If Beale Street Could Talk (Penguin Modern Classics Book 35) by James Baldwin (EPUB)

Description

The inspiration for the film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins’Achingly beautiful’ Guardian Harlem in the 1970s: the black soul of New York City. Tish is nineteen and the man she loves – her lifelong friend and the father of her unborn child – has been jailed for a crime he did not commit. As their families come together to fight for his freedom, will their love be enough?’Soulful . . . Racial injustice may flatten “the black experience” into one single, fearful, constantly undermined way of life – but black life, black love, is so much larger than that . . . It’s one of the signature lessons of Baldwin’s work that blackness contains multitudes’ Vanity Fair’If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction – that between members of a family’ Joyce Carol Oates

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Delivered as promised. Received in good condition.

⭐This was my first novel by the famed writer/activist, who I’ve gotten to know through archived footage and many articles, impressed me with this gritty story that’s so realistic in its telling. By the end of the book, I felt fully enveloped in the lives of Tish and Fonny, the main characters, their frustrations had become my own. The book, to me, was well worth the read and I recommend it for everyone’s must read list.

⭐If you are a Bible reader and if you ever read from some of the prophets in the Bible, you will understand the tone and the texture of their prophecies. It always gave voice to the climate oftentimes confronting us to face our reality with clarity provoking us to make those uncomfortable changes. James Baldwin’s voice and words remain prophetic. When you read Fire Next Time now and realized when it was written, those words were prophetic. When you read this story of Fonny and Tish, a blossoming love between two beautiful people in the face of systemic oppression/racism in the “land of the free and the home of the brave”, another prophesy. The range of emotions and the ability to convey every senses whether it was the view of the oceans, the stench of the garbage in the city, the fear of isolation, Baldwin was able to craft every word to invoke and provoke. This story breaks me because that reality still exists and when I reached the end, the cries were real…my cries. He will remain as one of the greatest and prolific storyteller of all times, moreso, the prophetic voice of our community.

⭐I love a good hardcover. I actually bought this one as a gift for my man. It’s one of his favorite movies/ books. I surprised him with it and he said “ Thank you, baby. A hardcover? You must really love me. I know you paid a lot for this. “ lol.

⭐Over the course of 197 pages, my heart was broken, warmed, and stitched back up. It is a bruised thing now; beating hot blood, but with the soft pain of being reminded that life (and especially the lives of people of color) can so often be tragically unfair.The story as a whole is a necessary one— there were many emotions that it stirred up in me, and I haven’t read many books lately that can manage to make me feel so much all in one. This is a pretty short book, and the fact that I felt so strongly for Tish, Fonny, Sharon, Ernestine, Joseph, Frank, and even some of the barely-there side characters, is the work of a true master.A particular note I feel I must make: Tish has one of the most remarkable, supportive families I’ve ever read in literature. I love her mother. I love her sister. I love her father. The lengths they go to (or would go to) for each other is profoundly moving. I fear for them, and I want to hope for them. Everything in the story felt so based-in-reality, and that’s frightening, because you want to see your beloved characters overcome and be happy, but the circumstances of life don’t always raise you up so much as saddle to your back a conveyor belt of tribulations. And even after EVERYTHING, the language of the novel is a hopeful one: the final message is not one of despair, but resilience.James Baldwin has created a world full of saints and monsters, that also just so happens to be a ‘far-from-simply-fiction’ 1970’s New York. It is at once both a terrible reality— a reminder of ignorance, hate, and injustice— and a life-affirming look at love, family, and hope.

⭐I’m not sure how—or why—this powerful work of narrative beauty escaped me until now, but I’m certainly grateful that Barry Jenkins’ film adaption has rekindled interest in this narrative. Despite some perplexing inconsistencies in narrative point of view, this story of unconditional love blends themes of romance, race, social class, gender, sexuality, and family in ways that only literary masters can manage. Baldwin was undeniably head of his time.In the early 21st century, this story has become familiar enough. Tish, the young, Black first-person narrator, is pregnant with the child of her lifelong love, Fonny, who has been unjustly imprisoned for the rape of a Puerto Rican woman. As Tish and her family band together to free Fonny, institutionalized racism, economic inequality, and social oppression (not to mention members of Fonny’s own family) conspire to keep the young lovers apart.Baldwin’s prose is by turns lyrical, minimalist, imagistic, and brutally violent. He orchestrates his diction with sublime precision; therefore, I must presume that there is some artistic justification for having Tish narrate scenes (such as Fonny’s private conversations with his friend Daniel, Fonny’s experiences in prison, and her mother’s ordeal in Puerto Rico as she attempts to track down the rape victim) that she could not have possibly witnessed. That stylistic quibble aside, I cannot recall another book this brief (fewer than 200 pages) that permeates with such intensity and insight.

⭐This is such a great novel, my first of Baldwin’s and I can’t believe it. Published in 1974 it still applicable today, and as horrible as that is, it speaks to Baldwin’s timeless writing. I cannot do a review for this book justice, so I will just say that I was moved by the writing in this book, it was so well done, so phenomenal, that I was a roller coaster of emotions throughout. I loved Tish and Fonny, and my heart broke for them both.I will also note that the audiobook for this is fantastic, it is read by Bahni Turpen, who is one of my absolute favorite narrators, and she brings the characters to life in your ears, making the story even more emotional than it already is.

