Passing

(This took me much longer to read than it should have, through no fault of the books.) This was a really good glimpse into the ways black people passed as white in the 1920s. We meet three women at various points who either pass or don't, some of whom are married to white men, with all that may entail. This was really good and I did not see that ending coming.

I found this book because I'm participating in the 52 Book Challenge. I was looking for a book to satisfy the prompt: Takes Place During the Roaring Twenties. This one afforded me the added opportunity to discover a new to me author of color. This book was riveting. Written in the late 1920s, published in 1929- It feels positively timeless. I have never read a book about women passing- fair skinned “colored” women as they're called here- passing as white in society.
It was short but thoroughly fleshed out. Toward the end I was physically stressed out, reading quickly to figure out who was going to end up happy and who was going to end up exposed. This was a great, original story. Loved it. And loved discovering Nella Larsen- a trailblazer of the Harlem Renaissance.

Une histoire extrêmement prenante entre deux femmes prises dans le racisme de l'Amérique des années 20. J'ai eu du mal à comprendre tout le cheminement de pensée de la narratrice, mais j'ai littéralement dévoré les pages. La fin est profondément marquante, posant énormément de questions et laissant le lecteur dans l'interrogation.

Remarkable. Emotionally powerful on many levels. Larsen writes with a bold directness that I found both refreshing and uncomfortable. Narration is third person but entirely from the POV of one character, Irene, almost as if it were first-person disassociated: the reader has constant awareness of her emotional state but only indirect awareness, via her inferences, of the minds of others. Unusual but effective. Even more unusual, there's only one sympathetic character in the book and it's not Irene: it's her husband, who we realize she does not know at all, and her imaginings of who he is are a tragedy of their own. This is a complex, layered book.

Larsen must've been a fascinating person. Insightful, sensitive, witty. The main themes for me were choices, consequences, loss, loneliness, and the crushing of our hopes as we commit to paths in life. There is more than one character living a lie, and we see a lot of the costs involved. Larsen adds in religious intolerance, sex ed, responsible parenting, with enlightened positions on each. Absolutely delightful to find in a 1929 book. (Depressing, too, since the problems she rails against persist today).

4.5 stars, rounding down because the language was often more tell than show. But, no, rounding up because this was just too impressive.

An elegantly written psychological portrait of two light-skinned black women who pass for white in New York's upper middle class in the 1920s. The novella is full of tension, and keeps building and building like a psychological thriller, with a focus on moments and conversations that reminds of a stage play. I really like the ambiguity of the ending.

The audiobook narration was excellent.