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A review by traceculture
Beloved by Toni Morrison
5.0
Toni Morrison has been on my radar for a while, glad I got round to this Pulitzer winner. There will always be suffering. It’s how we track our progress. From plague to famine to war to genocide - misery and torment is what we do best. 'Beloved' catalogues the suffering endured by millions of Africans caught up in the transatlantic slave trade, which went on for hundreds of years. The novel is set in the 1860’s and centres around the lives of Sethe and her daughter Denver, who escaped from slavery to live at 124, a two-story house in Ohio. They have secrets. Bad secrets.
Morrison’s writing is fearless, flawless and challenging and once you start moving to the rhythm of her language, you won’t want to miss a beat. Via Sethe’s dead baby, Beloved, Morrison weaves the threads of darkness through her characters lives, patching up old memories, making them possible to wear, until they wear-out and reality is no longer what they imagined it was. Despite the characters back-stories, their shared traumas and suppressed emotions, they didn’t appear to be as psychologically damaged as I was expecting. That is until ‘Paul D’ crept up behind me with a sinister ‘coming thing’ in his wake.
Morrison plants some menacing seeds, and although her eloquent and profound prose never lets go of your hand, she does take your wits to places you may feel a little unsteady.
The ‘presence’ that comes to 124, to unsettle Sethe and her daughter, brings a hefty inheritance of suffering and unutterable truths but, it also brings redemption and another chance of a free life, denied for so long to so many.
I’ve seen the movies and heard the debates but I haven’t read much literature about this period of American history. It was brutal and inhumane (like so much of what's going on today in Syria, Yemen, Iraq) and the horror we are capable of makes me sick to my core. At one point Paul D, sitting on the edge of the Mississippi, 'trying hard not to love it', finds a bunch of black curls tied with a red ribbon ‘still attached to it’s piece of scalp’ and asks ‘what are these people?’
Haunting and arresting, Beloved is the mirror we do not want to see ourselves in.
I found some of this novel puzzling and I wasn't totally enamoured by the ending, but how do you complete a book like this? I don't know.
Morrison’s writing is fearless, flawless and challenging and once you start moving to the rhythm of her language, you won’t want to miss a beat. Via Sethe’s dead baby, Beloved, Morrison weaves the threads of darkness through her characters lives, patching up old memories, making them possible to wear, until they wear-out and reality is no longer what they imagined it was. Despite the characters back-stories, their shared traumas and suppressed emotions, they didn’t appear to be as psychologically damaged as I was expecting. That is until ‘Paul D’ crept up behind me with a sinister ‘coming thing’ in his wake.
Morrison plants some menacing seeds, and although her eloquent and profound prose never lets go of your hand, she does take your wits to places you may feel a little unsteady.
The ‘presence’ that comes to 124, to unsettle Sethe and her daughter, brings a hefty inheritance of suffering and unutterable truths but, it also brings redemption and another chance of a free life, denied for so long to so many.
I’ve seen the movies and heard the debates but I haven’t read much literature about this period of American history. It was brutal and inhumane (like so much of what's going on today in Syria, Yemen, Iraq) and the horror we are capable of makes me sick to my core. At one point Paul D, sitting on the edge of the Mississippi, 'trying hard not to love it', finds a bunch of black curls tied with a red ribbon ‘still attached to it’s piece of scalp’ and asks ‘what are these people?’
Haunting and arresting, Beloved is the mirror we do not want to see ourselves in.
I found some of this novel puzzling and I wasn't totally enamoured by the ending, but how do you complete a book like this? I don't know.