Quicksand and Passing Book

I was not prepared for this. But it was probably better that way. Here are a few notes on each:

Quicksand: Stylistically, the prose is conventional, with some interesting indirectness and some surprisingly concise and fresh sounding turns of phrase. For me, the structural aspects were the more interesting part of the prose: the pacing and the lacunae specifically.

As for the content: the main character's (Helga Crane's) very identity suffocates her: In her America, having a white mother and black father means that bigotry and patriarchy condition her autonomy. Her resultant way of being put me in mind of Camus' The Stranger and Delillo's "Baader-Meinhof". That is to say Helga rebels instinctively but gropingly. She is pulled through her life mostly against her intentions by the currents of irrational impulsivity and the cuffs of cultural normativity. She's foolish in the way we all are, in that we act only on our always incomplete knowledge and muddy intuitions. But Helga's braver than most because she's willing to take big risks; she throws up her stable teaching job and fiancé and later, a life of material comfort, to escape the asphyxiation of quotidian unfulfillment on the one hand and the alienation of objectification on the other. Her final attempt at shedding despair is a mis-self-diagnosis of worldly grasping and a misprescription of metaphysics. She ultimately prefers Nietzsche to Kierkegaard, (i.e. she surrenders to "faith" but ultimately finds it untrue, deformative and nihilistic) but by that time it is too late. She finds herself crushed under the yolk of childbearing: a brutal indictment.

Passing: Should be required reading. Tighter prose than Quicksand. Everything hurts now. Liminality heaving open massive casement windows. This is a reckoning. If you only read one, make it this one. If you will read both, end on this note.