Amatissima Toni Morrison Pdf Reader

Beloved - Kindle edition by Toni Morrison. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and. Sep 02, 1987 Reader Q&A. To ask other readers questions about Beloved, please sign up. Popular Answered Questions hey guys! - Toni Morrison, Beloved.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened.

And Sethes new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrisons greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.

A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story... Read it and tremble. A few words about book's author. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey. Biography Toni Morrison has been called black Americas best novelist, and her incredible string of imaginative contemporary classics would suggest that she is actually one of Americas best novelist in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrisons greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade. A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story... Read it and tremble.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Her new home is haunted by Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Her new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison has a unique way of using the language. My husband felt the same way about the book at first, but I encouraged him to continue reading Toni Morrison has a unique way of using the language. My husband felt the same way about the book at first, but I encouraged him to continue reading and by the end he understood and enjoyed it. Some of the illusions she makes at the beginning of the book are foreshadowing--glimpses of future events. The book has a kind of rhythm that may feel unfamiliar, but if you stick with it, by the end, you may find an appreciation for her unique style. Some books, and this may be one, are better the second time you read them when you know the full story and can appreciate the depth of meaning.

I encourage you to continue reading, but in the end, it's okay to say this style/book is not for me. I think the author also evidences some discomfort with occupying the space in Sethe's mind when she commits this act. The description of this scene is I think the author also evidences some discomfort with occupying the space in Sethe's mind when she commits this act. The description of this scene is not typical throughout the book.

It is graphic and TM really attempts to inhabit it, but it lacks the unquestioned understanding evident in other scenes. When she speaks of atrocities done to Sethe, she can speak as Sethe. But when she speaks of atrocities done by Sethe, she just is not able to inhabit that space but instead places the storytelling with the actor who she does see as violent. In other words, Sethe is only violent as a reflection of the violence of slavery and whiteness; she cannot tell Sethe's violence independent of that narrative because she doesn't imagine it independent of that narrative. Beloved is the Great American Horror Novel. Sorry Stephen King: evil clowns and alcoholic would-be writers are pretty creepy, but they just got nothing on the terrifying specter of American slavery!

I literally got chills -- physical chills -- over and over while reading this book. To me, great horror has the scary element (e.g., a ghost) and then, lurking behind it, something so vast and evil that trying to think about it can make you go insane. Beloved did that! It worked as horror! And then a Beloved is the Great American Horror Novel.

Sorry Stephen King: evil clowns and alcoholic would-be writers are pretty creepy, but they just got nothing on the terrifying specter of American slavery! Download Auto Macro Recorder Crackers here. I literally got chills -- physical chills -- over and over while reading this book. To me, great horror has the scary element (e.g., a ghost) and then, lurking behind it, something so vast and evil that trying to think about it can make you go insane. Beloved did that! It worked as horror! And then also, even more, it worked as great American literature.

I don't think in these terms too often, but it does seem like there's such a thing as national novels. I'm sure there's a better, fancier way to talk about what I mean, which is books that are so specifically about 'The American Experience' that being an American reading them feels very special and intimate, as if it's a book about my own family. That feels like a strange and dorky thing for me to say, but it's how I felt.

Slavery is such an essential part of all our heritage that reading this treatment of it felt very personal, like listening to secrets about your grandparents. Beloved really worked on something at the heart of the American experience, and while I don't usually think in those terms this book forced me to, which is one of many reasons why it did affect me so much. I feel like Morrison has a certain reputation and associations that are completely at odds with what her work is actually like. Maybe it's the Toni-with-an-i thing; it's definitely the Oprah connection and the fact that she's a lady author, but whatever the reasons, I feel like people who haven't read her believe that Morrison writes these lovely, lyrical, ladylike books that will soften the heart and elevate the soul. And I mean, I guess in a way she does, but these lovely books will give you seriously deranged nightmares. Toni Morrison is out of her MIND!

I mean, she really must be in order to write these things. I can't imagine what it would be like to have this incredibly twisted stuff come out of my brain. Of course, the most horrific parts of the book aren't invented; Morrison clearly spent a lot of time researching the historical record of slavery and thinking about its effects and meaning, and her ability to wrest a novel like this out of that past is just incomprehensible. Because in fact Beloved really is lovely and lyrical, but it's about the most disturbing shit imaginable. It's interesting to see how divided people on this site are about Morrison. A lot of people just LOATHE her!

I think that's pretty understandable when you consider her subject matter. Some girl on here was like, 'UGH! Beastiality, rape, torture, infanticide. Is DISGUSTING!'

