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Loading... The Bluest Eyeby Toni Morrison
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Valphia | Jul 8, 2009 |  1   This book should be handled with caution. It is banned for a reason. It is a deep story about a young black girl growing up in the south who wants to have blue eyes to be pretty like the white girls. In the span of this book, bad things happen to her, she is molested and sexually abused by her father and become pregnant with her father's baby. There is detailed descriptions of this content that may be offensive and confusing to younger children. (  )kimmclean | Jun 12, 2009 | Toni Morrison's first novel is some really beautiful writing, but what bothers me most about The Bluest Eye is the way it goes back and forth (and in the middle, and back again) through time. Sometimes I can appreciate this in a book by Toni Morrison, sometimes it gets on my nerves (here it gets on my nerves). Though time could have been handled better, it's not as if the past is unnecessary for the story. I found more to relate with in the back stories of the older people than I did with Pecola's fall into insanity. Pecola's parents run through the good portion of their lives trying not to be miserable in their skin, but they wind up miserable anyway. Their children are born and they don't even have to search for their...miserable-ness. It was interesting how the characters became increasingly boxed in by generation. That is certainly the story of many black families. Imagine if the story covered an even even larger span of time! Well, that would add even more drama to a story so controversial for its sex and violence and hopelessness. As it is, The Bluest Eye is a dramatic, depressing story, in which the central character deals with incest, violence, and of course, racism. Not every reader will have to deal with Pecola's terrible trials, and not every reader (not even black ones in 2009) will even have to deal with the more normal self-depreciation that can result from racism, but haven't you ever been miserable and undefended? (  )DanielChilds | Jun 1, 2009 | How can you not give Toni Morrison 5 stars. I mean, she's brilliant. It you enjoy literary works then you'll love this. This book takes us into the mind of a young girl who has suffered a lot of pain. The imagery and language used is well done. This is not a light read so I don't reccomend it for the beach. Great winter time, PJ book. (  )Toyi | Apr 23, 2009 | Raw, cerebral, literary, real, and any and everything anyone could ever want in a novel. This is my favorite Morrison work. I find her too metaphysical (Beloved; I'm embarrassed to admit that I started Beloved but after several pages, I abandoned it. I'm determined to read it though, and I'm determined to 'get' it.) for my taste sometimes, but The Bluest Eye left me in awe of her. I will re-read this again and again. ( )petersonvl | Mar 6, 2009 | 0.078 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0452282195, Paperback)Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear: You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye. This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:23 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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The novel’s title, “The Bluest Eye” is based on how Pecola wishes for blue eyes–that she feels she might be considered more attractive and more likeable if she had blue eyes.
Here is an example from the book (Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove are Pecola's constantly-fighting parents):
“It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. Her teeth were good, and at least her nose was not big and flat like some of those who were thought so cute. If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes”.
It was hard to read about Pecola’s downward spiral and her thoughts that life would be better if only she was beautiful. (