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A black and white photo shows James Baldwin sits at a table gesturing with one hand with a coffee pot and glasses in front of him.

Another Country

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The Penguin Classic cover features red cut-outs of figures layered over a neutral background.
Penguin Classic edition

by Ben H.

“Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen – for the weight of this city was murderous” 

James Baldwin

Another Country is a novel that’s more like a play or a poem. Short descriptions set scenes like flashes of light, and dialogue propels us through the story. James Baldwin is brilliant and empathetic; his depiction of humanity is beautiful. Passages that make you weep are followed immediately by passages that make you laugh. Dark episodes in the cold rain follow erotic passages in warm apartments. Baldwin’s relentless prose attack zigs and zags at the reader, and he never lets up. He pulls the threads of the tangled ball of relationships at the center of the novel tighter and tighter. Another Country is addictive and almost unbearably tense. 

Baldwin explores race, gender, sexuality, religion, art, and life in America in the 1950s through the interactions of a group of memorable characters. First, we meet Rufus Scott, a black jazz drummer, stumbling out of a movie theater in New York, disheveled and desperate. His experience as a black man in America is really the central pillar of the story. His wretched love/hate relationship with Leona, a white woman from the south, ruins both of their lives and sets a grim tone for a serious book. Vivaldo, a white man, is arguably the main character. Vivaldo is a struggling writer and Rufus’ best friend. Vivaldo is everywhere. He felt to me like a stand-in for James Baldwin himself.

France offers the reader a brief respite from the grimness of New York. We first meet Eric and his boyfriend Yves on a French beach. The passages set abroad are lovely and warm, while the scenes in New York are often brutal and freezing or unforgiving and sizzling. Baldwin’s depiction of France juxtaposed with that of America neatly illustrates the way Baldwin, a gay black man, felt in France versus the way he felt in the United States.

The many protagonists provide a narrative richness I really loved. Besides Rufus and Vivaldo, Cass (maybe my favorite character), Ida (Rufus’s sister and an incredible character), and Eric (in his own way the heartbeat of the book) are the other main players in this story of relationships and race. The New York Times compared Another Country to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and I think it’s a great comparison. Baldwin also brings the furious pace of a sax solo to his poetic novel. If you want to know what it’s like to read Another Country, listen to “Countdown” off of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.

Another Country really does have a momentous heft to it. Baldwin, like an alchemical wordsmith, achieved something magical with everyday material. On the surface, it’s just the story of a few overlapping relationships during the 50s. But by the time you turn the last page, it feels like you’re holding something vital in your hands. I really do believe that books like this can change the way people view and treat one another.

If you’ve already read Another Country, visit HCLS and see if we have a Baldwin that you haven’t yet read (or if we can recommend something similar). If you haven’t read Another Country, you have money in the bank. You can’t go wrong with Mr. Baldwin.

Ben Hamilton works at Project Literacy, Howard County Library’s adult basic education initiative, based at HCLS Central Branch. He loves reading, writing, walking, and talking (all the basics).

The cover is a photograph of Van Gogh's painting, "The Bedroom, 1888." The scripted text, "the Yellow House" appears atop Van Gogh's painting of his room in Arles, with a single wooden bed, a small chair, a side table, and six pained windows. The colors are natural wood browns and a red blanket. The brush work is restrained.

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks In Arles

Nina L. Leave a comment

By Nina L.

We know them today as giants of art history, but in 1888 French artist Paul Gauguin had an estranged family, a background in financial trading, and limited artistic success. Vincent Van Gogh, a 35-year-old Dutchman, had failed miserably at several vocations before turning to art with the encouragement and financial support of his brother Theo.

The Yellow House, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles, by Martin Gayford, is an intimate and revelatory look at a time when Van Gogh and Gauguin lived together in a self-styled artist’s colony of two. They were an odd pair, full of contrasts – Gauguin cerebral, Van Gogh emotional, but both drawn to the idea of inventing a new art of the future. The book follows the events as they unfold day-to-day with granular detail.  Drawing on the copious letters of both artists, Gayford makes it easy to imagine being in the house looking on as the two men worked in the small, cramped, ten-foot wide studio filled with the heavy atmosphere of tobacco and turpentine.  

While living in Paris, Van Gogh dreamed of starting an artist’s colony in the south of France. He settled on Arles, a provincial town on the way to the Mediterranean coast. Both he and Theo admired Gauguin, enticing him to Arles with the offer of free room and board in exchange for his paintings.  Van Gogh, who later became the greater artist of the two, regarded Gauguin as a mentor and had high expectations of living and working together. In anxious anticipation of Gauguin’s arrival, he set about transforming the little yellow house, carefully choosing furnishings, brightening the exterior and interior with paint, and hanging his art work throughout the house, including his newly created Sunflowers. The first few weeks went well, with exchanges of ideas and daily painting trips to the surrounding countryside, but when the weather turned cold and rainy, spending all day in the small, cramped space didn’t bode well for the two large personalities.

