Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995)

God this was good. I had a hard time following it because I read it under less-than-ideal circumstances, but I totally acknowledge that was my fault and not the book's. I'm going to be revisting this one in the future definitely. So much of this was so good--grappling with the hard questions about healing and moving on and community work. The opening line alone is like a punch in the chest, and it just keeps going from there.

I'd love to revisit this in like a group environment, but show more definitely will be going back at some point just to sift through more of it and see what sticks with me. show less

Rating: 3.75* of five

Wonderful prose, not so much on the storytelling.

I haven't changed my mind on that one, either.

The Book Report: Velma is a healer's worst nightmare: a failed suicide depressed by life and Life. Minnie and Old Wife, who is Minnie's spirit guide, work to heal Velma's wounds both inner and outer, in the course of this novel.

And that, mes amis, is it.

My Review: Which is kinda the problem. It makes this gorgeous incantation of a tale into a pretty tough swallow. Interiority show more can be overdone. Bambara's enraged response to the world of 1980 (when this wa first published) was perfectly justified, as she saw coming the horrors we presently live through in the never subtle, never hidden class warfare counterattack begun after Nixon's crash and burn. Velma is a computer programmer, a telling detail that Bambara clearly wants to remain a detail, who can't cope with the workload...prescient much?...and whose entire world centers around *yawn* an unworthy man *cue 21st-century Serious Lady Lit music* so she loses her inner Old Wife just like Minnie did.

Minnie is a daughter of privilege, a former Bible college attendee, and now a root woman who talks to haints. I love Minnie and Old Wife with a passion! They are the kind of ladies I want to live next door to, so I can go over with a plate of blondies and a bottle of bourbon and talk about Life to them.

But loving them, and loving the loooooooooooooong internal monologues that Minnie and Old Wife share as they work to heal dull little Velma, does not make this book a novel. In French, it would be called a récit: a simple internal narrative, usually in past tense, with one PoV. It's an excellent récit, and a ~meh~ novel.

Recommended for language lovers, Southerners, and white people wondering what the fuss about African American literature is. show less

I always felt at a distance from this book. Bambara’s style is dense, a tangle of overlapping perspectives and voices, which makes it difficult to follow what’s happening. This is not unexpected, and to be fair, there’s an atmosphere that is sustainable without that narrative support. Still, I found it difficult to care. I would say that tone—layered, heavy, often incantatory—became the dominant experience rather than the story itself.

The more I think about the book and its show more themes—fractured community, ancestral power, political exhaustion, despair, healing—the less I think I actually got from it. I suspect it might be more powerful to sit and read through in one or two sittings, rather than my preferred method of stretching the reading out over some time. But since that really is my preference, this probably isn’t a book I’d ever enjoy much. I hesitate to actually assess how good it is, though. show less

Dense and chaotic, I don't think I absorbed all of what this book has to offer, but its offerings are so many and so deep that I know I'll be rereading and seeking again from it. Extraordinary insight into radical organizing and what it needs and takes from communities and individuals, its pitfalls, its best possibilities.