vlog sekolah - I find novels of bohemianism infinitely attractive. With their liberal joie de vivre in the face of bitter adversity, their respect for people irrespective of creed or class, their creative stimulus that drives them on, and their healthy spurning of the currency of money.
What is also very exciting about them is the simple and altogether physical pleasure derived from reading about the taboos and ill-conceived acts of a group of people you could never be a part of, for many reasons, but mostly, because one simply cares more about life than they appear to.
While James Baldwin's Another Country has all of the trappings of 1950s American dilettantism, it crosses the boundary of what is essentially a genre of extreme parody, effectually satirising the conservative world by highlighting the fun of its polar opposite, into a serious book on racism, sexual inequality, homophobia, xenophobia, and the problems faced in a life ruined by a love of music and artistry. While this is understandable, when Baldwin himself is considered (as a gay black man in America at this time, during which he must have suffered great indignity), it goes just far enough to make the reader feel guilty for ever enjoying the face of a novelistic 'type', without truly comprehending its roots. This is good, in many ways, but bad in a great deal more.
Another Country is really about tragedy in its original sense. As Aristotle set down the principle rules of this eminent genre, Baldwin almost seems to trace his characters straight out of the Ancient Greek premise. The hamartia of the hero (his fatal flaw that ruins him) can be seen through Rufus Scott's internalised racism that he sees through the eyes of so many people. His paranoia prevents him from becoming a successful jazz drummer as he always wanted to be, and the lover to Leona (a white woman from the south, troubled dramatically with her own failed life) as she would like him to be. The peripeteia, or decline of the hero, is clear as Rufus brings himself to destruction via this racism, and the cathartic outpouring - which comes as a result of the eventual anagnorisis (sudden realisation of the flaw at a time to late to prevent the fall) of Rufus who, too late, appreciates his fault in his downfall, - is traced through the lives of his friends Richard, Cass, Eric, and more importantly Vivaldo and Rufus' sister Ida, whose relationship is also fated to eventual doom through the opposite form of racism, i.e. that of the black woman towards the white man.
With complex themes of jealousy, ignorance, sexuality, denial, as well as the aforementioned burdens of this effort-fully poignant novel, and many others besides, Another Country stops being a novel about the 'country' designed by bohemian codes of living, designed around expression and artistic impressionism, and instead becomes a lecture, almost a rant, on the frailties of man. This is not an enjoyable novel, nor does it make the reader feel good about themselves or their lives, or indeed the world in which they live. What it does feel, however, is necessary.
It would have been very easy to put the book down and simply stop trying, and this, at times, is very tempting; but the infinite sadness of the characters, the events you wish you could stop before they happen, and the ever-compelling setting of down-town New York all contribute to combat this instinct when combined with the obligation the reader feels to finish the book, no matter how painful.
The characters of Another Country are quite clearly drawn from real life - in most part from Baldwin himself, as he sees Rufus as his persona had he stayed in New York and struggled on, Eric as an expression of his relaxation, literary expression, and sexual gratification while in Paris, and Vivaldo characterises his difficulty with writing (this novel alone took fourteen years to finish). It would be routine, at this juncture, to refer to Baldwin's style, but in this novel it strangely seems not to matter. There are few errors and the novel is easy to read, which is its entire point. The reader is to follow the lives of the characters to their end without deviation, and Baldwin's prose, being stark and often profane, establishes this without any unnecessary literary trappings. He simply tells the story as he feels it.
New York is, and always will be, a haven for artists and a pit of torment for them. Its atmosphere in the steam of its pavement-vents, in the piercing yellow of the taxis, and the cruel height of its buildings at once seems to measure success against failure in every line of Baldwin's novel. This is, perhaps, the saving grace of a novel built around the feelings of immense hurt that are wholly individual and, as a result of this, sometimes a little hard to read. Nevertheless, the novel is winning in many other respects, and comes, in this review, with a respect hard-won.
