leona in another country by james baldwin

Faustus (though at this point I’m not sure) Mephistopheles says to Faustus, “Thou hast committed. I’ve always thought the title came from Marlowe’s Dr.

He died when I was sixteen, and among the many things I wish I’d been able to talk to him about, this book would now be at the top of the list. A major pleasure of Baldwin’s fiction is the writing itself.Īnother Country, published in 1962, is a book that was around my house when I was young, and the idea that my father-who was an avid reader of fiction and an Eisenhower Republican (though he voted for Johnson in ’64), actually read this novel, with its complicated and angry race relations and its portrait of gay relationships-is stunning to me. But the writing in Giovanni’s Room is much stronger and surer of itself than in the first novel. He loved both an Italian man named Giovanni and a woman named Hella whom he thought he might marry, but his love for the woman seemed dutiful it was Giovanni he was passionate about. Giovanni’s Room, in comparison, is novella-length, a heartbreaking story about a man trying to make up his mind about his sexuality in the midst of a repressive culture, though he was in France, not the United States. Go Tell It on the Mountain reads like apprentice work it apparently took Baldwin ten years to write, and is obviously autobiographical it concerns a brand of evangelical fundamentalism that Baldwin later rejected and that I find hard to take.

In the midst of the endless current theorizing about race and sexuality and gender identity, and talk of all the books we must read (I hate to be told I must read a book ), I’ve gone to writers who have survived the test of time, first the great Toni Morrison, whose work I read in it’s entirety, and now James Baldwin, whose non-fiction I read when I was young (with almost no comprehension) but whose fiction I never got to. Early Novels and Stories by James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country.

Leona in another country by james baldwin