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Beloved by Toni Morrison
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Beloved (1987)

by Toni Morrison

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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12,666205158 (3.9)1 / 596
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  1. 40
    Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (susanbooks)
  2. 10
    The Known World by Edward P. Jones (BookshelfMonstrosity)
  3. 21
    Cane by Jean Toomer (cammykitty)
    cammykitty: An often overlooked classic.
  4. 00
    A Killing in This Town: A Novel by Olympia Vernon (hyacinthony)
    hyacinthony: I was reminded by Morrison's poetic narrative voice at the end of part 2 of Vernon's narrative style. Both books convey a powerful and mysterious spiritual force embedded in the violence of post-slavery african american conditions.
  5. 00
    Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (BookshelfMonstrosity)
  6. 00
    A Visitation of Spirits: A Novel by Randall Kenan (lottpoet)
  7. 00
    Bailey's Cafe by Gloria Naylor (PrincessPaulina)
  8. 01
    Sap Rising by Christine Lincoln (edwinbcn)
  9. 01
    Mojo: Conjure Stories by Nalo Hopkinson (cammykitty)
    cammykitty: This collection of short stories is nowhere near as dark as Beloved, but it's worth following these tales to the crossroads.
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English (196)  French (4)  Swedish (2)  Spanish (1)  Italian (1)  Dutch (1)  All languages (205)
Showing 1-5 of 196 (next | show all)
It's always hard to know what to say about a classic, what with so much having already been said. I already knew quite a bit about the book, so it felt slow to me at first, but as it went on, it got much better, haunting in more than one sense of the word. ( )
  CarlosMcRey | May 22, 2013 |
First line:
~ 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. ~

I did not really get this book. It was an interesting read. I had heard so much about it that I expected to love it and really, I am not even sure I liked it. It has some horrific scenes in it, terrible stories of man’s inhumanity to man. The terrible injustice of slavery. This book also has a supernatural element to it and I just found it weird. I also found Morrison’s writing style difficult. She jumps all over with time and place and I found it difficult at times to follow.

And yet, there was beauty in the writing style also; lyrical prose kept me going at times when the story would have stopped me completely.

Glad I read it but will not be looking at it again. ( )
  ccookie | Apr 20, 2013 |
Beloved by Toni Morrison is set in a rural area outside Cincinnati after the end of the Civil War, but it also frequently flashes back about 20 years to life-shaping events at "Sweet Home", a nightmarishly named Kentucky slave plantation. This is the first novel by her I've read, and I came away very impressed by her writing. The novel is an industrial strength reminder of the horrible treatment of so many blacks by so many whites during that time. "To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The 'better' life she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one."

Sethe is a woman in her 30's who was devastatingly mistreated at Sweet Home after the "kind" owner passed away and a relative, the "school teacher" arrived. But she's a survivor, and makes her way, with her daughter Denver, to her mother-in-law's Ohio farmhouse. The house comes to be haunted by Sethe's daughter Beloved (name taken from her funeral service), who was gruesomely murdered under dreadful circumstances. This supernatural element is treated as practical and real, not late night movie scary. Lonely Denver considers the ghost a friend, and even Sethe finds comfort in her presence.

The arrival of another former slave with romantic feelings for Sethe upsets the balance, and Beloved becomes more aggressively present. Members of the town become involved as concern rises, culminating in a reverberation of Beloved's original fate.

The effects of slavery are seen everywhere in the book, with the power wielded by whites over blacks in that time having myriad toxic effects. Sethe's mother-in-law shares the lesson she's learned from her "sixty years a slave and ten years free": "there was no bad luck in the world but white people. 'They don't know when to stop'", she said." We see occasional acts of kindness, but they are overwhelmed by slavery at its worst. There are reminders of the Holocaust - a sense of superiority justifying atrocious acts. A treatment of people as not-people. And the desperate acts of the oppressed. Even those more fortunate had not "lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that."

It's easy to see why this has become a modern classic. It realistically conveys slavery's damaging effects, and romanticizes no one, including Sethe. The supernatural element engages the reader in a new way, seemingly rooted in black folklore, with elements of magic realism. The writing is exceptional from beginning to end, including passages like this one: "There was a time when she scanned the fields every morning and every evening for her boys. . . . Cloud shadow on the road, an old woman, a wandering goat untethered and gnawing bramble - each looked at first like Howard - no, Buglar. Little by little she stopped and their thirteen-year-old faces faded completely into their baby ones, which came to her only in sleep. When her dreams roamed outside {the farmhouse}, anywhere they wished, she saw them sometimes in beautiful trees, their little legs barely visible in the leaves. Sometimes they ran along the railroad track laughing, too loud, apparently, to hear her because they never did turn around." Sethe is torn throughout between not wanting to look back, and wanting what was good in the past to come back and find her. ( )
12 vote jnwelch | Apr 6, 2013 |
brilliant; frightening; mix of real & otherworldly; climactic events are all revealed early and yet the tension is sustained throughout
  FKarr | Apr 6, 2013 |
I could not appreciate the fragmented narrative. ( )
  Sullywriter | Apr 3, 2013 |
Showing 1-5 of 196 (next | show all)
"Beloved" is Toni Morrison's fifth novel, and another triumph. Indeed, Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, ''Beloved'' will put them to rest.
 
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» Add other authors (16 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Toni Morrisonprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Dekker, BesselTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vink, NettieTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Beloved ( [1998]IMDb)
Awards and honors
Epigraph
I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. Romans 9:25
Dedication
Sixty Million
and more
First words
124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.
Quotations
I will never run from another thing on this earth.
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children.
Being alive was the hard part.
Nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Please distinguish between this complete 1987 novel and any abridgement of the original Work. Thank you.
Publisher's editors
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Wikipedia in English (4)

Book description
This is the story about Sethe, and ex-slave, her daughter, who's afraid to leave the house, and the ghost that has come to live with them. 

This book just made me feel gross. I understand that Beloved represented everything that Sethe didn't want to remember about herself but i had to keep asking myself why. There was too much sex, and violence, and just inappropriate situations. The background story was interesting, there was just too much personal information that I didn't need to know.
Haiku summary

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0452264464, Paperback)

Toni Morrison gently reads her own Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the unabridged version of this riveting tale of ex-slave Sethe and the beloved ghost that haunts her. While Morrison makes occasional odd pauses in her reading, what is lost in smoothness is more than made up for in quiet intensity as the author reads words obviously deeply felt. Her intimate knowledge of the characters and their motivations lends this reading an authority that helps the listener sort out the breaks in time and dialogue in this complex story of a woman coming to terms with her enslaved past and the loss of her husband and baby daughter. (Running time: 12 hours, eight cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:55:05 -0500)

(see all 8 descriptions)

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement. After the Civil War ends, Sethe longingly recalls the two-year-old daughter whom she killed when threatened with recapture after escaping from slavery 18 years before.… (more)

» see all 7 descriptions

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