The Bluest Eye (original 1970; edition 1972)

Morrison's prose is quite pretty, but I had difficulty connecting to the book. I couldn't identify with the central character and the events in the book are very divorced from my own experiences. I would read Morrison again, but this book wasn't for me. ( )

Morrison addresses so many issues in this compelling yet devastating book, but the dominant one is the effect of entrenched racism on individuals.
The story centers mainly on Pecola Breedlove, a young girl who, when she is noticed at all, is the object of vicious cruelty by her classmates, her neighbors and most appallingly, by her parents. Tormented by everyone, Pecola is convinced that the reason for everyone’s brutality toward her is her ugliness, that is, that she is darker than everyone else. Because of what her skin color and hair represent, Pecola is the family and community target and scapegoat. In her desperation for acceptance, she tries to attain society’s image of beauty. Pecola drinks quarts and quarts of milk in a Shirley Temple mug, hoping to drink in not only the whiteness of the milk, but the blueness of Shirley Temple’s eyes. Eventually, she begins to pray each night for blue eyes.
The book also details the stories of Pecola’s parents and the two girls who are kind to her. Each of these characters has methods of dealing with their own or vicarious experience with racist cruelty, animosity and humiliation. These methods range from immersion in and exclusive love for a white employer to preemptive hostility and in one case criminality and extreme violence. This last instance demonstrates the exertion of power on one who has even less power.
Apart from the story itself, I think that what makes this book so compelling is the writing style. Most chapters begin with excerpts from the old Dick and Jane reading primer. Simple idyllic statements about white families living a comfortable life run into each other and become a driving and ironic counterpoint to the plot and characters’ situations. Most of the story is narrated by the two girls who show Pecola some compassion, but there are several chapters describing various characters and their histories that seem to be in the author’s voice. These different voices might be viewed as distracting and incongruous in another book, but here serve as part of the fluid trajectory of this heartbreaking story. This is a really tough story to read, but is rendered beautifully and powerfully. ( )

morrison's first book...i wonder how she'd write it now if she could do it all again. it's not perfection, but i love this book. she gives a clear look (maybe not so clear to everyone?) into racism and society's hand in perpetuating it, the effect this has on young people of color (self-hatred, redirected hate of whites and the power they wield onto women of color, intra-racism, etc), and into other issues as well, like sexual violence and what that can look like. her language is precise but beautiful. i only wish it was slightly more galvanizing, so readers would put the book down and immediately rise up to fight all the issues she puts on the table. (i remember really liking this book years ago when i first read it, but i'm ashamed to say it didn't move me to fight racism. perhaps i shouldn't fault the author/book for that at all, but merely myself.) ( )

review coming soon ( )

Read for a class. Really didn't think I'd like it as much as I did.

I'm finding it hard to really put words to my thoughts about it other than it stuck with me for days afterwards. My version had an Afterward written by the author some twenty years after publication and she has a number of criticisms about the book, namely that it didn't capture what she was aiming to do as clearly as she wanted to. This, I'll agree with. Rather than an overall narrative, it read more like a series of vignettes, the life stories of a number of people living in a little town in Ohio that are all connected by this intentionally mysterious "Pecola". The narrator's afterward, wherein the girl explains that Pecola is the focus of the black community's hatred of itself, comes off as forced - as if we were reading a SparkNotes summary after the fact; "Here's the point in case you missed it." I felt it could've been constructed better.

Still...some of the images stick with you. Some of them aren't welcome. I suppose that's the point of literature sometimes. ( )