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    Quicksand
    Ebook191 pages3 hours

    Quicksand

    By Nella Larsen

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Helga's mother is white, and her father is black--and absent. Ostracized throughout her lonely childhood for her dark skin, Helga spends her adult life seeking acceptance. Everywhere she goes — the American South, Harlem, even Denmark--she feels oppressed. Socially, economically, and psychologically, Helga struggles against the "quicksand" of classism, racism, and sexism.
    One of the most acclaimed and influential writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen published her powerful first novel in 1928. Quicksand features intriguing autobiographical parallels with Larsen's own life, in addition to reflecting many aspects of African-American culture of the 1920s. Alice Walker praised it and Passing (Larsen's second novel, also available in a Dover edition) as "novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMar 6, 2012
    ISBN9780486116846
    Author

    Nella Larsen

    Nella Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891 to a white Danish mother and a black West Indian father. She studied in America and Denmark and throughout her writing career she worked as a children’s librarian and primarily as a nurse. In 1928 her first novel Quicksand was published to great critical acclaim. Passing was published a year later. Her marriage to Dr Elmer Imes brought her into contact with the upper echelons of New York’s black society and she became an important female voice of the Harlem Renaissance. She was the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. Divorced in 1933, she spent the rest of her life working as nurse. Nella Larsen died in 1964.

