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#1 | |
o saeclum infacetum
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February 2018 Discussion • Passing by Nella Larsen
![]() Passing by Nella Larsen is the February selection for the New Leaf Book Club. Quote:
Kindle | Kindle UK | Kobo Last edited by issybird; 02-15-2018 at 12:12 AM. |
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#2 |
o saeclum infacetum
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Let's talk about Passing. What did you think?
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#3 |
cacoethes scribendi
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I can't say that I enjoyed this as such, but then I'm not sure that enjoyment was intended. It was an interesting and vaguely intriguing book, and with it being so short, novella rather than novel, I had no difficulty in finishing it. I would also add that this is almost the ideal book-club book: it is chock-full of talking points, especially the ending.
I find it difficult to work out how much to say in this first post. I might try some summary points here, and then post more detail behind them in a separate post: * The book is ambiguous, apparently deliberately so, almost all the way through. * I thought the opening (delaying the racial aspect until well into chapter 2) was excellent. * I don't think I ever quite "got" Clare. I wonder if that was intentional (see the first point). * A true "chick's novel"? The interactions were familiar but not something I really understood or related to (see also the previous point). * That Larsen was trying to say something was a little too obvious, it left the ending feeling (to me) like a bit of a cop-out. * The title, "Passing", insists that this is a book about race, and yet without that title I would have said that race was incidental to the core of the story. Indeed, it seems to me that this contradiction was the author's intention; if so, she did very well. |
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#4 |
cacoethes scribendi
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Feel free to treat this as tl;dr. For a summary of this see my previous post. What follows is a dump of my notes collected as I read this rather curious story.
Spoiler:
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#5 |
Snoozing in the sun
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Well, I don't like the description of "chick's novel" which sounds like a putdown. However, I take you to mean that it is a novel about relationships, feelings, emotions, rather than a book involving a lot of action. I certainly agree with that.
For me, the book is very much about race rather than its being incidental. It made me think about the strain of living a lie, always in fear of being found out. Consider the comment Clare made that when she was pregnant with her daughter, she was terrified that the baby would show her racial antecedents. Just think for a moment about being afraid of that for an entire pregnancy. Apparently Larsen originally intended to call the book Nig, but it was changed because the publishers were concerned about the outrange caused by a book they had published called Nigger Heaven. (This was in the Introduction by Emily Barnard in the Penguin edition.) The title she used was not as outrageous, but was just as much about racism. Beyond the thoughts of the stress of living as one thing when you feel/know you are something else - which of course immediately makes me think of LGBTI people having to pretend they are something they are not, or Jewish people trying to survive in a Nazi regime - what does it say about a society that makes people need or want to "pass" as something other than what they are? We all like to think our society is a tolerant, open one these days and in contrast to the past it is. But only partially, and only really on the surface. I think there is a lot more to say about the book, but I shall leave it there for now. |
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#6 |
cacoethes scribendi
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Yes, I thought the description might garner some reaction - but I don't really mean it in a derogatory sense. It's more that the interactions between Irene and Clare are familiar to me, but I cannot say that I really understand them. It's not the emotional content, men have emotions too, it's the manner of their interaction. It may seem potentially sexist to say (and possibly is), but the interactions are familiar from what I've seen between women that I know - hence I wondered whether women may understand/relate-to this novel better than men, hence possibly a "chick's novel" in a more literal sense than usually meant by the phrase.
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#7 | |
cacoethes scribendi
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Quote:
So, perhaps it is about race, but in the sort of reversed or negative sense that it's about how the race issue gets debased even within the Negro community. |
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#8 |
Resident Curmudgeon
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I feel it's not a classic. It's rubbish. The topic sounding interesting, but the execution very poor. The writing was light so it wasn't too bad to read. I didn't like the ending. The ending just came out of nowhere.
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#9 | |
Wizard
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I quite enjoyed it but I felt like I was missing nuances. I wasn't sure if it was some of the dated language (what does it mean to be a "having" sort of person?") or references I was missing or the author's desire to be ambiguous.
