Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It …
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.
There were two very trying things about this book:
1. The writing is so good, it made me feel shame for wanting to be a writer. It wasn't inspiring to sit and read Morrison and thing to myself, "I can never do this,": it was dispiriting.
2. The story is so dread-filled, and in 21st century America we've become so nearly enlightened (well, some of us have, highlighted by the fact that the unenlightenable have become so toxic and near-violent) that it filled me with remnants of shame for the sins of whitepeople, and I don't always want or need to feel that. So, it took much longer to read the book than it ought to have.
[a:Toni Morrison|3534|Toni Morrison|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1494211316p2/3534.jpg]'s [b:Beloved|483003|Beloved|Toni Morrison|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1289634142l/483003.SX50.jpg|736076] is one of those brilliantly written and important books that I wished I had liked more than I did. But that's me. I am, these days, in the mood for straightforward narratives.
I really don't know what to make of this book. I finished it. I think I liked it, but... Yeah. Sure was a ride, and I'm going to have to go back and watch John Green's crash course video about this one to help me process, I think.
This book is beyond praise - it is like watching an elaborate setup of dominoes falling backward up a hill, to the door of 124, a country house that is bombarded with metaphors of history, culture and race: every sentence is loaded. Brilliant.
I read this book once, 10 years ago, and to be honest I dreaded having to reread it for a class. My first experience was frustrating. I felt confused and alienated to the story. Then again, I felt confused and alienated about most things: I was in my early twenties.
I'm so glad this book gave me another chance. After a decade of digital, this book was like vinyl. Funny how I couldn't connect to the story a decade ago, yet today, the raw and powerful feelings of emotional desperation coursing through these characters have resounded in me like an echo of some familiar, intimate history of my own - though, admittedly, a milder, bourgier one.
There are complicated scenes in this book. By that I mean, scenes that aren't meant to be passed through quickly, but can stay with you and resolve themselves through you as you live, if …
I read this book once, 10 years ago, and to be honest I dreaded having to reread it for a class. My first experience was frustrating. I felt confused and alienated to the story. Then again, I felt confused and alienated about most things: I was in my early twenties.
I'm so glad this book gave me another chance. After a decade of digital, this book was like vinyl. Funny how I couldn't connect to the story a decade ago, yet today, the raw and powerful feelings of emotional desperation coursing through these characters have resounded in me like an echo of some familiar, intimate history of my own - though, admittedly, a milder, bourgier one.
There are complicated scenes in this book. By that I mean, scenes that aren't meant to be passed through quickly, but can stay with you and resolve themselves through you as you live, if you're interested. I love these kinds of novels. They are the best kind. They are more like companions than stories, companions who start up long conversations with you and continue asking questions long after you've moved past them to other books and other places.