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    Reviews for Quicksand

    3.5/5

    120 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A deeply affecting story, Larsen's first novel is remarkable for its prose and its themes. Protagonist Helga Crane, armed with her own standards of morality and reason, faces stiff opposition--herself--in her quest to become an autonomous individual.
    • 4/5
      Nella Larsen is quite a discovery; a lost writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Only two novellas of hers were published, and then she was unjustly accused of plagiarism of a story and stopped writing. What a waste! Quicksand is the tragic story of a half Danish, half black woman (as was Larsen) who cannot find happiness in Harlem or in Denmark. In America she becomes filled with self loathing and race hatred both as a teacher at a HBC and a Harlem resident. Helga Crane flees to Denmark, where for a time she enjoys her status as an exotic but is insulted by propositions from men who see her as their own personal Josephine Baker. She then returns to Harlem and is happy for a time with her friends but once again becomes miserable and ends up in an even worse state due to a nervous collapse. There is no happiness for someone who is so divided. How awful. I hope that this is no longer the case but I don't know. So beautifully written, with language we no longer use these days. Somewhat anachronistic but with such elegant flow. Spoiler alert: the end is very jarring.
    • 2/5
      Quicksand by Nella Larsen made me think of better versions of the genre: Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Fredric, or Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy, The Drowning Room by Michael Pye, even Jane Eyre (though I'm not fond of Jane Eyre).The young, bi-racial orphan wakes up one morning entirely unhappy with her life- she's a teacher, but she doesn't love it. She sets off to call on what little family she has. She is rebuffed by her white relatives, then settles into a nice life in Harlem. After a year or so she pulls up her roots again to visit her mother's family in the Netherlands. She is very well received there, but she feels her African American heritage makes her more of a curiosity than a part of society. So she heads home for America, where she married a preacher for no good reason, pops out a few kids and is thoroughly disgusted by her life.I can grapple with the feeling of isolation that the protagonist's identity causes her, but the stark cause and effect of Larsen's writing leaves me cold. I can imagine how powerful any of the scenes in this slight volume could have been in the hands of a more gifted craftsman. George Eliot or Toni Morrison or Margaret Atwood or Chimamanda Adiche could have burrowed into any one of those great situations and illuminated, rather than merely cataloging, the racial struggle of the Harlem Renaissance.Not a terrible book, and a quick read (which can be its own merit). But not the first I'd recommend.
    • 4/5
      The writing in this book was somewhat unclear and sometime difficult, but the ideas came through. The protagonist felt very uncomfortable in her biracial skin, as she was treated as an "other." She travelled through her life very angrily, which can easily be understood. This book was written in 1922, and though there has been some improvement, sadly so much was relevant today. The fact that it was very much based on the author is tragic.
    • 3/5
      Heartbreaking, delicate rendition of emotion.
    • 2/5
      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
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      This was a great find from the 1001 books to read before you die list. The brief googling I did about Nella Larsen made me interested to read her work. She was an American writer in the 1920s and is considered part of the Harlem Renaissance. She was mixed race, with a black father, possibly of Caribbean descent, and a Danish immigrant mother. I had never heard of her, which I find sad. [Quicksand] is largely autobiographical and explores Helga's search for identity. When the novel opens, Helga is teaching at a black college in the South. She quickly becomes disillusioned, though, and wonders what this closed community is really achieving or even trying to achieve. This disillusionment will follow Helga through all of the different communities she subsequently belongs to. She first goes back to Chicago, where she was raised, thinking she will get aid from her white Uncle who has helped her in the past. But he has a new wife who won't acknowledge Helga at all. Helga is helped by a wealthy black woman who gives her some connections in Harlem and Helga moves to New York. There she is happy at first, living among educated and creative black society, but she again becomes disillusioned, partially with their isolation from wider American culture. She travels to Denmark to live with her Aunt. There she is fully welcomed, but realizes that she is treated mainly like a novelty. At first she appreciates the freedom she has to fully participate in Danish society, unlike in America, but again she becomes disillusioned. So she returns to New York. At the end she falls into the most common and expected trap of religion, marriage, and childbearing. A sad and disappointing ending for this bright and yearning young woman. I found the writing beautiful and mature and the themes of race and belonging explored deeply and subtly. This was a really excellent surprise and I look forward to reading [[Nella Larsen]]'s other novel, [Passing].
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Written in the 20's by one of the Black Renaissance writers. Story is about a woman with a white mother and a black father and her search for belonging in America and overseas with white relatives. Well written and an easy and entertaining read. I think many of the characters issues are still relevant today.
    • 4/5
      The 2 page introduction written by T.N.R. Rogers nearly drove me to tears with the description of the life of Nella Larsen. And then I moved on to the book and got a little pissed-off with Helga Crane, the main protagonist and the alter-ego of Nella Larsen.Helga was born to a Danish mother and West Indies father. The father split when Helga was just a young girl and the mother remarried to a white man. They had another daughter and the dark little Helga was basically abandoned. Now you have to admit that is a pretty sad affair.Helga is educated. She teaches at a southern African-American school. She's got job security and people who love her. But she's restless. Not happy with the current state of affairs of the school. She must move on but needs to hurt the feelings of a couple of men first.Chicago. Woe is her. No money, no job. But she networks, gets a job and moves to New York's Harlem district where she lives with the high society in a Harlem Mansion. But she's restless. Not happy with the current state of affairs. She must move on but needs to hurt the feelings of a few people first.Denmark. Her Aunty and Uncle welcome her with open arms. She lives in luxury. Dresses to the nines. Goes to concerts and high society artsy parties. She's proposed to by a prominent artist. But she's restless. Not happy with the current state of affairs. She must move on but needs to hurt the feelings of a few people first.New York City. Rich. Mingling with the best of Harlem. Lovers past and present. But she's restless. Not happy with the current state of affairs. She must move on but needs to hurt the feelings of a few people first.Alabama. A preacher's wife. Poor. Birthing like a rabbit. Playing Martha Stewart to the local ladies. But she's restless...Now I understand that not being fully African-American and not being fully Anglo Saxon at the turn of the century was a precarious position to be in. But it seems she was generally accepted into each place she ran off to. She was just never satisfied. Aside from being materialistic she was also an egoist. She scorned her African-American culture and disdained the Anglo Saxons. Her problem didn't seem to be a racial problem. It appeared to be a personal issue of not 'counting your blessings'.In my life I've run away from places I didn't like and like Helga was happy for the first couple of years then grew dissatisfied with each locale. But I learned to appreciate the good things about each place I lived. Made new friends. Looked at the world in wide-eyed wonder. But damn Helga, you had friends, wealth, acceptance and still groaned about how hard your life was. You were blind to your blessings. Belittled the friends you had and ruined your life in the process. You have no one to blame but yourself...Helga reminded me of Anna Karenina. I didn't like Ms Anna but in the end felt pity for her. In Quicksand, I didn't like Ms Helga and in the end still didn't like her. But I enjoyed the book.
    • 4/5
      Sometime during the past week I happened to be sitting in a very stuffy classroom - first heatwave of the summer lurking outside the air-conditioned building - listening to a very boring lecture on Eugene O'Neil's "Mourning Becomes Electra". ("Yes, you seeee children, Orin feels verrry verrry geeltee beecoz hee thinks hee eez reesponseebell for...") Ten minutes into the class, I'm ready to die my hair black, cut my veins and re-read Bell Jar. Fortunately I notice that the girl sitting next to me has a copy of of one of those huge Norton Anthologies - possibly to use in another class. So I think "surely, there must be something better than this to read in there!" and beg her to lent me that book in the same tone I would beg an axe-carrying mass-murderer to spare my life.The first think that caught my attention - I was looking for full-length texts, not those useless chopped up texts the Nortons are full of - was Nella Larsen's "Quicksand". So I read the biography of the author first, to prolong the time I didn't have to hear all about Orin and Lavinia, and then proceeded to read the text. I had read about half of it before the teacher dismissed us and the girl asked me for her book back, and then I went home and read the rest of it. The novella, at only 80 (small-print) pages offers much more food for thought than its size would suggest. Larsen touches upon questions of racial and sexual identity, and discusses sensuality, love, religious belief, discrimination, the desirability of uniformity or diversity, belonging, motherhood, marriage, happiness, womanhood, money - discusses them in earnest, using her own experiences to make the novel and its protagonist as real as possible. Our heroine Helga Crane shares a lot with her creator, Larsen. They both had a white mother and a coloured father, they both lived in Denmark for some years, they both worked at rich black schools and ended up very disappointed in the education provided for coloured people, they both had to deal with marital and economical issues. They both struggled to find a place in the American society of the 1920s and 1930s. And neither of them, it seems, ever found it. After her divorce was completed, Nella Larsen stopped writing completely, turned her back on the critics who acclaimed her work and the literary circles where she was admired, and was reported as being depressed and possibly on drugs. She never wrote another word again and spent the rest of her life avoiding contact with friends and acquaintances. As for Helga Crane... her "ending" is not quite as conclusive - it is perhaps more subtle. But it is no less heartbreaking.My favourite parts of the book were not, in the end, the ones that dealt with racial identity - although one could argue that the issue of racial identity is such an intrinsic part of the novel that you cannot separate it from the text. What I loved most was, on the one hand, the descriptions of the stages of Helga's relationship with religion; and on the other hand her attempts, through whatever means she had at hand, to capture that elusive thing called "happiness", attempts that never quite succeeded.So: short novella, and definitely worth a read.