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I love Baldwin’s writing, his beautiful prose that punches me in the gut without fail. This book might be his most sophisticated, from a narrative structure point of view, but jeez, it was also his heaviest, as far as I am concerned. “Another Country� weaves together the story of a small group of friends living in New York in the 1950s, Rufus, Vivaldo, Cass, Ida and Eric. Loss brings them closer together, but also pulls them apart, both literally and metaphorically.

Baldwin did something remarkable with this book: it is so far ahead of its time in terms of analysis of race relations and the way racial identity can never be removed from the conversation in America. It is also extremely frank about sex, the confusion that sometimes veils sexual orientation, and love’s place in that discourse. The extremely introspective, warts and all narrative, can be painful to read, but the characters� confusion, anger and pain are so vivid that it is difficult to judge them. If anything, the sharpness with which he captured their inner struggle made me feel even more compassion for them, for their attempts at finding a tiny moment of happiness, dignity and capacity to survive in the cruel and messy world they live in. The pain every character in this book feels comes from a deep feeling of alienation, a feeling brought on by the judgement they see in other people’s eyes and their rage and being perceived as something so different from what they are. They push back, try to claim their identity more truthfully, but society pushes back harder�

The humanity Baldwin saw was not always pretty to look at, but he never averted his eye, and his writing reminds us of the flaws we all struggle with. This bleak books ends of a note of hope, a hope based in honesty and forgiveness. If you like Baldwin’s work, this is a dark but impressive example of his talent and his gift for seeing people as they really are.