Go Tell It on the Mountain
1953 • 256 pages
Ratings28
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings28
Average rating4.2
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. 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.
With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
Reviews with the most likes.
I was so impressed by how the layers of this family unfolded through the book, and how the perspective of each family member brought more depth and new insight into their history.
This is a fantastic story of love and faith and the challenges that come with them. While just a narrow glimpse into a few characters lives, Go Tell It On the Mountain is deep and cutting and leaves so much room for considering the counterfactual. What should/would he/she/you have done in the same situation. What is right? What is beautiful? What is love?
I'll admit that I've tried to read this book before, but I didn't get absorbed. The audiobook is something wholly other. The narrator does such a fantastic job breathing life into the characters and giving them the voices that I wanted but did not quite get right in my head for reading.
Two hundred and fifteen monotonous pages of sermons, hymns, and Praise-Jesusing, and forty-seven compelling pages called “Elizabeth's Prayer”. Deeply unsatisfactory balance, that.
Le premier roman de James Baldwin nous parle d'un adolescent afro-américain et de sa famille, dont son père pasteur. A travers les pensées de John et les souvenirs de son père, de sa mère, et de sa tante, nous suivons le destin des afro-américains dans la première moitié du XXe siècle, et le rôle essentiel que joue la religion dans leur vie.
Le récit est lent, certains diront qu'il ne s'y passe pas grand chose, mais c'est une plongée subtile et riche dans l'âme humaine, avec les contradictions qui nous animent sans doute tous. Un beau roman, assurément.
