I spent the first half of Sula feeling vaguely disappointed at the spare, undeveloped quality of its author's early prose, and the latter half exclaiming at how thoroughly Morrison pulls this novel out of the bag. Some of the late scenes (Sula and Nel's final confrontation on Sula's death bed; the final description of Suicide Day, 1941) will probably haunt me for years, and Nel's final realization in the last three pages of the book is heart-wrenching. Nonetheless, even after reading the last page, I still felt that this short novel is made of a different substance than certain other Morrison works, like Beloved and Song of Solomon. Covering over forty years in under two hundred pages, much of its plot and characterization are implied and suggested, rather than explicitly developed. One online reviewer referred to it as a fable, and I think that's a useful approach. Sula, Nel, Eva, and their poor black hillside neighborhood (called "the Bottom" despite being perched on a hill) are allegorial - or rather, they often treat each other and themselves as allegorical, denying their own humanity, and one "moral" of the Morrison's fable is how harmful that treatment can be.

Like other Morrison novels, there is a complicated love/hate nostalgia at play in Sula; as the novel opens, we are told that even now its setting, the hillside ghetto known as "The Bottom," is largely destroyed, and that soon all trace of it will have vanished in the sweep of "progress." And while there is a definite sadness at the disappearance of this place, in which the dramas and everyday lives of human beings unfolded, that sadness doesn't eclipse the narrator's anger and disgust at the more inhuman aspects of life in the Bottom. She lets her love of the nurturing and even the gritty, enduring parts of Bottom life coexist with her other feelings:

It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place. These young ones kept talking about the community, but they left the hills to the poor, the old, the stubborn - and the rich white folks. Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren't any places left...

I think that line is so telling: "Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place." On the one hand, this is Nel as a middle-aged woman, disapproving of all the jargon talked by the young kids who are more in love with ideas than the realities in front of them. In another way, though, the poverty and cruel conditions of life in the Bottom do erode its ability to be a "community" in the positive sense: in one scene, a grown woman asks her mother if she ever loved them (the children), and her mother tells her probably not, "Not the way you thinkin'." Hannah means, did her mother ever play with the children, snuggle them, and Eva reminds her that people need food and time for that kind of loving:

"You want me to tickle you under the jaw and forget 'bout them sores in your mouth? Pearl was shittin' worms and I was supposed to play rang-around the rosie? [...] Wasn't no time. Not none. With you all coughin' and me watchin' so TB wouldn't take you off and if you was sleepin' quiet I thought, O Lord, they dead and put my hand over your mouth to feel if the breath was comin' what you talkin' bout did I love you girl I stayed alive for you can't you get that through your thick head or what is that between your ears, heifer?"

Eva's narrative is moving - she obviously cares about her family - but her harshness toward her daughter is also hard to read. One of the themes of Sula is the ways in which love is perverted by poverty, and also, paradoxically, by the desire for upward mobility, for gentility and acceptance. When Sula, Hannah's daughter, returns unmarried, college-educated, selfish and sexually omnivorous to the Bottom as an adult, her very badness serves to transform the place into the community it may not previously have been. She becomes the collective scapegoat. To some extent she earns her reputation and to some extent the townsfolk embellish it, but in a way it hardly matters: she's the foil that makes everyone else kinder toward one another, more tolerant, better fathers to their children and wives to their husbands. They band together against a perceived common foe. And later, when Sula is no longer in the town, these benefits start to unravel; with no resistance against which to push, their relationships veer off the tracks. Morrison doesn't really take a stand on the darkness of this vision - that the people in her novel need an enemy in order to be bothered to love each other properly. It's a reality she just lays out for the reader to see, like she portrays the Bottom in all its beauty, ugliness, and erosion. Sula becomes an integral part of life in the Bottom, even though the townsfolk shun and condemn her. Neither her behavior nor their condemnation is particularly righteous, but both are forces of nature.

In fact, one of the most interesting things about Sula its examination of how things we may not like, or even notice, become so integrated into our lives that we use them as reference points. Sula becomes the townsfolks' reference point for an evil woman, just like the iconoclastic holiday "Suicide Day," started by a shell-shocked, cowbell-toting WWI veteran in 1919, becomes a reference point for the passing days and years.

