When I think about this infanticide, all I can say is Let life be the judge!!! View all 26 comments. Set after the American Civil War —65 , it is inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January by fleeing to Ohio, a free state.
Morrison had come across the story "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an newspaper article published in the American Baptist and reproduced in The Black Book, a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in View all 9 comments.
Jan 03, Cecily rated it liked it Shelves: usa-and-canada , landscape-location-protagonist , race-people-of-colour , death-grief-bereavement , ghosts-and-mysteries , unreliable-narrators , magical-realism. I am not worthy to review this brilliant, visceral, mysterious, and powerful book. The story is simple, but the telling is not - like watching a petal on the surface of turbulent water, unpredictably changing direction.
I understand the individual words, but the sense and sentences are elusive, even as they are beautiful and sometimes ugly - like trying to decipher an unfamiliar dialect or make sense of a half-forgotten dream. Image : Catching a fish with bare hands Source Freedom from slavery does not free people from the past. Not even from the past of their forebears. Beloved shows the shocking brutality and the catastrophic multi-faceted consequences handed down generations, but the quicksilver prose casts a veil on the horror rather as the Nadsat slang does in Clockwork Orange , which I reviewed HERE.
The narrative switches points of view and jumps about the timeline. What is true and what is imagined is muddled, muddy, moot, most especially who - or what - is Beloved. Elemental liquids mix and take on a mystical element: blood, milk, and water. Image : Blood and water mixing Source Themes I'm sure there are many books, theses, and GR reviews exploring these far better than I can, and I will shortly look at friends' reviews. Winter stars, close enough to lick, had come out before sunset.
All he can. View all 34 comments. Shelves: best-ever , read-in This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. You who read me keep your repugnance and horror to yourself. I am here to tell you my story with an iron smile under my chin.
The men without skin stole my milk so my mother punished them with my blood. I was the already crawling baby waiting to be loved. I am Beloved. Which kind of unimaginable atrocities can lead a mother to murder her own baby to spare it a certain life full of humiliation and wanton abuse? How much suffering can a human being unde You who read me keep your repugnance and horror to yourself.
How much suffering can a human being undergo before he loses touch with reality and turns to derangement as the only way to cope? But I do wonder, derangement or conscientious remembrance as a sort of self-inflicted punishment? Set in the s Ohio, this story reveals, in a disturbingly subtle and poignant way, the real value of freedom as opposed to a life of slavery.
Baby Suggs, the mother of her spouse -only in the eyes of God- Halle, tries to warn her about the risks of being a slave woman and insisting on loving her children too dearly. But Sethe blooms with the seed of light which is growing inside her and plans an escape with her family to be able to love freely. Until one fateful day, when the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, disguised as men without skin, come to take what they believe to be their right. They come to teach a lesson to these proud animals which have had the boldness to believe they can be human beings.
They undermine the body and tear the flesh, proving their power and manhood, forcing their entrance. They arise as the masters, squeezing all kind of fluxes from emaciated carcasses: urine, spit, blood and milk.
But not tears, never tears. The fluxes blend into a streaming river of sorrow and lost hopes which will never reach the cleansing waters. They wear out the spirit and subjugate the soul, chocking and chopping. The hummingbirds sing, flapping their wings, and the sunbeams shine through the branches of the trees, which are now adorned with hanging limbless torsos.
The natural world, which becomes the imperturbable setting for this irrational carnage, watches as an indifferent spectator. She only has time to spare one before she is stopped. Her Beloved. A murderess? Or a selfless, desperate act of a loving mother? An individual might not find enough strength in him to exorcise the ghosts from his past, to break free from his long life bondages, to recover from the nonhealing wounds of his soul.
But when embraced by the nourishing arms of the community, when allowed to enter its collective memories and sorrows, he becomes miraculously empowered to banish his worst nightmares, to let go of the shame and the guilt. A future, free from the shadow of slavery is possible then, where a so much coveted peace of mind can be envisioned, where the hummingbirds will sing and the sundrenched grass will gleam in harmony with smiling faces instead of iron grimaces and scarred necks.
Slave life; freed life- every day was a test and a trial. I am the girl and I am still waiting to be loved. This is not a story to pass on.
This is a story to forget so that a new beginning can be born. View all 69 comments. Aug 24, Trillian rated it did not like it Recommends it for: over-educated literati. Shelves: not-worthwhile.
