Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
A Cultural, Fiction, Glbt book. I went down again. My heart and I went down again. I was aware...
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of its feeling, Tell...
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 496 pages
- ISBN: 9780375701894 / 375701893
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More About Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
I went down again. My heart and I went down again. I was aware of her hand. I was aware of my breathing. I could no longer see it, but I was aware of her face. James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone I remembered my mothers insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe. James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me. James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
The back of this book makes it out to be the life story of a black actor who rises to greatness, but is "torn between two different kinds of love". I don't think Baldwin makes as big a deal as all that about the fact that the character, Leo, has one lover who is a woman his age and one who is a man much younger than he is. The woman,... I read the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of this book and I would be happy to classify it as a "great American novel". It's beautifully and powerfully written, if a little slow at the start, and the protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, is a thoughtful, sympathetic and engaging character, as are most of the supporting cast. I think... This is my second Baldwin title, and he still sits as one of the best writers i've ever stumbled upon. In this novel, just like Another Country, I saw parts of myself in many of the characters, which is a talent that cannot be scaled. The pain and the lust and the intimacy and the world pre-civil rights all was hyper real and demonstrated...
