Beloved

I read this book for a book club in April 2021. I did not start the book until I had submitted my term papers for the previous term, which only left me a few days to read this—I ended up not finishing it in time for the meeting, of course. (I had about 4 days, and this ended up taking me 13 days to read. I was in the hospital for some of that and very reluctant to pick this back up, but still.) Well, I at least appreciated the group discussions as they helped me understand the themes and plot of the novel a bit more. The first part of Beloved, I was completely ‘lost in the sauce’ as they say. Morrison loves to drop you in the middle of things without any warning or acclimation period. I had read The Bluest Eye, so I thought I would not succumb to the same confusion this time around… but while the The Bluest Eye was still somewhat sensible, Beloved really takes it to a whole other cognitive level. At least in the former, Morrison gives the reader the structure of the plot from the very beginning, so you aren't completely scrambling for purchase. The second part of the book completely ditches conventional writing standards and becomes more like a fever dream. The third is a mix of both, with some normal narrative tossed in so you do not go insane, presumably.

Let me be clear—I enjoyed the themes and plot of the novel. I love dark, gritty novels, and Beloved is not pulling its punches when it comes to the brutality and horrors of slavery and its legacy. However, in order to understand anything, you have to read the book several times, which takes a lot longer than you’d expect, because the prose is in such an overtly literary style. (And that’s only the prose—not counting the random moments Morrison jumps into verse or rhyme or paragraphs that go on and on for pages.) I guess some may call it postmodernist. What I do know is that this style is definitely not for me. I appreciate Morrison’s uncanny ability to manipulate the English language, so versatile and dazzling. But when I read a book and come away with not understanding what has happened at all, it can either be very good or terrible. Unfortunately this was the latter. I ended up glancing at SparkNotes every so often just to make sure I was ‘interpreting’ this book correctly. I also had a hard time keeping track of characters or understanding their motivations and perspectives.

If you enjoy stream-of-consciousness style writing and heavy-handed metaphors, you’ll love Morrison’s style. Unfortunately while I was able to get through The Bluest Eye feeling somewhat like I understood the point of the book, with Beloved I was just frustrated and confused. I wished I would have DNFed it several times throughout the book. For what it’s worth, Denver is my favorite character—perhaps because she has the clearest and most optimistic character arc, and possibly also because sections in the book from her perspective tend to have some semblance of coherence and normalcy. Then again, I suppose you could say that the disorder and disarray of the novel reflects the inner psyches of its characters, understandably traumatized by slavery—which is brilliant for a writer, of course, but not terribly fun for this reader.

Beloved begins as a slow-burning and haunting story about living on after the worst days, slowing winding around how to tell those days without shattering again.

The story rotates narrators and jumps back and forth in time in a way that was a little confusing at first, but the narrators have distinct voices and there’s mostly just Now and one big past event for each narrator as far as jumping around in time is concerned, so it became pretty easy to keep track of where the story was. The lack of demarcation with each switch helped to build the feeling that the past isn’t really gone for any of them. The story is about reckoning with the past in different ways, and how they deal with it. It’s also a ghost story, a haunting of the past refusing to leave. As the story develops it begins depicting the past events which were just hinted at earlier, circling back to them from different perspectives and catching slightly different bits of time surrounding a few very pivotal moments. It had the effect of helping me to ease into a very traumatic story.

The middle third of the book (leading up to the end of part 1) is absolutely devastating, enough story threads are in place for it to slowly wind to a set of riveting and horrifying explanations. This book is also filled with care, for the characters and the readers. The most brutal events are told from the perspective of someone who has already survived them (or who we know is around later on, at least), and that makes the current events feel manageable even when they’re differently awful. There are multiple narrators but it usually wasn’t hard to figure out whose perspective was in each section because their narrative styles were different enough to be distinct while having enough in common for the changes in POV to not be jarring.

I like the ending, it feels like it meets the characters at a place that makes sense for everything they've been through, both before the book began and during the main timeline. They're not all the way better, not by a long shot, but they're working on it, each in their own way.