And I mean, well, that girl's got a point, this book was pretty icky. But it's about kind of an icky topic, ya know?

In a weird way, this felt a bit like the anti-Proust: it's about memory, but instead of being a plotless, enchanting, European meander through a picturesque past, Beloved is a brutal and ruthless American cousin with rough, bloody hands, running through the woods screaming. The book is about the problem of memory, specifically the memory of trauma, both on a personal and national level. I feel like everyone always wants to write these great books about the most terrible shit, but the fact is that doing so right is incredibly hard, which is maybe why there're so many bad books about tragedy and so many good books about boring people's mundane little problems. You really have to know what you're doing to write about the most terrible shit well, and Morrison picked THE most terrible shit in America's past, then wrote an original and organic ghost story that deserves its hallowed place in American literature. Ya know, one thing we think about in social work school (or that I thought about, anyway) is the relationship between macro events or phenomena (e.g., a war, or racism) and its micro effects on individuals. This book depicts the effects of slavery on people -- individually and collectively -- with, just, well, shattering genius.

But don't try this at home, folks! She is a lady of unusual talent and skills, and in most people's clumsy hands this effort'd be dangerous. Beloved isn't flawless, and it's not one of my all-time favorite books or anything. However, it is a great classic, and I think everyone who hasn't already should read it.

Well, actually, let me amend that. A lot of people on here, as noted, hate this book. If you struggle to follow a slightly nonlinear narrative or are white and feel personally affronted by descriptions of historical wrongs perpetrated by white people on black people, you might chose another book club selection.

Everyone else, though, I think should give this a go, especially if you love ghost stories! I just had a really fun idea for a literary double date, which would be Cathy from Wuthering Heights with Beloved, and Medea with Sethe. They could all go on the Oprah show together and talk about their traumatic experiences! I would definitely, definitely watch that, and I bet other people would too.

'Beloved You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again; you have come back to me You are my beloved You are mine You are mine' It's 6 o'clock in the morning and I have finished with one of the best books I have ever read in the course of my short life. I am sleepless and I need a moment to organize my thoughts, sort out my feelings.

Come back to real life. A part of me is still with Sethe and her daughters, Denver and Beloved at 124. A part of me 'Beloved You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again; you have come back to me You are my beloved You are mine You are mine' It's 6 o'clock in the morning and I have finished with one of the best books I have ever read in the course of my short life. I am sleepless and I need a moment to organize my thoughts, sort out my feelings. Come back to real life. A part of me is still with Sethe and her daughters, Denver and Beloved at 124.

A part of me is being tied to a pole and whipped mercilessly for eating a shoat I skinned, butchered and cooked myself. A part of me is giving birth to children of fathers who forced themselves on me. A part of me is still wondering whether my husband Halle is out there alive and free or long dead. A part of me is burying the daughter I killed with a handsaw because I couldn't live to see her being pushed into the endless abyss of torture and humiliation that I had to endure myself. A part of me is engraving the word 'Beloved' on the headstone of my dead girl, because she has no name.

But it is not I. It is Sethe and Sethe is not I. I'm not even Baby Suggs (Sethe's mother-in-law) who never had a chance to recognize that she was a human being with a beating heart. Baby Suggs, who only looked at her own hands at the sunset of life and came to the realization that they were her own.

Her very own for her own use and not the use of another. Baby Suggs, who was forced to accept the 'kindness' of being bought out of slave labour by her own son, at the cost of never seeing him again, never knowing what happened to him.

I'm not Paul D, being made to wear neck braces as punishment for an act of belligerence, unable to move his head. Deeply afraid of starting a new life and adding a purpose to it-not knowing what to do with the new-found freedom after the Civil War.

Afraid of loving too much and losing too much because of it. I'm just a lucky Indian girl who was born in an era free from the worst form of human rights violation that ever existed on the planet. I was not alive during the period of systematic brutalization of one particular race by another just because one proclaimed racial superiority over the other.

I was not in the plantations of Kentucky or Georgia or the Carolinas before or after the Civil War. I wasn't in the hell called 'Sweet Home'. But Sethe was.

So were Halle, Paul D, Sixo, Paul A and Baby Suggs and the unnamed ones. And a part of me is with them and I still cannot wrest it away. I can perhaps ramble on and on and still be completely unable to write a proper review of 'Beloved'. And I won't even try to summarize the book in a few sentences, since that would be deeply irreverent of me.

Beloved is not just a masterpiece, not even just a remarkable literary achievement. Beloved is the beauty of the resilience of the human spirit. Beloved is about hope and endurance.

