The Bern Book is a travelogue, a memoir, a ¿diary of an isolated soul¿ (Darryl Pinckney), and a meditation on the myth and reality of race in midcentury Europe and America.
In 1953, having left the US and settled in Bern, Switzerland, Vincent O. Carter, a struggling writer, set about composing a ¿record of a voyage of the mind.¿ The voyage begins with Carter¿s furiously good-humored description of how, every time he leaves the house, he must face the possibility of being asked ¿the hated question¿ (namely, Why did you, a black man born in America, come to Bern?). It continues with stories of travel, war, financial struggle, the pleasure of walking, the pain of self-loathing, and, through it all, various experiments in what Carter calls ¿lacerating subjective sociology.¿ Now this long-neglected volume is back in print for the first time since 1973.
