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��Love was a country he knew nothing about.��

Where would we be without love? It uplifts, it hurts, it sends us ricocheting with one another across existence, and we all grapple with consuming or being consumed by one another in its name as we struggle to apply our love with that of another. ��Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,�� James Baldwin wrote in his nonfiction work, The Fire Next Time, and the duality of understanding or being understood with the fear of being truly perceived drives much of Another Country, a striking portrait of the ways society informs our collisions of love that we all use as a method of chipping away at ourselves to discover our identities. It tells the stories of a group of young people living in Greenwich Village in the 70s, ��all equal in misery, confusion, and despair,, as they inflict one another with themselves in emotional and sexual relations. At the heart of this is Rufus, a Black musician who’s relationship with the white Leona exposes the struggles of being Black in America, and the reverberations of his life are constantly felt against the lives of his friends, family and former lovers in searing portrait of the obfuscations of being human in a world with obdurate social enforcement on the ways we can love. There is tragedy in the miscommunications of love, worst when it is an unrequited love affair with a world which, instead of love, shows only scorn back through society to those who are Black or queer. Brilliant and impossible to put down, feelings at once a quick read and a hefty psychological investigation into gendered interactions and racism, Another Country tackles the ineffable sadness and hunger of finding oneself in the chaos of human relations.

��Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together.��

James Baldwin can WRITE. I mean, this is a 400pg book that breezes by from the way his prose grabs you by the heart and makes it beat to its rhythm, driving you like a bassline across the story in which his characters seem so alive on the page that you begin to wonder if they are your friends as well. The writing moves like jazz. He has heavily punctuated sentences where the commas and dashes drive the writing forward like a drum beat, propelling the reader through melodies of struggle and understanding but also bringing the city to life, thrumming along to the beat. The locations become characters in their own right: New York reads as a violent cacophony of hectic lives, Harlem rolls out as ��sexual excitement, with danger, like a promise, waiting,�� whereas France vibes calm and slow through the novel. While reading this it felt akin to the writing and psychological narratives of Fyodor Dostoevsky, something I felt justified in when Baldwin name drops him multiple times in the first half, but the book engulfs you with it’s world and makes you feel like you are there engaging and complicit in all the uncomfortable glory of it’s story. Plus there are passages that just read with such intensity, life a fever dream of insight taking flight in his prose, with waves of emotion and scorching critiques of love such as:

��There was only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender. And the terror: which all seemed to begin and end and begin again—forever—in a cavern behind the eye. And whatever stalked there saw, and spread the news of what it saw throughout to entire kingdom of whomever, though the eye itself might perish. What order could prevail against so grim a privacy? And yet, without order, of what value was the mystery? Order. Order. Set thine house in order. He sipped his whiskey��

Baldwin can transport you through the stratosphere with philosophical musings then abruptly return you to the mundanities of life with expertise, playing your mind like a jazz horn then returning you to sipping your drink watching it all unfold. Baldwin has a lot to say, and despite the decades that have elapsed since this first went to print, it is all just as relevant today.

��It’s not possible to forget anybody you’ve destroyed.��

Love is often used in metaphors about being consumed. Think of phrases like ‘loves burning flame,�� or the idea of giving oneself to another. As we see in Another Country, each person’s ideas of love is unique, and the ways we brush up against one another with our individual aims of love often hurts those we love most. Love is dropping your armor and being most vulnerable, opening up to the possibility of hurt. Baldwin shows this is just part of love, such as when Cass says to her husband, Richard

��you and I have hurt each other—many times. Sometimes we didn’t mean to and sometimes we did. And wasn’t it because—just because—we loved—love—each other?��

Love is shown as both creation and destruction, a dual imagery not unlike the way waves are used in the novel: the black waves of destruction Rufus hallucinates compared to the way Eric says Yves' voice washed over him in soothing waves. But, tragically, all the loves of the novel find friction in the variances each person tries to love the other. Cass, for instance, feels like housekeeper ignored by Richard who spends all his time working, but for Richard working to provide is how he feels he should show love (this is getting into some Five Love Language territory, but you see what I mean). These aren’t portraits of problematic people per say—though they are all problematic and hurt and betray each other—but merely people as people are with all their flaws, fears, foibles and failures. It is quite moving and Baldwin embodies individual perspectives across race and gender with extraordinary dexterity that truly brings them to life.

