by James Baldwin
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Product Description
"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.
By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
TORTURED SOUL, 2008-01-17
James Baldwin is a tortured soul. He pours his whole soul onto every page. This makes him one of America's greatest writers. His word pictures take you into the church, on a picnic, into a country farm house and into the lives of all his characters. Long Live James Baldwin. In our hearts.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
going to meet a young james baldwin, 2007-10-27
James Baldwin is one of the best writers
of all time. This semi-autobiographical
collection of short stories about different
male protagonists going to meet "the man"
which is different in every story is one
of the best story collections of all time.
Even today, after reading it, I could see
where there was a lesson to be learned from
each story. I wish James Baldwin was still
alive so I could tell him how much I love his
work. If you don't read anything else by James
Baldwin (although Giovanni's Room, Tell me how
long the train's been gone and Another Country
are also brilliant) read this, particularly Sonny's Blues.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Eight unforgettable stories of honest realism, 2007-06-02
James Baldwin is known primarily for his essays and his first two novels ("Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "Giovanni's Room"), but I often tell readers that the place to start is with his first story collection, "Going to Meet the Man." Baldwin's short fiction is more straightforward and accessible than are his essays (which are indeed excellent); each of the eight stories presents a different aspect of Baldwin's worldview; and unlike his early novels, where racism is treated as one aspect in the lives of characters, several of these stories confront the "racial issue" full on.
Baldwin's short fiction may be easier to read, but it does not avoid uncomfortable truths. In fact, some of Baldwin's most heated writing can be found in this volume, which was first published in 1965. It contains work written over a 20-year-period, including "Previous Condition," the first piece of fiction he ever published (in Commentary Magazine in 1948). A fledgling actor is torn between the black world of Harlem ("perfectly in his element, in his place, as the saying goes") and the white neighborhoods downtown. He stays at a friend's apartment in lower Manhattan, but has to hide from the landlord and leave the building at odd hours to avoid being seen by the other residents ("Why don't you go uptown, where you belong?").
Each of the other stories is unforgettable in its own way, but my two favorites open and close the volume. "The Rockpile" is an early (yet different) version of an episode in "Go Tell It on the Mountain"; two of Baldwin's strengths are his ability to capture the memories of youth and to present the complexities of family life. The incendiary title story that ends the volume depicts a white police officer whose racial attitudes were formed by a lynching he witnessed as a child. Baldwin pits the very real horror of the police brutality experienced by a young man who attempts to register to vote against the officer's wholly imagined fear of the oversexed black stereotype.
This last story--indeed, much of Baldwin's later fiction--has been criticized (by biographer James Campbell, for example) for lacking "a neutrality which Baldwin was finding harder than ever to maintain" and an unwillingness to "concede that somewhere, somehow, this corrupted man might incorporate genuine goodness." Such comments seem unfair on two counts: the actions of some racists, while "pitiable," are still beyond redemption or "goodness," and (more to the point) I don't agree that it's a storyteller's responsibility to make lemonade out of every lemon.
So ignore the critics who argue that Baldwin's fiction lost its shine as he grew older and more cynical and less "neutral," and pick up this excellent collection of stories. I think you'll find that their bluntness and honesty and gritty realism make up for whatever stylistic faults the critics might point to.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Painful. Almost too painful. , 2005-12-20
I am slowly understanding why Mr. Baldwin elected to leave the United States for more than a decade in the 1940s and 1950s. He apparently is on record as saying that he needed to flee because his anger was going to destroy him if he did not seek a respite from American injustice.
Upon reading this collection, I think I am really beginning to understand what must have been going through his mind. Read "Previous Condition" where a young African American man keeps being thrown out of hotels and denied jobs simply because of the color of his skin. There is nowhere he can go without meeting the hostile glances and conspiratorial whispers of people on the street simply because of his skin color. And there is a moment where it all came into focus for me, standing in the kitchen of his Jewish friend's Jules' apartment. And I quote:
"Oh," I cried, "I know you think I'm making it dramatic, that I'm paranoiac and just inventing trouble! Maybe I think so sometimes, how can I tell? You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. Oh, I know, you're Jewish, you get kicked around, too, but you can walk into a bar and nobody knows you're Jewish and if you go looking for job you'll get a better job than mine!" (78)
It is deeply disturbing to think that a person has the suspicion and rage of the world cocked against their temple, but that was how it was (and still is). I have read much about the Civil Rights struggle and as a Jew myself, have listened to many stories from members of my family about prejudice but these stories, they uncover something. After seeing what happened in New Orleans with Katrina and listening to the empty discussions of "good schools", No Child Left Behind and test score mania, it opens your eyes to the fact that performance, optimism and opportunity are perceptions that, when absent, can ruin lives in ways that are hard to qualify.
I highly recommend these stories but be prepared to become deeply uncomfortable because Baldwin had a powerful case to make about American hypocrisy and he makes it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Inspirational, 2005-03-21
The first story I read in this was "Sonny's Blues" and I realized there was more to it than just a story- and that the blues is more than just b5ths but a greater understanding of life - highly recommended.
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