Book Discussion "Quicksand" by Nella Larsen

Our book for September is "Quicksand" by Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen.

From Wikipedia:
Nella Larsen introduces the educated mixed-race protagonist, Helga Crane, who struggles to find her identity in a world of racialized crisis in the 1920s…The novel gives us a glimpse into the dichotomy of being mixed raced and the divergence into two vastly different worlds as the protagonist travels through uniquely different cultural spaces from 1920’s Jazz Age Harlem, NY to Copenhagen, Denmark.

When in Harlem…Crane happens onto a store-front revival and has a charismatic religious experience. After marrying the preacher who converted her, she moves with him to the rural Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for more than how to integrate her mixed ancestry.

“[Nella Larsen’s novels] open up a whole world of experience that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable. They do that still.” – Alice Walker