��His life, passions, trials, loves, were, at worst, filth, and, at best, disease in the eyes of the world, and crimes in the eyes of his countrymen.��

Often we see that external forces are also acting upon the characters, adding friction to already perilous affairs. When Rufus and Leona first get together, there is an immediate air of distaste aimed at them when they go out into public for being a mixed race couple. ��[Rufus] has not thought at all about this world and its power to hate and destroy,�� and this unease seeps into him, making him react violently with rage and jealousy at Leona, or picking fights with any white man he perceives to be looking down on him. Similarly we see how being queer is equally looked down upon, and the intersection of Black and queer only exponentially raises the ire of society. This novel does contain a lot of domestic abuse and toxic masculinity, be forewarned, yet Baldwin refrains from passing judgment on his characters and never directs the reader to either. Instead, everyone is handled sympathetically, allowing you to see the social forces that back them into corners. Baldwin never negates their actions with the causes as understanding does not mean condoning, but he does pull back the psychological curtains to see the forces at work which understandably lead to so much suffering, rage and insecurity.

��And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time's true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. ��

They say society in the US is a melting pot, but it is more of a violent blender with blades that hack away. Being Black is to be in danger in the America, Baldwin argues, and we see how even some of the well-meaning white characters fail to understand it. We have Jane who weaponizes her whiteness and, when shouting of her white womanhood feeling threatened by a Black man, causes a bar fight nearly killing Rufus and Vivaldo. Cass must even explain that, sure, bad things happen to everyone ��but they didn’t happen to you because you are white,�� she tells Richard, but the troubles and gatekeeping that befalls Rufus ��happens because they are colored. And that makes a difference.�� The racism, faced by Baldwin as well causing him to leave the US to live in France where he wrote this book, is seen as a function of US society that keeps Black people down on purpose while claiming to be the land of opportunity. As Ida says to Cass:

��They keep you here because you’re black, the filthy, white cock suckers, while they go around jerking themselves off with all that jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with that same music, too, only, leep your distance.��

Ida calls bullshit on the whole proclamation of freedom in the US, looking at all the progress only to be held back (such as Jim Crow laws) and recognizes freedom means White Only. But everyone must playact otherwise, causing a lot of ambiguity and despair in their own identity having to support a system hellbent on destroying them. In a novel where a search for identity often trips over self-hatred and internalized racism or homophobia, we see Rufus act in ways his sister Ida criticizes as avoiding being Black as if out of shame. Even Vivaldo says he only paid attention to Leona because she was white, something that is reversed later when Vivaldo considers that his relationship with Ida might be because she was not white…that she would not dare despise him.��

This is key in Vivaldo, who also recognizes that he may have hated Rufus for being Black and his close friendship compensated for it. Vivaldi who lived in Harlem, who hung with the Black crowd. We see in a way that he uses Black people and Black culture as a way to find his identity, but as a white man he is consuming something not for him in a way that is used to prop him up. In modern context he is the well-enough-off college kid who lives in the poor districts of a big city for the excitement and edginess, knows all the right inclusivity terms, curates his social media to be all about productive allyship and social justice, but at the end of the day is using it all less to prop up the communities he claims to love but to convince himself he is good and doing good. Not to only drag Vivaldo, who is certainly my favorite character of the bunch. I love the whole rivalry between him and Richard, Richard who is publishing a book Vivaldo finds underwhelming while struggling to write his own—he realizes he does not understand his characters enough to make them act correctly for the story which metaphor’s his own lack of understanding of himself keeping him in a hiatus of emotional growth.

But society at large is also acting against them in ways beyond racism and homophobia, though these are products of the larger forces. Society crushes some in order to uphold others, divides by class, consumes the poor in factories and workshops to benefit the owner class.

��People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.��

How is one to love and thrive under these conditions? All the expectations, social stigmas, rules and regulations on how to love befall these fledgling relationships and send everyone on a crash course.

��How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you ���.��

Each character hurts the others and is hurt in return with a whole tangled web of affairs and lies. They all want to be understood, but being understood means giving yourself away to someone. To be known, truly known, is to be vulnerable and is frightening. Jealousy occurs from this insecurity, jealousy that threatens every relationship in the book and sends us towards the tumultuous climax of affairs and tears. ��Love does not begin and end the way we think,�� Baldwin wrote years later, ��love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.�� And that is what we see, these characters growing up and being forged in the flames of their own missteps. I’m beginning to think,�� Cass says near the end of the novel, ��that growing just means learning more and more about anguish.�� By the end everyone has had their share of anguish, but the future is uncertain and possibilities are vast.

Another Country is an absolutely outstanding novel that flows to the beat of life and never shirks from the grit and pain of living. These characters are remarkable and we watch them all struggle to understand one another, seeing each other's existence as if it were a foreign country. This was my first Baldwin, and I am sorry I haven’t read him before but will certainly continue to do so as I was blown away. There is such power and passion here, so much empathy for the characters even in their darkest moments, and despite all the suffering under the cold sun of the novel, it fills your heart. Baldwin tackles racism and homophobia head on, shouts back at the world with an intensity of words and desire for justice and delivers a story that will shake you to the core. Nothing but awe for Another Country.

5/5

��Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person result in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together.��