This is the worst book that I have ever read. It epitomizes what elite academics love about literature: It is dark and nasty which, to an academic, means realistic and it is obscure and incoherent to an academic, this means deep and profound. This is like the deliberately hideous painting that is called "art" by intellectuals: Common-sense individuals question its merit and are told it is complex, beautiful, and beyond the untrained understanding and crass sensibilities of the uneducated.
I This is the worst book that I have ever read. I disliked everything about this book - its leftist message, disgusting characters and grotesque writing style a conglomeration of broken grammar rules, disorganized structure and ungainly narrative.
It is mired in filth with its references to bestiality, sexual assault, psychological torture, violence and infanticide. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past. It seems to be a good book to read in the light of the recent discussion on the Roots reboot, as well as the recent New York Times article which discusses how African-American DNA bears signs of slavery.
I feel that for many thi "Working dough. I feel that for many this isn't too much of a surprise. This was a tough read, even tougher the second time around.
I never get used to books like this; if anything they get more painful as I become more and more aware of what slavery consisted of. One of the things that always gets to me when reading slave narratives is the burdens the slaves had to endure and with little to no help, but I'm learning about the little things they did to try to endure and survive. Some of their methods may not sound healthy, from our perspectives for example, limiting love because you know that any time your family could be taken away from you , but this book shows us in many ways how unless we are in a certain situation, it's really impossible for us to know how we'll react to it.
At the beginning of the book, former slave Baby Suggs is contemplating colour, all because she is about to die and she has never had the time to do so before. The world of a slave is small and it doesn't belong to them. And even with freedom the past still haunts them: "Her past had been like her present--intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.
Paul D and Sethe's love story is against the odds, with Paul D guarding his heart and Sethe still recovering from deaths, abuse, and children running away.
Two very broken people, and Paul D with this sort of mentality: "He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him.
And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him. Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something? I pictured her loneliness, loneliness that caused her to value the company of a ghost, which is why she clung to Beloved, who demands so much attention and affection.
I ended up liking her character transformation the most: "In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out.
View all 24 comments. Sep 28, Kelly and the Book Boar rated it it was ok Shelves: liburrrrrry-book , read-in , i-read-banned-books , smort , oprah-told-me-to. I realize this is a classic and a Pulitzer Prize winner and yada yada yada, but oh my goodness am I glad to be done. Going in to this book I knew nothing about it except for the fact that it was on the Banned Books List and that Oprah said I should read it.
I did manage to finish, but WHAT. I will say that Beloved is the only book I can remember reading where I was in love with the story but hated the way it was told. As for Beloved being touted one of the best books of all time????
Thanks for nothing, Oprah! Apr 08, leynes rated it really liked it Shelves: to-review , black-writers. How I thought reading Beloved would go: How it actually went: I might be in denial still but it actually wasn't as gruesome or hard to stomach as I thought it would be. The first thirty pages were the worst Which turned out to be a pretty good story Sep 12, Jason Pettus rated it it was amazing Shelves: classic , personal-favorite , postmodernism.
Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally. The CCLaP In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Book Beloved , by Toni Morrison The story in a nutshell: To understand the importance of 's Beloved , you need to understand that before this first Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.
The CCLaP In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Book Beloved , by Toni Morrison The story in a nutshell: To understand the importance of 's Beloved , you need to understand that before this first novel of hers, author Toni Morrison was already a respected executive within the publishing industry, and a highly educated book-loving nerd; this is what made it so frustrating for her during the s and '80s, after all, when trying to look back in history for older books detailing the historical black experience, and finding almost nothing there because of past industry discrimination, general withholding of education from blacks for decades, etc.
This novel, then, is Morrison's attempt to partially right this wrong, loosely using a real historical record from the s she once discovered when younger and obsessed upon for years, the story of a slave woman her age who once voluntarily killed her own child rather than let her be taken back to slave territory. In Morrison's case, the novel is set in the decade following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, up in Ohio in the northern US where so many former slaves fled during the so-called "Reconstruction" of the American South in those years.
As such, the actual plotline resembles the beginnings of what we now call "magical realism," a style that has become virtually its own new sub-genre in literary fiction in the last twenty years; because not only is this woman's house haunted by a violent poltergeist, but eventually even a young woman appears claiming to be Beloved herself, the bizarre revenge-seeking reincarnated version of the very daughter this woman killed during the Civil War years.
But is she? Or is she a runaway taking chance advantage of intimate knowledge she randomly happened to learn through odd circumstances? And does it matter? Just as is the case with most great postmodern literature, Beloved actually tackles a lot of different bigger issues in a metaphorical way, perhaps the more important point altogether than the details of the magical part of the plot, which never does get fully resolved in a definitive way even by the end; it is instead a novel about love, about family, about responsibility, about the struggle between innate intelligence and a formal education.
