Since joining goodreads, I've made an effort to read the classics. Sometimes they fall flat, but most of the time they are better than expected. Passing is an example of the latter and I absolutely loved it! This novel at 90 years old feels like it could have been written today. What Passing has revealed isn't a huge revelation in my mind. First of all let me get my literary impressions out of the way. Nella Larsen is quite a talent. There is something about the way she writes that just blew me

Checking out the Netflix Book Club (Which is confusing because it is actually on YouTube)!Irene "Rene" is out doing some shopping for a birthday present when she becomes faint and slips into a taxi. The driver takes her to The Drayton, a hotel with a rooftop restaurant, to cool down. The rooftop is a section of the hotel that is restricted to blacks, but Rene is able to "pass" for white. When she is enjoying a nice glass of sweet tea, she notices a woman staring at her. When the other woman laug...

This is so good. The suspense. The ambiguity. It’s short. It’s great.Second read: it’s so good. The language and discussions around race and respectability and belonging and ownership are just spot on, even 100 years later. Also the scenes are so drama packed and yet so so short. Ugh this is a very good book.

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | |“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.” At once alluring and disquieting Nella Larsen's Passing presents its readers with a piercing examination of the interplay of race, gender, and class in 1920s New York. Clare and Irene, the women at the centre of this novel, grew up in the same Black neighborhood....

Wow, for such a short novel, this one packs a punch! A classic of Harlem Renaissance literature, this little book explores what the concept of "passing" as white has meant for Black women throughout history. This book challenges our notions of what makes someone a part of a racial group, and hooboy. That ending though.

A novel about passing as white, coded with queer subtext, Passing follows protagonist Irene Redfield as she rekindles a deep bond with her childhood friend Clare Kendry at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Both Clare and Irene are light-skinned Black women who grew up in the same neighborhood; since the time of their separation from each other, though, Clare has married an aggressive white supremacist and begun passing as a white woman, while Irene has thoroughly involved herself in the raci...

Truly fantastic – compelling, gripping, thought-provoking and powerful. What an ending! I completely loved it.

Unfortunately I've not read many Harlem Renaissance greats. I've only previously read the novels "Native Son," "Go Tell it on the Mountain," "Invisible Man," &, well, pretty much. The simplicity of the way this story is told, with a heavy and interesting overuse of commas and a well-rounded anecdote which deals with self-proclamation and self-deception, makes this my favorite one in the canon. It speaks of the race problem with the use of melodrama, a very tricky device which feels snuggly & at

5 "astute, biting, theatrical" stars !!! 2017 Honorable Mention with High Distinction Read This was an extremely thought provoking and personally challenging read for me on a number of levels. Passing is such an odd concept for me to fully grasp on a deeper level. I straddle the line in so many ways in my own life and have always seen the world and expressed my own self in a non-binary fashion. Luckily this was not only accepted by my family of origin but also encouraged and nurtured by a selec...

PASSING gets an above-passing grade. It was on my TBR list for so long that I'm not sure why I might have wanted to read it, but I'm glad I got through it and...yeah, I'm glad I read it.

For the first time, I am participating in a women's century challenge in the group catching up on classics. My 1920s selection is Passing by Nella Larsen, a semi-autobiographical novella, in which a young, mixed race woman light enough to pass decides to live her adult life as white. Delving into the perception of race from a myriad of perspectives, Larsen takes her readers back to a bygone era when African Americans were beginning to make inroads in northern society. Irene Redfield and her husb...

Short classics are my passion. I love getting smarter in under 2 hours.Now I'm more intelligent and more pretentious and I had a good time getting there.Living the dream.That's enough of a review.Bottom line: Sometimes short and impressive is all a book has to be!!-----------------reading books by Black authors for Black History Month!book 1: castebook 2: business not as usualbook 3: the color purplebook 4: the parking lot attendantbook 5: kindredbook 6: wrapped up in youbook 7: the boyfriend pr...

I read this a few months ago now, and I drastically undervalued its brilliance. I’m writing an essay on racial encounter in the modernist movement for university, so I’ve been picking this book apart during my second and third readings of it. During the course of it, I’ve noticed something equally as important. Racial encounter is at the centre of this book, but it is not the heart of it. Indeed, repressed sexual desire and love are what drive the narrative forward. But love isn’t easily recogni...

Our Most Common PrejudiceThis novel is an extended example of a figure of speech called synecdoche in which a part is used to reference the whole. What makes it unusual, and highly creative, is that the part that Larsen uses is the gross and glaring fact of racial prejudice. The whole is a much more subtle and barely expressible prejudice that most of us find instinctive - prejudiced rejection of the purposes of others.The storyline appears straightforward. Because she is light-skinned, Clare, I...

What if I could be someone else? Crossing borders, sneaking into a different society through the back door, and living a secret life, fearing the consequences of detection - that is the main theme of "Passing", which I read directly after Quicksand, but had to let sink in for a couple of days before reviewing. Quicksand is about how you slowly, steadily sink deeper and deeper into life, choking when you feel the lack of choice, the lack of freedom in a world that judges you for the colour of yo...

Written in the late 1920's, this is indeed a powerful piece of writing, and all these years later still remains an important one, dealing with the uncomfortable critique on modern race relations. Nella Larsen holds her own place in history for being the first African-American woman to receive a Guggenheim fellowship, and while her body of work hardly got off the ground in terms of numbers, what she did produce was fascinating insight into the tough lives people of mixed race had to endure. This

Huzzah for neat seguing of plot pulse and theme! This one proves to be a much better outing than Quicksand because it relies on dialogue and interactions between characters to gradually disclose its cleverly withheld secrets. Till the very end Larsen successfully kept me guessing at the hidden fears, ambitions and motivations that drive Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry - two light-skinned black women who subscribe to different forms of morally ambiguous survivalist ideology to counter the omnipre...

“ “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion but we protect it.” ” This book reminded me of The Vanishing Half in the way that it focuses in on one light-skinned black woman’s journey to deciding to pass as white while someone that used to be close to her, who is also a light-skinned black woman, watches from afar. Afar in the way that everything that

“ It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well.”Passing, written a century ago in 1922 by Nella Larsen is a complex and compelling novel which looks at the relationship between racial loyalty and identity. It is a study in contrasts, following the increasingly fraught relationship between two very different biracial women. They are both able to pass as white, but the ways that they choose to pass revea...

You're living your adult life in the 1920s. You are extremely fair skinned although you are labeled Negro due to your ancestry. Because of being labeled a Negro you grew up in a world of fear, discrimination & possibly worst of all, poverty. Add in the fact that you grew up as a girl in a patriarchal society.You realize you have an opportunity to "become white." You can forget all of the bullshit that accompanied your childhood as a Negro. You can crossover to the mainstream! You can have a whit...