Go Tell It on the Mountain | James Baldwin

Go Tell It on the Mountain | James Baldwin | Second time for me, also

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Go Tell It on the ...

	Go Tell It on the Mountain James Baldwin Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2000 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 86 reviews view larger image
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"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a 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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A Great Day In Harlem

The first time I encountered this book was on a summer reading list in middle school. The title alone was so appealing I spend the rest of English class daydreaming what it was about. I didn't get around to actually reading it for nearly 30 years. Now I wish I had read it much sooner.

Not then, at the tender age of 13. The rude realities of Harlem life circa 1930 come at you right away. Never mind that the protagonist, John, is 14; I probably wouldn't have gotten very far given the novel's unsentimental look at the hard realities of life, the baseness of sex, and the shortcomings of religion.

Yes, "Go Tell It On The Mountain" is a tough book, but it's brilliant, too. Baldwin gives us the story of John, who in the course of a single day wavers between faith and doubt, love and hate, community and isolation, culminating at a "tarry service" at a Harlem storefront church where the man he calls father, Gabriel, is deacon. Gabriel is not, however, John's real father, nor is he that great an exemplar of faith, something we learn as Baldwin's narrative effortlessly takes us across time and space into the heads of John, Gabriel, and others at the tarry service, where extraordinary events are about to take place.

I wasn't expecting "Go Tell" to be so good, but it is, not because Baldwin draws on big themes so much as the visceral way he presents them, every emotion raw. John's enormous self-doubt is the fulcrum upon which the rest of the novel turns; looking at himself in the mirror, he wants to know "whether his face was ugly or not".

It's a story about growing up black and poor in a racist society, but it's more about the stuff of life, a universal tale about growing up. Gabriel is a tough man, but when we get inside his head we discover a more complicated story, about a man who tries to stand up for his faith but keeps being undone by his baser passions. His religiosity, an easy target for many readers, only serves to cloak his essential stubbornness.

For a first novel, "Go Tell" is amazingly accomplished. Baldwin moves effortlessly back and forth in time, like Faulkner, yet you feel completely connected to reality throughout. His narrative has the moment-by-moment feeling of Joyce, but without the ephemera. He finds the core of every character he lights upon, which he reveals with such studied gradualness he sweeps you along with every soap-opera-ish development.

Baldwin's 1953 novel seems a proclamation of his life's calling. John is not presented as a fledging writer, but his truth-seeking, and truth-finding, is one any committed person of letters can relate to. At the end of the book, when the sun lights upon John's forehead and affixes a "seal ineffaceable forever", it is the writer's call he is discovering.

Baldwin says this was the book that made his career possible; I sense many others could say the same. It's a book with a lot of gas in the tank. Like I said, I only wish I had read it sooner.

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Second time for me, also

It's funny, the reviewer below me also first read this back in the 70's - as did I. I started out the unofficial beginning of this Fall by re-reading the "classics." Some are actual classics, and others are Lit i have left over from college and high school. Not sure where this one fits in.

I just finished this book, and feel it's one of the best books i ever read. It's not an "easy read." You do have to get ready to understand the jumping back and forth to different eras. But once you do, it's worth the effort to read - totally.

Just a wonderful book and story, and fantastically written. I'm in awe of it. I love finishing a book that really leaves you saying "wow."

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A black guy wrote this?

I wanted to dislike this book. James Baldwin is anathema to me--but this book--as a work of art, as an example of human effort--is outstanding.

Not at first, though. The exordium is tedious and boring, and I was flipping pages with alacrity, saying to myself: "AHA! Overrated! And I know why." But once the narrative sea-legs get set with the history of Gabriel Grimes, the novel becomes special. You can tell Baldwin read almost every book in his local library, and that he had uncommon talent at organizing words, piecing sentences together, and constructing something greater than the sum of its parts.

The heavy emphasis on religion would normally be an impediment to my enjoyment of any work, but here, though it did get old, it did not vitiate the flow. God played an important role in young Baldwin's life, and the book reflects those years.

The MLA has decreed to the unwashed masses that Go Tell It On The Mountain is the thirty-ninth best novel of the 20th century. That places it ahead of superior works such as Pale Fire, Of Human Bondage, and Lord of the Flies (to name only three), but also behind inferior works such as To The Lighthouse and the Studs Lonigan Trilogy.

No matter the placement, this is a significant book that deserves to be read on its own merits.

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If you can get past the religious aspect, you might grow to like this book

James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain
deals with a lot of issues that are explored
in all of his works. The themes of religion,
identity and sexuality, which were themes
that were very taboo at the time and in some
ways still are. I think most of the bad
reviews on here are either people not sure
of their own religious beliefs. I will agree
though that this is not Baldwin's best work;
that is conferred upon Going to Meet the Man,
Giovanni's Room and Another Country, which
deal with the religious themes subtly. Still,
if you are are a history buff, read it for
the fascinating details of Harlem life in its
heyday. Baldwin is one of those writers whom
you have to read over and over again. Each time,
you discover something else wonderful about him
that you missed before. I guess I'm biased though,
as I love most of his books.

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