It is ultimately a book about the black experience, a sophisticated and complex look at some of the emotional issues people from that time period must've had to struggle with, Morrison writing their stories for them precisely because none of them were allowed to back then, or were given the education to express themselves in such an eloquent way; and as such, it's not really the "ghost" part of this ghost-story that is important at all, but rather that it serves as a convenient coat-rack in which to hang all these other issues.
The argument for it being a classic: Well, for starters, it won the Pulitzer Prize, and when was the last time you won a Pulitzer, chump?
Much more important than that, though, say its fans, it heralded a whole new sea-change in the global arts altogether; a triumphant moment for both black artists and women artists and especially black women artists , a story that not only speaks powerfully and intimately to all people with that background, but that proves to the rest of the world that it's not just stuffy white dudes who can write beautiful, haunting, instantly classic literature.
It's a major highlight of the postmodern period, say historians, a changing of the guard just as important as when the early Modernists shut down the Victorian Age; this one novel and its overwhelming success single-handedly ushered in a whole new golden period for the arts concerning people of color, women, the gay community and more.
And not only that, but so far it's held up well too; it was not only made into an extremely high-profile movie ten years later, starring and produced by The Great And Almighty Oprah Hallowed Be Her Name Amen, but in was named by the New York Times as the very best American novel of the last 25 years.
The argument against: A weak one, frankly; it seems that most people who read this book end up loving it, and with very little dissent found online. And a controversial argument, too; because the argument against this book being a classic seems mostly to be the anti-politically-correct argument, that books such as these got as much attention as they did in the '80s, '90s and '00s merely because the overly liberal academic community had a political agenda back then, that they were determined to usher in a new golden age for writers of color and women and the gay community, even if they had to falsely trumpet a whole series of merely okay books, or sometimes even semi-crappy ones.
It's an argument more often applied to other, lesser books than Beloved , frankly; but like other books in the CCLaP series, you can technically argue that this book started the entire trend, was the one that led to the lesser books afterwards that people complain about in a more valid way. I'm not sure how much water this holds, but you do see people arguing this point online.
My verdict: So in many ways, this week's book very directly illustrates why I wanted to start this essay series in the first place this year, of why I first thought it good for my own life that I tackle all these so-called "classics" for the first time, and only then thought, "Oh yeah, and I could write essays about the experience afterwards too.
Plus, I'm predisposed to dislike the so-called "ebonics" on display here in Beloved , an aspect of this book that continues to be controversial; that is, Morrison wrote all the dialogue here as actual barely-educated former slaves in the s would've actually talked, making it difficult to follow along and requiring close attention while reading, a decision that some "Western Classics" style professors have accused of being damaging to the arts in the long term, and another bad legacy of the politically-correct years.
But then again, let's plainly admit that I have absolutely loved reading all these old Victorian novels that I have through the CCLaP this year as well, of looking back on the nerdy little overdressed white people who were my very ancestors and seeing how they talked, behaved, what they found important, what they fretted about when the doors were closed, feeling that connection between them and myself, feeling that except for the wardrobe and funky flowery language we were actually quite alike.
When thought about this way, suddenly one has a lot of empathy for what Morrison and other intelligent, educated black women went through in pre- Beloved days; they simply wanted to have the same experience I've been having with Victorian literature this year, frustratingly couldn't because of no literature from smart educated black women even existing from those years, so realized that they were going to have to write it themselves.
And also when looking at it this way, you realize that the ebonics of Beloved is no worser at all than, say, the Romanticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables ; both are old-fashioned language, hard for modern eyes to follow, yet historically accurate and reflecting what those times were actually like.
Both require patience, both require forgiveness, but both can offer up richly rewarding experiences if taken seriously and if meeting the author halfway. It's this essay series, this newfound attention to the historical classics, that is making my brain suddenly work in these new ways this year, to have a more patient and more expansive view of any particular project I tackle; like I said, that's the whole reason I decided to read a hundred classics in the first place, is to hopefully learn something from it, since so many people are always arguing that there's something unique and important to be learned from "reading the classics.
It gets an extremely high recommendation from me today. Is it a classic? View all 6 comments. Mar 14, [P] rated it it was ok Shelves: bitch-please. Take Beloved , a book that I have only ever part read, having given up about a third of the way into it. Reaction to the book seems to be about evenly split between those who hate it and those who love it. Which is fine, of course. What do you say to ignorant crap like that? Part of me would prefer to say nothing because I find it exhausting arguing against such obvious idiocy.
