Quicksand (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
Born to a white mother and an absent black father, and despised for her dark skin, Helga Crane has long had to fend for herself. As a young woman, Helga teaches at an all-black school in the South, but even here she feels different. Moving to Harlem and eventually to Denmark, she attempts to carve out a comfortable life and place for herself, but ends up back where she started, choosing emotional freedom that quickly translates into a narrow existence.
Quicksand, Nella Larsen's powerful first novel, has intriguing autobiographical parallels and at the same time invokes the international dimension of African American culture of the 1920s. It also evocatively portrays the racial and gender restrictions that can mark a life.
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Community Reviews
This book is very difficult to evaluate. I like the concept behind it, but the execution was fairly flawed. The main character is just very difficult to root for because she follows a continuous cycle of changes in attitude. She hates her situation. She impulsively runs away to a new situation. She's initially excited and satisfied. Then she grows to hate the new situation. Repeat. It's sort of like a shorter version of Flaubert's Sentimental Education. The narrator is somewhat ironically distant - there are brief glimpses of the narrative voice criticizing or mocking Helga's foolish decisions. But they are very few and far between. I more often felt like I was supposed to be sympathizing with each stage even as my actual reaction was generally rolling my eyes, especially in the transition to her last phase / situation in a southern religious community. It was just out of nowhere and bizarre. Now, I ended up liking where that went - religion is the opiate of the southern black community. But it was bewildering at first. More of an issue is the amount of space given to the internal emotional monologue at each stage of her journey. There's just a lot of endless repetition or elaboration of emotional states and decision making that was not fun to read at all. I feel like to pull off this story concept you actually need more humor. There was a bit, but no where near enough. If this book were much longer, I don't think I could have finished it - I was really skimming along for the last 5 chapters. The ending chapter and a half or so did rescue it for me and leave me with a better final impression, but it's hard to really endorse a novel that so frequently bored me to sleep.
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