I read part of this and listened via whispersync to the other part. The reader was excellent, but . . . this was the first book in a long time that I felt the "audible" version was simply too difficult to follow. Every section I read I enjoyed more than any section where I only listened. Baldwin builds his sentences and paragraphs, and I just couldn't be a good enough listener for the density of the prose. I will reread soon, but just the text.
Observations:
1) The experience of the Black church--singing, ecstasy--makes religion physically real.
2) Strong sense of sin comes with puberty.
3) John feels the power of his intellect as something that separates him from others.
4) Black woman as strong presence, realistic, often in spite of the men they marry.
5) The North as a place that promises the possibility of more, but that frequently doesn't deliver.
6) After his "conversion," young John notices, "lean cat with yellow eyes," a "gray bird perching on the metal cornice of the roof," a "siren," a "clanging of a bell," an "ambulance." The moment of ecstatic belief threatened immediately.
I don't know that I've ever read a book with an ending where the main character finds God, the reader is in a way happy for him, and yet the reader is absolutely certain that this conversion is temporary and rooted in a turn away from the truth. Remarkable.
The "other woman," pregnant, to John's adopted father. She is pregnant, he protests that he is married. "What I mean is, if you was able to forget about (your wife) once, you ought to be able to forget her twice.
Page 135--on living among white men: "And blood, in all the cities through which he passed, ran down. There seemed no door, anywhere, behind which blood did not call out unceasingly."
The appeal of Jesus--a white man who knows what it feels like to be black.
Observations:
1) The experience of the Black church--singing, ecstasy--makes religion physically real.
2) Strong sense of sin comes with puberty.
3) John feels the power of his intellect as something that separates him from others.
4) Black woman as strong presence, realistic, often in spite of the men they marry.
5) The North as a place that promises the possibility of more, but that frequently doesn't deliver.
6) After his "conversion," young John notices, "lean cat with yellow eyes," a "gray bird perching on the metal cornice of the roof," a "siren," a "clanging of a bell," an "ambulance." The moment of ecstatic belief threatened immediately.
I don't know that I've ever read a book with an ending where the main character finds God, the reader is in a way happy for him, and yet the reader is absolutely certain that this conversion is temporary and rooted in a turn away from the truth. Remarkable.
The "other woman," pregnant, to John's adopted father. She is pregnant, he protests that he is married. "What I mean is, if you was able to forget about (your wife) once, you ought to be able to forget her twice.
Page 135--on living among white men: "And blood, in all the cities through which he passed, ran down. There seemed no door, anywhere, behind which blood did not call out unceasingly."
The appeal of Jesus--a white man who knows what it feels like to be black.
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