But if I was forced to respond I might well state, first of all, that, uh, racism does actually still exist. And so the subject is, er, not entirely irrelevant. For me, the point of writing a book like Beloved is to elevate a terrible part of history beyond mere statistics.
Beloved personalises slavery, which makes it easier for people-in-general to identify with the subject. I would say that is very important. You cannot live in a vacuum, where history is meaningless except for passing exams and making a HBO mini-series. This stuff is part of who you are and continues to play a role in how the world, your world, works.
In fact, the thing struck me as something like what Faulkner might have produced had you plied him full of E and asked him to write a chick-lit novel.
With the other he touches her face. What about this: "In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands.
Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead.
You got to love it. Every sentence in Beloved aches [or creaks] with emotion, with meaning and significance; and, for me, the impact of the story, and the full horror of the subject that Morrison was dealing with, was compromised by that. Cards on the table, I found the book entirely ridiculous. Ironically, for someone who, I think I am correct in saying, teaches or taught English literature or creative writing, I would say that she needed advice and guidance herself.
Someone needed to look at the manuscript and take a red pen to it, with little notes in the margin saying 'is this necessary? Probably the most glaring misstep in the novel occurs long after I gave up on it. Struggling badly to overcome my reservations about the quality of what I was reading, I had a look at some online reviews. It was then that I came across the opinions outlined in my initial paragraphs, but it was also then that I found out that the baby — the ghost baby, the slaughtered baby — at some point in the novel is apparently heard in the text; by which I mean that we have access to its thoughts or words.
Why on earth would you do that? The fate of that child speaks loudly enough, all Toni Morrison is doing by giving it a voice [a stream of consciousness voice, I believe] is cranking up the melodrama to View all 59 comments. Jan 09, SimitudeSims rated it it was amazing Shelves: book-club-books. Very haunting, and exceptionally written. The best kind of poetry.
Jul 16, Paul rated it it was amazing Shelves: women-of-colour Morrison based the novel on the story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her child as she was being recaptured, to save the child a lifetime of slavery.
The setting is around the time of the civil war. The plot and the storyline are well known and it seems most of my GR friends have either read it or have it on their tbr lists. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it.
Its grave-yards and low-lying rivers. Or just a house—solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it.
It has been argued that Morrison is confronting and highlighting things not recorded or told by histories narrated by white historians. I think this is also where some of the negative reviews come from; because the novel is not polemical and the characters have and enduring humanity with nuance. There are reviews saying this is the worst book ever, expressing hatred and loathing for the novel.
Hatred and loathing; worst book ever! There are so many bad, bad books out there. I wonder if it is being forced to look at something in the past, that is still in the present and that we are unwilling to face. It seems that slavery has now to be a topic studied in history; making it too real and present creates strong reactions.
We still minimize and gloss over in the west the horrors we perpetrated on other parts of the globe. The European powers and the US killed far more than the Nazis did in the slave trade and we still have a problem calling it genocide.
Morrison makes it all human and personal and brings it home. View all 12 comments. I did not end up caring much for this book. I really wanted to like it since it is a classic, but it really was a chore for me. There was so much time jumping without obvious breaks that it was difficult to understand. It also didn't help that there was a mix of prose, poetry, and stream of consciousness. I can see how some might see this as a must read, but not me. View all 18 comments.
Apr 01, Samra Yusuf rated it it was amazing Shelves: fav , historical-fiction. Damn the humans, they are the most enigmatic beings who ever lived, their hearts have reasons that reason knows not, and their heads fabricate worlds the world have never seen, they kill the things they love and are haunted by the memories that fade away by the time but never disappear, but becomes a ghost and gnaws at your nerves, for always and forever….
To be a mother is the most consummate feeling one can have, the one most celestial and earthly alike, you share your blood and flesh with the Damn the humans, they are the most enigmatic beings who ever lived, their hearts have reasons that reason knows not, and their heads fabricate worlds the world have never seen, they kill the things they love and are haunted by the memories that fade away by the time but never disappear, but becomes a ghost and gnaws at your nerves, for always and forever….
To be a mother is the most consummate feeling one can have, the one most celestial and earthly alike, you share your blood and flesh with the one who resides in your womb ignorant of the outer world, the bloody walls and thumping heart his only world, a seed size of a grain gradually becomes something you come to love unconditionally, who feeds on your flesh and sucks your milk, to be a mother is almost godly!
