Books
Nella Larsen

Quicksand

Helga Crane is a mixed-race teacher who struggles to find her identity in a world of racial crisis in the 1920s America. She is the daughter of a Danish mother, who died when she was an adolescent, and a West Indian father, who is absent. While teaching in Naxos, Helga suffers from social angst as she is discontented with the social uplift philosophy delivered by a white preacher. She moves to Harlem where she becomes the secretary to a refined, but often hypocritical, black middle-class woman who is obsessed with the “race problem”, which urges her into another escape as she visits her aunt in Copenhagen. Driven by the search for racial identity Helga rejects intimate relationships with every man she encounters at each destination. She is looking for more than how to integrate her mixed ancestry. Quicksand explores both cross-cultural and interracial themes and throughout the book Helga expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends consider genetic differences between races.
170 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2023
Publication year
2023
Publisher
DigiCat
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  • Julie Laurberg Lund Kofoedshared an impression6 years ago
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Quotes

  • Sophia Millerhas quoted2 years ago
    If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t “belong.”
  • Sophia Millerhas quoted2 years ago
    No family. That was the crux of the whole matter. For Helga, it accounted for everything, her failure here in Naxos, her former loneliness in Nashville.
  • Sophia Millerhas quoted2 years ago
    Bitterly she reflected that James had speedily and with entire ease fitted into his niche. He was now completely “naturalized,” as they used laughingly to call it. Helga, on the other hand, had never quite achieved the unmistakable Naxos mold, would never achieve it, in spite of much trying. She could neither conform nor be happy in her unconformity.
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