Beloved (1987)

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. ( )

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. ( )

brilliant; frightening; mix of real & otherworldly; climactic events are all revealed early and yet the tension is sustained throughout

I could not appreciate the fragmented narrative. ( )

I must represent the last generation of Americans to get through school and college without being assigned Beloved—so by not reading it until now I was spared the academic vivisection. I listened to it read by Toni Morrison, so everything that was there to get, I must've got.

It's a hell of a book: creepy, horrifying, wondrous. Without being able to turn pages back and forth I couldn't see how it was put together, see whether the narration itself really stands so far above and beyond the story as to constitute another rich dimension, which is one of the ways I identify a masterpiece. I suspect it does, but sometime I'll have to reread it, on paper, to find out. Meanwhile, I now know that Toni Morrison—or at least Beloved—is not to be avoided like bitter medicine, but to be savored like sweet wine. ( )