Richard hasn’t written a sellout book to make money - “if only!” Cass proclaims - but rather because sellout quality writing Mentor, and his wife Cass’s reaction to it. What felt most true in some regard was the depiction of the career of Richard, Vivaldo’s The book’s anachronisms stem more from the sense that characters define themselves almost entirely by their erotic lives. I’m not suggesting by any means that we live in a racial paradise. “Another Country” is not the sort of book that offers a vision of New York that could easily pass for what the city feels like today. I wondered as I read whether this added to my sense of the book’s being seeming dated. Rufus and his friend Vivaldo are sexually fluid they involve themselves with men and women in ways that are not commonplace in theĬontemporary novel. To beat his white girlfriend, doubly a victim because she is poor and uneducated. Baldwin avoids making him entirely sympathetic by giving him a misogynistic bent that compels him The novel gives us Rufus Scott, a jazz musician, defined by the psychological traumas largely inflicted on him by race. It could withstand his own critical apparatus. The social agendas in these novels were too blatant for Baldwin’s liking, but reading “Another Country,” I wondered over and over whether In the Partisan Review, Baldwin coined the phrase “protest fiction,” a derisive designation for those African-American themed novels in which black characters were too obviously victimized by theirĬircumstances, or were made to seem too mythically sexual. Much of the writing in “Another Country” feels forced and stilted, the miles of the journey manifest on the page. Much, he eventually took up an actor friend’s invitation to go to Turkey, where diminished distractions permitted him to finish a book that had seemed unpublishable.Īt times, the process and struggle make themselves all too evident. The characters, he said, refused to talk to him. The project had become a source of torture for Baldwin. To Paris and later to Istanbul, whose dateline provides the book’s end note. Begun in New York, the unfinished novel went with Baldwin James Baldwin’s “Another Country,” published in 1962, was written over the course of 13 years, in at least three cities and two continents. Join us for our next live online conversation, on May 16 from 7 to 10 p.m. The project lands him in the New York of 1882, where, as a sidebar to his adventures, he has reason to trace the mystery of a half-destroyed letter for a friend. Written in 1970, the novel revolves around the advertising artist Si Morley, who is recruited by the government to join a secretive operation committed to exploring the possibility of time travel.
Rufus is a creative genuis that could have been a better man, but instead he lived in a time where he was just seen as another black man.Updated Our next selection will be “Time and Again,” by Jack Finney, which Steven King has called “the great time travel story.” He is a tortured black man, some would say most black men are tortured in the United States, and he falls for a white woman who he physically abuses, but loves very much.
Rufus Scott can considered to be the main character in "Another Country" even though he dies in the first chapter. I like the scene because it show James Baldwin's writing ability, it is descriptive, and you can see it in your mind's eye. I love the scene where Eric recalls walking in Europe and he is carrying a radio in his hand,listening to classic musical, and he is followed by a man that will be his lover. You feel like you get to know each of the characters, and you want them to be settled, but that is difficult based on the discrimination of the time, and how James Baldwin's writes about love as something that can be used to destroy another person, and he thinks that how a lot of people use love.