Another Country

Literary fiction

First published: 1962
Print length: 436 pagesVintage Books, 1993

Description

Another Country moves among Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France in the late 1950s. Jazz drummer Rufus Scott begins a relationship with Leona, a white woman from the South, while living among writers, artists, and friends. After Rufus’s death, those who knew him struggle to understand his life and confront uncomfortable truths about themselves. His friend Vivaldo enters a relationship with Rufus’s grieving sister, Ida, under the pressure of racial tension. Eric, an actor and Rufus’s former lover, returns to New York from France with a more settled perspective. Through these connected lives, the novel examines sexuality, interracial relationships, infidelity, grief, and the difficult consequences of intimacy.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Lyrical

Pace

Measured

Tone

Dark · Earnest · Intimate · Melancholic

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

BelongingGriefIdentityLoveRace and racismSexuality

About James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and civil rights activist whose work places private conflict under the pressure of race, religion, sexuality, and family life. His essays move between personal testimony and sustained argument, using memory and cultural criticism to show how public ideas enter intimate relations. In The Fire Next Time, a letter to his nephew expands into an examination of American racial history, while recollections of Harlem churches and the Nation of Islam sharpen his account of race and faith. His fiction is often dense and lyrical, with shifts into memory and interior reflection that widen a concentrated crisis. Go Tell It on the Mountain confines its present action largely to one day, then opens John Grimes’s spiritual and sexual struggle onto his family’s history. Giovanni’s Room uses a more tightly enclosed drama. David’s affair in Paris unfolds through self-scrutiny, evasion, and the claustrophobic setting of Giovanni’s room. Baldwin repeatedly joins social analysis to the unstable stories people tell about themselves.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Vintage Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780679744719

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