In fact they had simply stopped remarking on the holiday because they had absorbed it into their thoughts, into their language, into their lives.

       Someone said to a friend, "You sure was a long time delivering that baby. How long was you in labor?"

       And the friend answered, "'Bout three days. The pains started on Suicide Day and kept up till the following Sunday. Was borned on Sunday. All my boys is Sunday boys."

       Some lover said to his bride-to-be, "Let's do it after New Years, 'stead of before. I get paid New Years Eve."

       And his sweetheart answered, "OK, but make sure it ain't on Suicide Day. I ain't 'bout to be listening to no cowbells whilst the weddin's going on."

Likewise, the two protagonists, Nel and Sula, become the touchstones of each others' emotional lives without fully realizing it's happened. And even after their relationship has been corroded by the selfish independence of Sula and the hard bitterness of Nel, both women continue to think of the other whenever they have a particular realization, or when something happens (or doesn't happen) in their lives. "Wait'll I tell Nel," thinks Sula, while Nel chastises herself for thinking of Sula "as though they were still friends and talked things over." Part of the tragedy of Sula is that the women don't have the resources to recognize the worth of what they have, and another part of it is that they can't find a way to regain what they've lost. Yet another part, it seems to me, is that despite supposedly being the closest of friends, having lived together through "the days when we were two throats and one eye and we had no price," there is still some core of existence in each woman that passes completely outside the understanding of the other.

Sula is a story with a fundamental loneliness at its core. I'm reminded of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's famous argument that all human beings live and die alone. One of the the only ways for characters in the Bottom to connect is to demonize another human; real, genuine connection is always sabotaged or undervalued. And although it's hard to deny the egregiousness of some of Sula's cruelties, it's also hard to dismiss her cry:

My lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.

As I've written about Sula, I've realized how deep its questions and motifs go. It's really a small, finely-turned gem, although I wouldn't have gotten nearly as much out of it if I hadn't stopped to articulate my reading experience. In that way, I suppose it's similar to the Faulkner I just reviewed: it has much to offer to the reader who can offer something in return.

http://unpretentiouslitcrit.blogspot.... ( )

As I read this, I experienced everything Morrison wrote about, I could visualize, smell and feel everything. Her character and story development is some of the best ever. Literary perfection. ( )

This reads something like an extended fable, beautifully written and full of meaning. Here, Morrison has packed up all of the color of her longer novels into a tight tale about a small town and its inhabitants, centered around two girls. The book is full of both beauty and horror, but comes across throughout as true to itself. While it isn't my favorite of Morrison's works, it s highly recommended. ( )

Morrison's style is soo unique, and yet curiously easy to read. I loved this story of Sula and Nel, two girlfriends, losing each other over a man, though the ending was just heartbreaking. ( )

Quite enjoyed this one. Read it at the recommendation of my sister. Found the stories interesting in their examination of the multiple viewpoints, I am aware there is much more analysis possible of this book. ( )

Magnifique écriture au service d’un univers dur et cruel. On suit Nel et Sula pendant plusieurs années, chacune avec son destin. Le roman étant très court on reste un peu frustré de la fin rapide, on aurait aimé plus de développement, les suivre plus en détail, et plus longtemps. ( )

Classic Fiction ( )

Excellent book. Morrison's writing style is incredibly rich without feeling indulgent. Her characters are complex and the environments/communities she creates in this book are very complete. It's easy to get enveloped in her writing. This book was moving. ( )

A small in size but not in content novella. The interlocking life stories of two complex women and their families. Love , life, death , betrayal , friendship and loneliness. Some very strange but believable characters who sometimes do the most unpleasant and oddest things. Set in the midwest of the USA in a poor black township over twenty one years. Oddly my edition ( UK 1980) has a strange mixture of Commonwealth spelling and American vocabulary and idioms using colour but purse for handbag, a bit disconcerting at times.
Fantastic book. ( )