Then there is a world different than ours, a world of less-humans who are bought and sold like corn, where, to live is a curse and to die a luxury, where you are never sure to get bread enough to calm the hunger, where you are never free enough to entertain your eyes with sight of sky, where you are aware of only one color, the color of dirt and hint of sweat, and where you are not named but numbered!
She kills the baby girl and will be haunted by her ghost, the baby denied to suck milk, will suck life out of her mother, the baby denied of the warmth of lap, will haunt the home her mother lives, the baby denied to breathe life, will turn the lives of others into living hell….
Morrison is at her best in building most complicated of characters stucked in bizarre tapestry of relations, magical realism is handled craftily, one wayward step and you lose thread of the story wholly, Beloved becomes more than just a repressed memory, but also a representation for the entire community.
While much of their pain stems from the horrors of slavery, it is also comes from their relationship with Sethe. Throughout the novel, Sethe suffers more psychological damage than any other character, making it logical that others would find themselves entangled in her life.
As a character, Beloved represents not only her own history as being one who, before her murder, lived along the edge of the line between freedom and slavery, but the history of several generations as she acts out the pain of others by forcing along their remembrances….. View all 27 comments.
In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like. I could leave it like that. I should, really, I should. Leave it, in her words, in her meaning, in her context and effort and heritage and everything that is not mine.
Never will be mine, these things that should rightfully flay me alive every time I happen to dwell upon them, whether in flight of fanciful musings or serious consideration as they so rightfully deserve.
The only In the beginning there were no words. The only thing I own is the history, and god forbid I forget it for a length of breath. I see the decriers of her prose, and I wonder.
I see the decriers of magical realism, and I wonder. I see the decriers of characters, of plot, of calves in particular, and I have to wonder, especially at the calves. That was what made you stop? Just that? You should know better, by now, there is no excuse calibrated enough to sail you past the port of truth.
Especially that. So I will try. I, descendant of Virginia landowners and parents who refuse to believe in the fact and face of the current US president, will try, and I can only hope for Toni Morrison to let me be. This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. There, just that, are the words you really need. More of hers, I know, but truly, I have nothing to fall upon besides vague nuances of "slavery", "United States", "the evil that men do".
And women, and people, and the days rolling by on the backs of millions, chokecherry trees bleeding through the centuries to a boy named Trayvon Martin today and so, so many others. No answers; no redemption. Just facts and figures and cultures spliced and split along veins of the void, how much can one thing break another, and how long, and how shall it ever be unbroken.
The voice carries all of that, and beyond it. Listen to the voice long enough, and you will begin to see the hazy and bloodcurdled outlines of the question, the content, the situational chaos bounded by need on one side and means on the other, and the world that will never be able to afford to stop picking up the pieces.
On the last day, however, schoolteacher comes for Sethe to take her and her children back to Sweet Home. Rather than surrender her children to a life of dehumanizing slavery, she flees with them to the woodshed and tries to kill them.
Only the third child, her older daughter, dies, her throat having been cut with a handsaw by Sethe. Sethe returns to the house at , where Baby Suggs has sunk into a deep depression. The community shuns the house, and the family continues to live in isolation.
Meanwhile, Paul D has endured torturous experiences in a chain gang in Georgia, where he was sent after trying to kill Brandywine, a slave owner to whom he was sold by schoolteacher.
One day, a fortuitous rainstorm allows Paul D and the other chain gang members to escape. He travels northward by following the blossoming spring flowers. Sethe and Paul D look forward to a promising future together, until one day, on their way home from a carnival, they encounter a strange young woman sleeping near the steps of Paul D and Beloved hate each other, and Beloved controls Paul D by moving him around the house like a rag doll and by seducing him against his will.
Worried by the way her mother is wasting away, Denver leaves the premises of for the first time in twelve years in order to seek help from Lady Jones, her former teacher. Bodwin, who has come to to take Denver to her new job, arrives at the house. Mistaking him for schoolteacher, Sethe runs at Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick. She is restrained, but in the confusion Beloved disappears, never to return. Ace your assignments with our guide to Beloved! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. How long should it take to read beloved?
What should I read after beloved? What is the least popular book? What is the easiest Toni Morrison book to read? Which James Baldwin to read first? Why was Go Tell It on the Mountain banned?
Which is the best book to read? What is the first book I should read? What happens if you read 20 minutes a day?
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