Sula

To be honest, I picked this book up thinking "it's required." There are certain things that you have to read before you die, certain authors that are "required" to be a fully rounded person. At least that's what I believe. But from Steinbeck to Hurston and yes, even Shakespeare, I wasn't here for it. I read The Color of Water and Jane Eyre and I could have just as easily gone on with my life having never read either.

Sula isn't that. Sula isn't anything you're thinking but it's exactly what you need.

Sula is real characters, with their flaws and horrors and humanity on full display. Sula is who you wish you could be, who you are, who you could never be, and the person you become in certain circumstances. It is the individual, the show more community, the partner and lover and friend. It is the full scope of human relationships as well as the very minutia of what it means to be Black and a woman, but more specifically a Black woman.

For people who want a deeper look at themselves and how stories are written not as sex (rising action, climax, falling action) but as life (shit happens, y'all, and it keeps going) then this is the book for you! show less

Sula by African American female writer Toni Morrison demonstrates definitively why she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Her prose borders on poetry, painting rich and detailed pictures in very few words.
The general tone of this book strongly conveys the desperation and poverty Black Americans endure as the result of racism without ever talking about racism. Every moment, every episode hinges on the impoverished, second class citizen status of the character, yet the story is universal, the characters are not stereotypes but instead are typical of characters existing anywhere in the world. Sula and her friend Nel represent two very different types of people, those that are crushed by their circumstances and others who stand above them even show more as they continue to be marginalized.
The storyline begins with a scene from WW I and proceeds through the next several years tracing the lives of the protagonists, of their relationship with each other and with others, and of their ultimate movement in vastly different directions.
This is a powerful read eliciting empathy and compassion from any thoughtful reader. show less

30. Sula by Toni Morrison (1973, 181 pages, read July 3-8)

How to capture this?

Morrison’s second novel leaves a mark. It reminds me of a side story by Pat Conroy in his memoir My Reading Life. As a young author he had a chance to meet Toni Morrison, but she refused to sign a book or talk with him apparently because he was white and male. Conroy obviously never forgave her. Before Sula I hadn’t been able to see that person behind Morrison’s writing (although there are strong hints in Guitar and his carefully reasoned murders in Song of Solomon). There is a complex but palpable anger underneath Sula. In a 2004 forward to the novel Morrison wrote about [Sula] that she "rooted the narrative in a landscape already tainted by the fact show more that it existed" - and this is an underlying point in the novel, the hurt and limitations of being black in the US.

The short novel parallels the lives of Nel Wright, a good girl raised in a good home, and her childhood best friend Sula Peace, who grew up in more wild circumstances too complex to describe here. Both grew up in an impoverished segregated black community in the hills outside a white valley Ohio town in roughly the 1930’s (??). In Sula the reader is confronted. A complicated character, she searches for her own freedom in a variety of forms, breaking many societal norms, and crossing over into some gut-wrenching crimes...crimes that don’t seem to bother her. The reader is left to wonder what do with our mixed feelings of admiration and disturbance, and Morrison offers no easy answers.

This is a terrific read that can stir up some conflicting emotions deep down in the reader.

2013
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Morrison's second novel is another short, deceptively slight-looking book, set in a small black community on the fringes of an Ohio town in the inter-war years. It's not explicitly a political story, the plot is about a friendship between two women, but Morrison makes it pretty clear that everything that happens in the story is influenced and constrained by the nature of relations between white and black, male and female in that time and place. Even the settlement itself grew up where it is because the land there wasn't valuable enough to be wanted by white farmers; in a pair of frame chapters from a 1960s viewpoint, the narrator tells us that the settlement has since disappeared, not because of racial integration but because hilly land show more became attractive for suburban houses and golf courses and the black families couldn't afford to stay.

Morrison sets up the contrast between two matriarchal clans, on the one hand the Wrights, driven by the need for respectability and by Helene Wright's shame about her southern mixed-race background, and on the other the Peaces, anarchistic women who see themselves as having nothing to lose and no reason to keep to anyone else's rules. Nel Wright and Sula Peace become friends across this social divide as small children, and maintain the warm, close friendship through a number of grotesque incidents right into adulthood, until they are finally forced to recognise the depth of the ethical gap between them when Sula does something she sees as trivial and Nel as fundamental.

