The Bluest Eye
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Product Description
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is the tale of eleven-year-ancient Pecola Breedlove–a black girl in an America whose like for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others–who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be gorgeous, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the tale of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
From the Hardcover edition.Amazon.com Review
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 leader 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 intolerably 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 leader drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, past 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-ancient black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family tree has been agreed a cosmetic cross to bear:
You looked at them and wondered why they were so hideous; 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 agreed each one a cape of unpleasantness to wear, and they had each accepted it lacking question…. And they took the unpleasantness 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, unpleasantness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She’s spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No marvel she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is–yearns, in additional 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 thought of romantic like, she was introduced to another–physical beauty. Probably the most destructive thoughts in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and finished in disillusion.” Yet the destructive power of these thoughts 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 stable one. –James Marcus
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For persons who care, she uses f-words and b-words in the book. The book is filled with sexuality. I didn’t like it because if I want to read a book, I like to read something that doesn’t pollute my mind and I thought, an skilful writer like her didn’t need to decorate her work with profanity
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
white bashing at its best Im sick and tired of whites being blamed for blacks behavior start taking responsibility for your own peoples actions this book is trash I would rather clean the toilet than suffer through another morrison garbage read
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I feel that this book, although written before Oprah ongoing building millionaires, is still part of the huge Toni Morrison sell out tale. She’s agreed up what’s made her a fantastic writer to be well loved, and that’s sad.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I reflect it’s terrible that Oprah Winfrey would recommend a book as anti-white as this. It’s not as terrible as some “black” literature that blames everything on white people, but it’s close. It’s very reactionary and unfairly critical. She doesn’t promote the beauty of blacks, but only puts down whites. It’s insane the way people fawn over this hack.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
If you like to read one long (as in book-part) poem, this is the book for you. Or, if you delight in reading nothing but “downer” stuff, this book is for you also. I skimmed the last 50 pages to be sure I wasn’t going to miss anything. I didn’t.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5