The thing I like about Toni Morrison is the nasty little core of unsentimentality that lies at the heart of her work. Violence and misfortune arrive abruptly and without fanfare. The protagonist of Sula is deeply sympathetic and noble even though she does things that—both in and out of the context of the story—are unconscionable. This doesn't compromise the novel's moral seriousness, but it does put it at an interesting kilter. ( )

So disturbing its tasteful ( )

http://literaryfeline.blogspot.com/20... ( )

I picked up this book on readitswapit because the review on Amazon looked interesting. I was vaguely aware that Morrison was a famous American author, but not that she had won the Nobel prize for literature, nor that she is regarded as the foremost black American novelist. Sula is a short book, set in the poverty of a black rural township in Ohio, it isn't an overtly political book, more a psychological study.

She is famous for her unorthodox style, she switches narrators and mixes up time, she also writes dialogue in the vernacular and narration in standard English. in the first chapter, I found the style difficult and thought I wouldn't enjoy the book, but I did. For Morrison, the rural black poor of America cannot be understood using assumptions generally made about Americans. They have beliefs rooted in old religions, and this especially shows in their view of evil and appropriate responses to it.

The book has two main protagonists, Nel, who has a relatively straight-laced background, and Sula, who has a ramshackle family and sees no reason to deny herself whatever she wants. Despite these differences, they discover they are kindred spirits, one spirit, without jealousy or separateness:

Somewhere beneath all of that daintiness, chambered in all that neatness, lay the thing that clotted their
dreams. Which was only fitting, for it was in dreams that the two girls had first met. Long before Edna
Finch's Mellow House opened, even before they marched through the chocolate halls of Garfield Primary School
out onto the playground and stood facing each other through the ropes of the one vacant swing ("Go on." "No.
You go."), they had already made each other's acquaintance in the delirium of their noon dreams. They were
solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into
Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the
delight of the dream.

Sula goes away, Nell stays. Sula returns like a fallen angel; her otherness and 'evil' helps the community define itself. This book is well worth reading for the characters alone, they are economically drawn, but vivid, in addition the sex scenes are interesting and the various dramas and tragedies remarkable for characters' reactions to them.

For me, this was a window on an alien world, set before the time of homogeneous mass communication, when black rural communities were largely isolated from mainstream culture and defined themselves differently, not just a difference imposed by segregation, but one rooted in a very different past. ( )

A novel about the nuancing contrasts of right and wrong... life's ambiguity, and the beauty, power and horror of womanhood. ( )

I had almost bought this book for so long, since its price was only $4 at the local bookstore, but one day I finally did. It wasn’t until months later when I finally picked it up and started it.
I’m on a quest to read all of Toni’s books, so I was gonna to read this sooner of later, but I’m glad I finally got around to reading it. “Sula” is a little different than all of Toni’s other books, since it focused more around a friendship between two young girls, and how it changes over a period of 40 years.
I loved watching the story start out talking about the beginning of Medallion, the town in which all the characters live, and continues its story as the town grows, has its heyday and eventually crumbles. By the end, you almost feel you live there.
The first half seems to go nowhere for a while, but its just setting up the second half, which fills you with nostalgia. Why this was picked as an “Oprah Book Club Book”, I do not know, since I’m sure there were probably more thought provoking books out when this was published, but nevertheless, it’s still lovely to read.
And as always, Toni’s writing is beautiful, and there were actually two passages around the end where I had to get up, grab a pencil and a post it and mark those pages for their wonderful quotes. I never put post its in my books, but the writing in this novel just forced me to.
It’s a very quick read, but filled with the delicious writing you would expect. ( )

'Sula' has everything you could ever want: jealousy, rage, betrayal, identity struggles, forgiveness, spirituality, grief... what makes this book so amazing isn't just the writing but that Nel and Sula are our extremes, the ones that we can so easily revert to at any given moment. Sula then, is both a warning and a tease of what can happen if life were lived ... in this way. ( )

Didn't make much of an impression. I wonder if I can't remember some of these books because I read them when my son was small, and my brain cells were being overworked in other ways? ( )

LF: "We was girls together." ( )