One thing that happened a lot with minor characters was that I wasn't sure of their ethnicity. For example this passage, which begins with Irene speaking: Quote:
I think that Hammond is a white guy who liked to frequent black dance halls and got a rough reception from a possessive boyfriend. But he may have been a black guy in a white neighbourhood. The context is they are discussing the incident where Clare's white husband went on a racist rant with Irene present. Brian's anecdote about Hammond is supposed to illustrate the fact that "they always come back". Is he talking about Clare or her husband? Does he mean that Clare, having tried to 'pass' in white society will eventually want to return to her roots? (something which does sort of happen?) Or is he making a point about Bellew? I'm probably being dim but the combination of the language, references and style meant I felt this sort of confusion three or four times. Fortunately the further you get in the book the more clear it is what's happening. I wouldn't say the ending came out of nowhere but it was definitely abrupt. It also made the whole thing feel like a long short story rather than a short novel. I did think there was something interesting about Irene's attitudes towards her race and 'passing'. On the one hand she judges Clare quite harshly for her choice. On the other she's happy to 'pass' herself to get served in a fancy restaurant, and there's something I can't quite put my finger on about her attitude towards her husband and his desire to travel. Is it relevant that he's darker skinned than her? He's also supportive of the sons learning about sex (albeit through jokes), and about the harsh realities of racism, in a way she's not. I kind of got the feeling she's trying to be "respectable" in a way he's happy to let go. She's not trying to 'pass' in white society, and she's heavily involved in black social events etc., but there is a almost a sense of trying to fit into a social hierarchy that's not necessarily based on race, but on class? But again I feel like I'm groping towards something that was too subtle in the text. At least for me. Again I can't help feeling if I'd been a African-American New Yorker in 1929, rather than a British white guy in 2018 I might be "getting it" in a way I'm not. Final thought/question: I read the Wikipedia article on this to try to de-mystify it a bit and was surprised to read they thought it was an ambiguous ending (based on the idea that Irene is an unreliable narrator). What do you think? Was she pushed or did she jump/fall? |
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#10 | |
Snoozing in the sun
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On the "shine" and "sheba" query, here is the relevant footnote:
Quote:
On Irene, there was an interesting reference in the book to her wanting Brian to be happy, but in her way. It seemed she thought she knew best about every aspect of their lives, which must have put pressure on the relationship. I think there are ambiguities all the way through, quite deliberately. Was Brian having an affair with Clare? Irene suspected it, but there was no proof. Did Irene push Clare because she feared that suspected relationship with her husband? And then there is the undercurrent of sexual ambiguity too, an attraction and tension between the two women. |
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#11 |
cacoethes scribendi
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I assumed "sheba" was a reference to the Queen of Sheba: in Christian contexts she is generally assumed to be black (see here).
The ending is deliberately vague. My ordering of the possible solutions (in most likely to least likely) are: Clare fell (accidentally stepped back during the confrontation) Irene gave Clare are subtle push Clare jumped Jack pushed Clare |
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#12 |
Snoozing in the sun
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Missed saying the "they always come back" referred to people like Clare wanting to be back with the people and the culture in which she grew up.
One of the difficulties of people of mixed race, which Nella Larsen herself experienced, was not being seen as belonging to either part of her family, and so always being an outsider. That has certainly been true of indigenous Australians who were taken from their mothers because of being of mixed race. Their lives were often appalling, as many suffered abuse: physical, sexual and certainly racial. When they eventually found their way back to their indigenous families, they felt they did not belong there either, because they did not speak the language, did not know the culture and so could not "belong" in either world. |
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#13 |
cacoethes scribendi
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I saw reference to something like this on Wikipedia (I think it was). I can see how it might be possible ... but I think that's reading too much into it, and I don't really see that it fits all that well with the story Larsen seemed to be telling. I'm more inclined to think the language used is an expression of Irene's jealously of Clare. (Then again, with everything else being so ambiguous I could be completely wrong.)
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#14 |
cacoethes scribendi
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#15 |
Wizard
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