off very strong, with brilliant prose, but by the time you get to the middle it bogs down in bad (lack of) editing

>>24557777
To better apprehend the significance of Baldwin’s cultural representation in Another Country, it is worth considering this novel’s exilic qualities as well as how they reinforce the shape of the narrative. Only a few years after the novel’s release, Charles Newman published an analysis for the Yale Review describing Another Country as a modern Jamesian masterpiece: “[t]he amphibious elegance of such syntax comes naturally to an artist obsessed by dualities, paradoxes. The Atlantic Ocean separated James’s mind into opposed hemispheres, and the gulf of color so cleaves Baldwin. The antipodes of their worlds propose a dialectical art”. This would not be the first time Baldwin’s prose would be remarked upon for its similarities to Henry James’s tightly-wound labyrinths of language; on the contrary, critical comparison to James have become the norm, and Leeming describes him as “the writer [Baldwin] most admired”. Newman’s early analysis of Another Country is helpful for how it unpacks Baldwin’s “social paradoxes” to show how both writers’ central “problem . . . is more universal – the opacity of their culture and the question of identity within it. For Baldwin assumes, in the consequences of his culture, the crisis of his identity, the reflective burden of Western Man. His color is his metaphor, his vantage”. Newman qualifies this by arguing that Henry James’s characters are cursed by wealth no more or less than Baldwin’s characters are cursed by their color, their blackness. His critique here is valid insofar as it relates to Baldwin’s literary output as of 1966, but it does come with the caveat that such a reading tends to overlook the author’s very real and very visceral engagement with racism and white supremacy in favor of a neat stylistic analysis. Nonetheless, there are many key insights to be gained from the Jamesian comparison, not the least of which being how both of them wrote in exile and how that exile played an important role in their understanding of American culture and identity: “both writers realized early that the American fabric is not subject to European tailoring, that America has no culture in European terms . . . One learns about America, not from being in Europe as much as from not being in America”. Ultimately, Newman’s comparison of Another Country to Henry James seeks to show how the novel employs richly decorated prose, complex, aestheticized plotting and a ruthless mastery of paradox to achieve a vision of stasis evoking a strange admixture of completion and of having gotten nowhere.