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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. This is award-winning writer Toni Morrison's first novel and my edition had an interesting afterward by her dated 30 years after she first wrote the book. It was a thought-provoking reflection on how she viewed what she tried to accomplish then and relative to now. The story is told, for the most part, from the point of view of a pre-teen girl and cleverly divided into seasons. I originally read the book when it was one of Oprah's selections about 8 or 9 years ago so I always find it interesting to re-read a book at a different stage in life. However, both times I felt anger that the adults allowed Pecola Breedlove to endure what she did in her life. She was made to feel 'ugly' inside and out and the only way that she thought that she could get her life back in order was the simple wish for the unnatural blue eyes. (  ) knithappened | Nov 10, 2009 |  Essential reading. Heartbreaking, valid from humanistic point of view. (  ) rmyoung | Oct 15, 2009 | No. 52: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison In her Afterword to this book, Toni Morrison writes that she wanted The Bluest Eye to be moving rather than touching. In my opinion. she certainly achieved her aim. This is a story which explores some of humanity's darkest issues: racism and child abuse in its many forms, and Morrison doesn't pussy-foot around these issues, she confronts them head on, and in graphic detail. Pecola, a young black girl, believes she is ugly, and that having blue eyes (like the white girls she admires) will make her beautiful. She is bullied at school and neglected by her family. Eventually, she is raped by her father and becomes pregnant with his child, and, after being ostracised by her community, she finally succumbs to severe mental illness. What makes this story both more and less bearable for me is that Morrison gives each of her characters a history which allowed me to understand (and sometimes sympathise with) even the vilest of the offenders in Pecola's life. The prose itself is a joy to read, which makes the subject matter seem all the more dire. A beautiful rendition of ugliness. ( ) nebowers | Sep 10, 2009 | I found this book to be profoundly sad, but also so well-written. There are several characters in this book, but the focus is on a young black girl, Pecola. While almost all the characters in this book have faced prejudice and humiliating moments in their lives, Pecola seems to get no break at all. My heart really went out to her. 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. (  )1  Valphia | Jul 8, 2009 | 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 | 
 I have said "poetry." But "The Bluest Eye" is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music. It is one thing to state that we have institutionalized waste, that children suffocate under mountains of merchandised lies. It is another thing to demonstrate that waste, to re-create those children, to live and die by it. Miss Morrison's angry sadness overwhelms.
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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