By late December of 1888 the relationship was fraying and Gauguin considered returning to Paris. On December 23rd, while feverishly working on a painting, Van Gogh suffered a mental attack and cut off part of his ear with a razor. He then wrapped the ear in newspaper and took it to a local brothel with instructions to give it to one of the women. Gauguin, alarmed at Van Gogh’s deteriorating state, had spent the night in a hotel. Returning to the house the next day he discovered a trail of blood and Van Gogh deep asleep in bed with no memory of the previous night. The traumatic events ended the dream of living and working together. Gauguin left for Paris, later moving to Tahiti, never to see Van Gogh again. For the rest of his short life Van Gogh struggled with mental illness, which Gayford attributes to bipolar disorder, gaining fame only after his death.

After reading the book, I found myself looking at the world differently, imagining how Van Gogh or Gauguin would see it. One of Van Gogh’s breakthroughs was in placing contrasting colors side by side. Placing colors together which are opposites on the color wheel creates a visual frisson, or what Van Gogh called electricity. He even had a box of yarn to test out color combinations before using his paints.

Interested in creating art work in the style of Van Gogh? Here is a project suitable for any age. Take some time to look at one of Van Gogh’s paintings, such as A Starry Night. Use a blue or gray colored pastel or construction paper along with chalk pastels in white, yellows, oranges, blues, and purples. Black can be added as an accent. Lightly sketch in your own version of A Starry Night. Look at how Van Gogh painted the wind, winding around the canvas, or the stars radiating out as if glowing. Working from dark to light, use thick, short broken strokes and follow the contour of shapes, repeating the pattern over and over until filling the composition. You may find yourself seeing the world just a little bit differently.

Did you know? You can even borrow a framed print of a Van Gogh painting or one from Gauguin via the HCLS Art Collection.

Nina L. is a Customer Service Specialist at the Miller Branch of HCLS. She loves art, yoga, dogs, cats, and reading horizontally.

Black and white photo shows a young woman in an overcoat and high heels walking through a narrow alley, with stone walls to either side. TItle is in red above, and subtitle in white below. Subtitle read: The Daring Young Woman Who Lead France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler.

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War

juliefitzreader 4 Comments
The cover shows a woman in 1940's-era clothing, carrying a package under her arm and walking down a deserted alley surrounded by stone walls.

Review by Julie F.

Imagine running the largest spy organization in Vichy France – setting up safe houses and networks, negotiating the tensions between de Gaulle’s Free French and the anti-Gaullist General Giraud, and helping to spirit spies and messengers from France to England in the dead of night on dangerous Lysander plane trips. Never staying in one “safe” location for too long; never knowing who has your back or who might stab you in the back.

Now imagine doing all of that as a woman, a mother of two young children and an infant, in a society where, as author Lynne Olson describes it, “Men fought, and women stayed home” (525). Marie-Madeleine Fourcade resisted both the German occupation and the gendered expectations of a military and espionage apparatus designed for and perpetuated by men. When the life of a spy in occupied France was reputed to be six months at the most, her success is a credit to her resourcefulness, daring, and people skills. The colleagues she trusted and led knew her worth. In the words of Léon Faye, her dependable lieutenant and the father of her youngest child, “A woman…But not just any woman!  She’s an indisputable and undisputed leader. Even the English have accepted her” (201).

Readers who enjoy tales of espionage will be amazed that Marie-Madeleine’s story is real and not more widely known. The scenes depicting her captures and escapes, and those of her Resistance colleagues, are riveting – sometimes by simply talking her way out of the hands of the Gestapo, or waiting until their backs were turned to climb out of a window and make a run for it. Not all went according to plan; she lost friends and companions, and their stories, and her anxiety for their safety and grief over their losses, are powerfully depicted. Her devotion to a cause greater than herself and her family is heroic – even after the war, when she advocated for remembrance ceremonies, official honors, government pensions, and medical care for Alliance agents, as well as benefits for the families of those the German executed. Read this fascinating account of her dedication and defiance of societal norms, and be riveted by her exploits and those of her spy network.

Adult nonfiction. Available in eaudio through CloudLibrary and in ebook and eaudio through Libby.

Julie is an instructor and research specialist at HCLS Miller Branch, where she facilitates two book discussion groups – Spies, Lies, and Alibis and Bas Bleu.