Quicksand

I didn't hate the book, in fact I quite enjoyed some of it, the writing is excellent, but it just didn't grab my attention, I couldn't concentrate on it. I might try it again some time, in print ( )

Does not get off to a great start; the writing is pretty wince-y in the early going:

"Helga ducked her head under the covers in a vain attempt to shut out what she knew would fill the pregnant silence - the sharp sarcastic voice of the dormitory matron. It came."

But she gets over it pretty quick. You can almost watch her learning to write over the course of the book. By the end, she's a little overfond of awkward sentence structures:

"Here, she had found, she was sure, the intangible thing for which, indefinitely, always she had craved."

But her prose has more or less stopped getting in her way.

The story itself is excellent. Helga feels sortof akin to antiheroines like Madame Bovary and Lily Bart (both, I know, arguable). It's a dark story and she does a good job of getting into Helga's head and showing us how she can't escape from her restless depression. It's not my favorite book of the year, but I dug it. ( )

There is a lot packed into this slim novel and juxtaposition in every chapter. Helga Crane was born in the early 1900s to a white mother and an absent black father. At a young age Helga needs to fend for herself and she doesn’t fit in with the black or white communities she is a part of. The novel starts with her teaching at an all-black school in the South; she is not only upset by the subservient attitude taught there but finds she doesn’t have the pedigree to fit in the high society of which she is covetous. Her search for acceptance takes her to Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen, Harlem again, and then back to the South.

The book is a sad tale of a woman with limited options trying to find love and identity. It was an interesting view of the “race question”; Helga wasn’t black enough to be comfortable in Harlem, but in Copenhagen, where race supposedly wasn’t an issue, she is sought after because she is an exotic creature, making her even more uncomfortable and longing for her people. ( )

I just finished Quicksand, and it's a great read. All Helga Crane's choices are impetuous, and I think Nella Larsen sacrifices the character for the opportunity to describe the many ways a mixed race woman could live in 1920's United States. There's the "squeeze all the native out of them" school where all attempts as self expression are squashed. After reading a little about the Indians under British rule, I think this is the sort of school she was after where the Indians end up more British than the British. She takes just a little time to explore the lack of opportunities for a black woman in a northern city where the only jobs open to her are menial. Helga Crane, well educated and proper, loves to read and thinks she can therefore get a job as a librarian without further education. In fact, Larsen was a librarian, but she must have found a way to get the proper credentials.

Then there's the wonderful stay in Harlem. I love this description:
For the hundredth time she marveled at the gradations within this oppressed race of hers. A dozen shades slid by. There was sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry white. There was yellow hair, brown hair, black hair, straight hair, straightened hair, curly hair, crinkly hair, woolly hair. She saw black eyes in white faces, brown eyes in yellow faces, gray eyes in brown faces, blue eyes in tan faces. Africa, Europe, perhaps with a pinch of Asia, in a fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty, semibarbaric, sophisticated, exotic, were here.

This would seem to be the exact right place for Helga Crane, but she never seemed to be able to comfortably intermingle the Helga and the Crane parts of herself. Unlike the ideal Audrey Denney who fit with both races, Helga Crane never felt she fit with either. In Harlem she was "passing" as black. In Denmark she was surrounded by whites but valued only for her exotic otherness. Her job was to tantalize with her sensuality. She longed to have "that blessed sense of belonging to herself alone and not to a race."
Then Larsen adds the religious sharecropper to the mix, lest we forget what the African Americans were migrating away from.

This is such a wonderful work. What a loss that for whatever reason Larsen was not able to continue with her art. ( )

Quicksand was a fascinating depiction of a woman who can't fit in. Much like Nella Larsen herself, Helga Crane is a black woman, brought up unhappily in a white family (her mother is white, her black father is no longer around, and her mother has remarried a white man). Some of the references to her childhood were heartbreaking, knowing that Larsen was writing from her life. Helga Crane is not a very likeable character - far too prickly and difficult - but a fascinating character.

Helga finds it difficult to fit in with white people (with her obviously black ancestry), but also finds it difficult to fit into the black community. She has a fascinating friendship with a black woman, Anne, who is very concerned with the "race issue" (which I think is one of those very multi-faceted issues, because I couldn't pin it down to one particular aspect!). This lack of being able to identify with other people, for Helga, leads to her tragic ending. ( )