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Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
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4/4.5 stars
As always, James Baldwin crafts a poetic piece of art. I loved the exploration of faith in this novel, including what it means to be a person of faith and what it means to be a good person (and how those may not always be the same thing). There were definitely parts that went over my head, so I'm glad I have a print copy to go over in the years to come and think about. To me, it was somewhat ambiguous whether it was a critique of faith or an ode to being saved by faith. Honestly, it's probably both. I definitely liked reading from John's perspective and Elizabeth's perspective more so than Gabriel's and Florence's, but none dragged to the point that I couldn't get through.
-At this there sprang into his mother’s face something startling, beautiful, unspeakably sad—as though she were looking far beyond him at a long, dark road, and seeing on that road a traveler in perpetual danger. Was it he, the traveler? or herself? or was she thinking of the cross of Jesus? (14%)
-At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be piked up once more in the morning. (52%)
-He could not pray. His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man’s decent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom—bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him. (63%)
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