In James Baldwin's 'Another Country,' love is a weapon; it is a double edged sword capable of hurting both the one posessing it and the one on the recieving end. It is water and it is poison. "How can you live if you can't love? How can you live if you do?" The character's need it even if it kills them. The entire book messy and complicated and despite the characters' attempts to treat love as something pure: race, gender, sexuality, jealousy, and repressed desires are proven to be inseparable from their relationships. 

From the beginning you understand that the characters are not meant to be good, moral people. The book starts off with Rufus recalling a toxic and abusive relationship (in which he was the abuser). He appears for one chapter but his character continues to haunt the rest of the story. 

The main cast of characters include Vivaldo (Rufus's best friend), Ida (Rufus's sister, dating Vivaldo), Richard (aspiring author), Cass (wife of Richard), Eric (aspiring actor who was previously living in France), and Yves (Eric's lover). There are three sets of defined relationships but the line between them blur as much as the line between platonic and romantic. The character's hurt each other and hurt themselves; they cheat and then talk about their lovers to the people they cheat with; the want what they shouldn't and want what they can't have. Despite it all, they still love, in their twisted and messy definition of what love is.

Every character is complex and James Baldwin does a really good job of establishing a basis for each character and relationship before turning it on you, so you feel disappointed when a character says and does things that are cruel. The story is structured like an onion; with every page, a layer is stripped off revealing the character's inner thoughts, repressed sexualities, prejudices etc. It's psychological as much as it's romantic and the best moments are the ones where you're deep into the character's thoughts even if you don't like the character. 

I loved the way book delved into race and whiteness. Majority of the character's are white besides Ida, Rufus, and Yves, and the book centers around the white character's understanding and treatment of race. The characters tell themselves they don't see race and many times it's because they don't want to. Over the course of the book, their progressive views get broken down and at it's core is guilt and willfull blindness. This is done in a very subtle and gradual way, never shoved in your face. The characters are not made out to be the villians nor any kind of saviors, rather the characters are written to expose the hypocrisy and ignorance of white liberals. There is a reason why the white characters can forget about their whiteness while Ida can't forget about her blackness; this leads to some of the most interesting conversations in the book. The characters don't become better people—this isn't that kind of book—they remain dislikable and condemnable and, up until the very end, refuse to truly open their hearts and face their white guilt.

Sexuality also plays a major role in the book. Besides the main gay couple, Eric and Yves, most of the male characters have desires they are made to surpress, through the shield of masculinity and pride. Sexuality isn't defined by labels like gay and bisexual, instead it's defined by the people these characters have loved and desired, missed chances, longings, and regrets.

The writing is beautiful and the book is hard to put down; you can't help but become completely absorbed in these character's thought and invested in their lives and relationships. It's hard to root for anyone (besides Ida in my opinion) and yet, you find yourself needing to know what happens next. You feel the love they feel, and mourn their heartbreaks and losses. Despite not liking them, you can't help empathize with them. James Baldwin has such a deep understanding of human psychology, exposing the characters inner thoughts and fears—thoughts that they hide from themselves—stripping these human beings down the their ugly core. 

There was one major issue in the book, which was the only thing which stopped me from giving it 5 stars. It'd feel wrong not to address the hints if misogyny throughout the book. While I do feel like the women in this book are well written and complex—just as complex as the male characters—I felt like the suffering of the female characters was taken as less important than the suffering of the male characters. If a women in this book suffered, the book never focused on her pain, at least not in a way it did with the men. It was hard for me to come to this conclusion because the writing feels like it's walking a thin line between being misogynistic through the viewpoint of the author vs depicting the very real misogynistic atmosphere of the 1960s. James Baldwin never excuses the men's behaviors and yet he brushes over them way too quickly.

Rufus is introduced as an abuser an rapist, being so terrible it leads to his victim ending up in an asylum. The characters acknowledge his wrong actions yet he still holds a saint like presence in the narrative, after his death.

There are also a lot of double standards.

Ida was coerced into sex by her agent and she suffers for it when she confesses this. Vivaldo on the other hand cheats on her with Eric and yet he never confesses this nor does he suffer for it, instead it's treated as an enlightening experience for him.

This is further complicates things when you understand that Ida is the only black woman, putting up with these toxic and messy white people alone without any kind of external support to turn to. Like I said, the line between misogyny in the writing and the world is very blurred, so while the depictions are not necessarily inaccurate, I wish what the women went through, specifically Ida, was written with more care and empathy.

That being said, I will eat up anything with morally gray, toxic characters and messy relationships. James Baldwin is a literary genius and his prose never fails to impress me. One final comment:

I found it really funny that the french guy is the only one that doesn't cheat (ignoring Richard because he's as boring and uninteresting as the book he writes)