the 941

My last 941 Book CL-B entry took 42 days to get through; today’s took me, well, about a day. And the reason why is simple: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is 893 pages long; James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time a mere 106.

While Baldwin achieved most renown during his lifetime for his fiction (I cannot recommend Another Country highly enough), Fire is a compilation of two essays, one a letter addressed to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the emancipation of African-Americans, the other a longer look at dangerously unstable race relations in the early ’60s and the rise of the Nation of Islam, with an extended description of an intimate evening Baldwin spent dining with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

As you might expect, Baldwin sears the page with his evocation of the violence and humiliation white America has visited upon African-Americans. He points out the philosophical disagreements he has with Muhammad’s movement, namely its one-dimensional portrayal of whites as devils, but recognizes its appeal:

Having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst. The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. … For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language. The privacy of his experience, which is only beginning to be recognized in language, and which is denied or ignored in official and popular speech—hence the Negro idiom—lends credibility to any system that pretends to clarify it.

Political tracts are very rarely intrinsically interesting enough to endure beyond their specific contexts, but The Fire Next Time certainly does that. If you’ve read Baldwin the novelist, it will broaden your understanding of his work; if the fate of white-black relations matters to you (and it should), it’s worth a look.

Upcoming entries in The 941 Book CL-B

• Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (Started this firsthand account of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, last night, and will probably get around to finishing it next week. Stay tuned, dear CL-B members.)
• Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness
  
• Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
• Who else could land on this list? Milan Kundera?  Virginia Woolf? Gertrude Stein? Henry James? You won’t know unless you tune in next time.

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