⭐I’ll keep this short, but I think this is a truly brilliant book whose greatest strength, for me, lies in the depiction of relationships between the two young lovers and their respective families.The girl’s family is loving and supportive whilst the boy’s family is more conflicted.There are some wonderful conversations in this book, but the passage I enjoyed the most is concerned with the antagonism between the two families when they meet to discuss how they should deal with the girl’s pregnancy The encounter is both physically and verbally pretty brutal and I loved it.If you are someone who is not keen on the use of swear words then you might want to give this a wide birth as they are used quite liberally and with great effect; the book is populated by realistic characters with real and very difficult lives.An ever present throughout the book is a hatred of the racism these characters have to negotiate their lives through.The author himself was a black homosexual civil rights activist and I, as a middle-class white male, couldn’t fail to get a real sense of the indignities, wrongs and frustrations heaped on the American black population. I also felt that the voices of the characters were noticeably different from those written by white authors e.g. you wont hear white men referring to each other as “baby”.The language employed is not difficult and the book, whilst by no means simple, is a joy to read and I can’t for the life of me understand people giving a book of this quality a poor review.

⭐Written half a century ago and read against the backdrop of “Black Lives Matter” this modern classic is a reminder of the persistence of racial injustice, given added authenticity by the black American author’s personal experience. Nineteen-year-old Tish has a steady job and close-knit family, who accept with almost unbelievable equanimity her unplanned pregnancy, just when her fiancé and childhood sweetheart Fonny, who has ambitions to be a sculptor, has been arrested for a serious crime on a charge trumped up by a vicious racist white police officer. Made all the more poignant by the depth of the couple’s love, this novel is an unflinching portrayal of how the cards may be stacked to destroy the lives of an innocent couple simply because of their colour.The approach is unusual in that the male author sets himself the challenge of getting inside the mind of a young woman, even to the extent of describing her orgasm. James Baldwin is also experimental in the flexible structure of the book. Tish narrates the novel in the first person, presumably to involve the reader in a more vivid experience of the drama, but when it suits him he replaces her voice with his own observations in his own style, as when he launches into an analysis of the mental differences between women and men. To portray events in which, say, Fonny’s friend Daniel is previously framed by the police and put in prison, or Tish’s mother Sharon visits Puerto Rico to make contact with the woman who has been manipulated into picking Fonny out of an identity parade, the author simply takes “writer’s licence” and has Tish describe scenes as if she has witnessed them in person.With strong opening scenes, dialogues and sense of place, as the facts are revealed, I found myself engrossed in how they would play out. Although it seems inevitable that Fonny would be found guilty, would some twist expose a fatal flaw in the prosecution? The sympathetic white lawyer might be prepared to work virtually “pro bono”, but how would Tish’s family and Fonny’s loving but weak father Frank manage to scrape together the money for his bail, without themselves taking to illegal activities which might cause them to fall foul of the law?The “bad” characters are too often caricatures with no redeeming features, like Fonny’s religiously fanatical mother who seems inexplicably hostile towards him – most mothers love their sons. His thinly sketched sisters are also pointlessly disagreeable. Although I am often intrigued by ambiguous or inconclusive situations leaving one free to form one’s own conclusion, in this case I was surprised and disappointed by an ending so abrupt as to seem incomplete. Yet perhaps for Baldwin, the development of specific scenes was more important than the arc of a plot.

⭐Had I had the time over the last few days, I would have wanted to gobble up this amazing piece of writing on one sitting. It’s that good! The narrative concentrates tightly on two people, a young woman and man who have dreams and the simple aspiration of living together and make some of those dreams happen. The main crux though is that they are African Americans in the 1970s, that they’ve grown up in poor circumstances and that racial hatred is rife. There is no justice protecting the falsely accused Fonny and no peace for Tish who is carrying a child by the time he’s incarcerated for a rape allegation.It’s a short powerful read that packs a punch, brings alive two individuals who don’t give up on each other because sometimes love is all you’ve got in life.

⭐I see from the number of reviews and the average rating that the majority of readers have had a different opinion of If Beale Street Could talk than myself. For me, it’s another classic that failed to live up to the hype. The story, of a young man wrongly accused of a crime by a racist establishment, has the potential for a powerful novel. Unfortunately, in the telling it lacks conviction. Told in first person by the girlfriend of the accused, even when she isn’t present, the book does contain some powerful scenes. However, despite being a short novel, both narrative and dialogue have a tendency to ramble into content with little or no relevance to the plot. It’s not badly written (obviously!) but these digressions made it tedious in places. My rating would be 2.5, but it’s better than a 2, so I’ve given it 3.

⭐This is a short but powerful book, a love story but a story of struggle against an unjust world as well. The characterisation here takes a while to bed in but once things get going you really feel the pain of these characters and it helps sweep the story up. Speaking of story, the story is slight in the traditional sense but the detail and the writing give this a gravitas that doesn’t let go. If you like a story with a strong beginning, middle and end maybe this isn’t for you, if you like grit, strong characters and a commentary on an unjust society maybe this is for you.

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