Morrison steers away here from the kind of stylistic flourishes that got her into trouble with critics in The bluest eye, but she goes for narrative excesses instead: there are magic-realist elements where the external world is reacting in strange ways to the actions of the characters, and many of the darker human incidents in the plot have a non-realistic, fairy-tale flavour to them, especially the climactic scene where the inhabitants of the township are led Pied-Piper style to their collective doom. She seems to be flexing her muscles and telling the critics: "Just because I'm an African-American woman, that doesn't mean I've got to restrict myself to writing social-realistic political fiction." But there's also perhaps a sense that the situation of black people in America is something that isn't adequately to be described within the confines of realistic fiction: we need this element of fairy-tale to make sense of the recent past and start to understand how it continues to affect our relations in the present. show less

Sula by Toni Morrison is a complex and emotionally charged novel that explores the lives and friendship of two black women, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, against the backdrop of the “Bottom”, a black neighborhood in Ohio. Sula is a powerful exploration of friendship, identity, societal expectations, and the complexities of human relationships within the context of a close-knit African American community. Toni Morrison's evocative storytelling and vivid character portrayals make it a thought-provoking and emotionally resonant novel.

I just want to apologize for taking this long to read a Toni Morrison novel. Who am I apologizing to? Myself, mostly. This book was beautiful in the most tragic way. Along with Sula and Nel, you really get to show more know everyone in the “Bottom” and their story’s. you understand the hole left in the neighborhood every time you hear of someone leaving and the reactions when someone comes back.

Reading this right after Before the coffee gets cold, I have two new worlds that will always live in my heart. This month is off to an amazing start. show less

Like most people who've earned a degree in literature in the United States since 1990, I've read Toni Morrison's "Beloved" about three times. I really like parts of that one -- mostly the bit where the characters retell their past experiences or when the author goes head-to-head with William Faulkner. Much of the rest of that book seems a bit stagy to me, though, a bit stiff.

So Sula surprised me a little. It's a much looser affair than "Beloved", and while I can't call it a happy book, necessarily, it's got more room for eccentricity and its own sort of humor. Its lens is also a bit wider than that other novel's, too. It takes place over about seventy years -- one human lifespan -- and Morrison takes as her subject the entire black show more community living in the town of Medallion, Ohio, not just Nell and Sula, the two women at the novel's center. So we hear about war veterans that didn't come back quite right and pool halls and candy stores and small-town gossip even while Morrison works out some of the themes that she'd express more fully in "Beloved." We hear a lot about the characters' houses and their bodies and the all-consuming sense of emptiness some of them contend with. I don't know if I can say that "Sula" is as successful or as ambitious as "Beloved" is: the latter is due for a re-read. But for a novel that clocks at just under two hundred pages, it feels marvelously rich and complete, and features many examples of real high-quality prose, the stuff that separates the pretenders from the contenders, when all is done. This is an astonishingly polished and impressive performance, especially considering it was just Morrison's second novel. Recommended, especially if you couldn't understand why "Beloved" got such great reviews. show less

Loved every sentence of this re-read. I remember the first time I read Sula; I went in expecting an innocent and charming story about friendship from the small talk I had heard of the book. Nothing had prepared me for the complexity in the relationship between Sula and Nel; nothing had prepared me for the force that was Sula. I remember my initial feelings towards Sula: at first fascination, then shock, then almost-loathing, later understanding and loving, and, finally, missing her when all was done.

The story opens with a short description of the setting of the book. The Bottom, a Black neighbourhood in Ohio; the irony in its name; the history of the place; its attractions. The introduction is told in a reflective and nostalgic tone. Of show more a place distant, disappearing, and being gentrified. Then the story of the people of the place begins, focus being on Nel and Sula, two friends who love and need each other in various complex ways.

Toni Morrison says in her foreword to this book:
"Outlaw women are fascinating - not always for their behaviour, but because historically women are seen as disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men. In much literature a woman's escape from male rule led to regret, misery, if not disaster. In Sula I wanted to explore the consequences of what that escape might be, on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship. In 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste."

Sula is an outlaw. A woman who lives fully for herself, with no apologies for it to the end. One of the stunning bits of dialogue from this book, the final conversation between Nel and Sula, Nel asks her what she has to show for the life she lived, to which Sula responds: "Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes in it. Which is to say, I got me." To which Nel remarks, "Lonely, ain't it?" Sula's brilliant reply: "Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely."

Re-reading this meant diving into the richness of this book all over again. The wonderful world that Morrison creates with the Bottom and its people, and the beauty of the language. show less