Beloved
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Product Description
A tale set in the mid-19th century, when moves to abolish slavery are at their height, and one man’s world of like turns to violence when his daughter dies at the hands of her mother. From the leader of EN-GENDERING and NOBEL SPEECH.Amazon.com Review
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a ex- slave. This mad, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life hard for Sethe and her family tree; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.
A dead child, a run off slave, a terrible secret–these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise–but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a theme so familiar that it is nearly impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery’s many cruelties into one apt symbol–a contrivance that deprives its wearer of speech. “Days after it was taken out, goose stout was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to pacify the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.” Most importantly, the language here, while regularly lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative lacking being overemotional: “Add my spouse to it, watching, above me in the loft–hiding close by–the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn’t look at at all. And not stopping them–looking and letting it take place…. And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now.” Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby,” comments Sethe’s mother-in-law.
Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe’s history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby’s death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe’s daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. –Alix Wilber
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Each whitepeople should be made to read this book until he vomits and cries. This is what whitepeople did to black people–they stole their souls, took color from their eyes. . .If this book doesn’t break apart your heart and scar up your soul, you ain’t human.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
“A cruelly powerful, mesmerizing tale…read it and tremble,” says People magazine about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Why, I question? Powerful and mesmerizing? The only thing I trembled about was the thought of reading the tale. Beloved is not the first book about colored people that I have read. Persons I have read before, I loved. But, because Toni Morrison’s style is so unique, it’s also hard to comprehend its uniqueness. Others have read Beloved and have been mesmerized by it. I’m not one of them.
The tale is full of holes and parallels that take a critical reader to fill as one reads it. This makes Beloved hard to read because there is a lot of back flipping of pages when information may be hiding. As I read Beloved, I started to get lost. I formed questions in my mind about characters such as Halle. The tale never mentions what happens to Halle additional than him going on with an original plot to escape from Sweet Home. What became of Halle? Also, a part of the tale mentions Baby Suggs as a cobbler. She is spoken of as “Baby Suggs holy.” A cobbler is the mender of shoes and soles. A name told me that in the first act of Julius Caesar, a name calls him the mender of souls and questioned if I thought that Morrison had read Julius Caesar and was comparing Baby Suggs to Julius Caesar. Who would have known this fact unless you happened to be reading Beloved and Julius Caesar at the same time? Reading between the lines is something that not everyone does as one reads. I sometimes read between the lines, but this tale just left me hanging.
Because the tale is about colored people, it seems as if the leader still holds contempt for what white people had done to African-Americans in slavery. One example of this is Sethe’s wedding dress. It was mad of a scarf, a sash, pillowcases, and additional stolen items could find. The wedding dress does not have a back at some point and this may symbolize how Morrison could not let go of the past because of the emotional pain she may feel about the slavery issue. Baby Suggs says in the tale, “There is no terrible luck in the world but whitefolks.” This statement makes the leader’ feelings of white people even more clear to readers. The slavery issue is not longer an issue because slaves were freed from the outcome of the Civil War. There are still hard feelings about the slavery issue, but it’s over and one just has to make the choice of overcoming it and getting on with oneself.
Morrison also changes the point of view in Beloved. Most of it is done in third person. But, in part two of the tale, Morrison starts a chapter with, “Beloved, she my daughter.” The narrator of the tale is changed all of a sudden. Although this narrator not hard to figure out, another chapter starts with, “I am my Beloved and she is mine.” Who is the narrator of this chapter? It is not clearly mentioned and kept me wondering who was language. After re-reading the chapter, the narrator still was not clear.
As you can see, mysteries are not pleasing to me. Beloved just has too much small details that one must look for in order to know the tale. There are too many changes over the duration of the tale and hidden points and parallels that are hard to find. The writing style of Morrison is also too intricate to comprehend. How can you find out what went on in the leader’s mind while she wrote the tale? It’s hard to answer that question for all tales that have been written. I do not know the tale of Beloved, and I do not plot on reading additional tales written by Morrison. If all of her tales are like this…well, keep them away from me.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I reflect this book was dreadful and did not deserve a prize of any kind. I wrote the leader years ago and told her so. I threw this book in the trash and I read a lot of prize books, and I don’t care if she was black or white, the book makes no sense, it is garbage, its like throw in a lot of stuff people don’t know and she is brillant. It seems people don’t want to admit they don’t know her for dread of being called stupid.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book was not a total disapointment, it didnt take long to read.
Toni has a comon failing among female writers, unfocused thoughts and flat characters. the theme matter wasnt something that particlarly intrested me.
I guess it would be possible to like this book, but a name like me, I reflect Ill stick with sci-fi.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I can’t judge a name would really want to read about some the grotesque & obscene gestures going on throughout the book. I establish it not only confusing with the way the leader jumped around form event to event, but down right salacious in content & depressing as well. In my opinion reading is suppose to be either an adventure that takes you out of the ordinary life, or informative. This was just down right excess jibber natter. It was overboard & weird!
No thank you… I will not read another book by this leader again anytime soon!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5