Beloved tells us about unspeakable cruelty and abuse inflicted on humanity by humanity itself. Beloved reveals festering psychological wounds, deep emotional scars that could never ever heal. Beloved is profoundly lyrical and empathetic in its depiction of grotesque events that unfolded during the most ignominious part of America's history. Beloved wrenches your heart out, shreds it into a million tiny pieces but then stitches all the pieces together and hands your heart back to you - all bloodied and messed up. Maybe a few years down the line when I read Beloved again, I will write a more coherent review and sound less emotional. Maybe I will get every cryptic message Toni Morrison intended for her reader to receive and decode.

Maybe I will not. But I will try. And I will read this book again when I feel like my life is difficult or I can't go on anymore. I'm sure Sethe and Beloved will be there to hold my hands and lead me forward.

I cannot write anymore. I must go and find myself another tissue. P.S.:- Apologies for the spoilers I have ended up including in the review. But I just had to write this the way I did. I don't give books low marks lightly.

If anything, I am prone to being carried away by the author's enthusaism and rate books more highly than they deserve. I am an aspiring author, myself, and that also leads me to be kind to the books.

That being said, I really hated this book. I like fantasy and magical realism. I find the dreams and allegories that live just underneath the skin of the world we can more readily see and touch endlessly fascinating. I like my stories intense and emotional, and I I don't give books low marks lightly. If anything, I am prone to being carried away by the author's enthusaism and rate books more highly than they deserve.

I am an aspiring author, myself, and that also leads me to be kind to the books. That being said, I really hated this book. I like fantasy and magical realism. I find the dreams and allegories that live just underneath the skin of the world we can more readily see and touch endlessly fascinating. I like my stories intense and emotional, and I like it when characters are so full of passion that it obscures their sense of the world around them. That being said, I really hated this book.

I found Beloved incomprehensible to the point of absurdity. It's one thing to have a book that is full of magic and poetry or to have a character's passion overwhelm their ability to describe the world from time to time, but I also need to know what is going on. For the story to grab me, I need to know what the story is. Did I mention that I really hated this book?

I know it's trendy to read, but I recommend this book to absolutely no one. I found it a borderline insulting waste of my time.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve tried a couple of times to read Toni Morrison’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about murder, guilt, ghosts and the brutal, complex physical and psychological legacy of slavery. Something about the dense, poetic prose and the elliptical nature of the storytelling made it impenetrable. After a chapter or two, I’d give up, perplexed. And I’ve read William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf! This made Oprah’s Book Club? I’m so glad I persevered.

About a third of the way in, I Over the past 15 years, I’ve tried a couple of times to read Toni Morrison’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about murder, guilt, ghosts and the brutal, complex physical and psychological legacy of slavery. Something about the dense, poetic prose and the elliptical nature of the storytelling made it impenetrable. After a chapter or two, I’d give up, perplexed. And I’ve read William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf!

This made Oprah’s Book Club? I’m so glad I persevered. About a third of the way in, I realized just how carefully Morrison had constructed the narrative, which pivots on two horrific events: one involving a mother killing her child (inspired by the actual story of a woman named Margaret Garner), and the other, which informs the first, about an attempted escape by a group of slaves at a plantation – and its violent aftermath.

The setting is 1873, Ohio. Sethe and her daughter Denver live in a house on 124 Bluestone Road. Once a lively place where freed slaves congregated after Emancipation to get news and socialize, it’s now desolate and creepy, haunted by the spiteful ghost of Sethe’s dead two-year-old child – not a spoiler, since it’s introduced in the first few pages. The matriarch Baby Suggs (Sethe’s mother-in-law) is now dead, and Sethe’s two sons have fled the premises. When Paul D enters the home, things begin to change. He and Sethe worked on the same plantation – called Sweet Home, ironic because it was anything but – decades earlier.

They share history, good and bad, and harbour secrets from the other. Paul D’s presence makes the ghost leave, and he alienates the shy, awkward Denver and begins to make Sethe unshackle herself from the past until a mysterious stranger – with no lines on her hands or face – appears at 124 to mess things up. Beloved overflows with stories: some tragic, some vicious, some joyous, some brimming with love. It takes a while to get all the names straight; I found myself flipping back to see when a character was introduced. It’s not a long book, average length really, but it’s dense and full of layered, complex imagery: about water (it's not a coincidence that Sethe's name suggests 'Lethe,' the river of forgetfulness and oblivion), colours, milk, metal. I'll never forget the description of Sethe’s back, so severely scarred from whippings it resembles a multi-branched tree, or Paul D talking about slaves having their mouths pried open with horses’ bits (“the wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back”).

Other things that will haunt and disturb me: the idea of black slaves being compared to animals; the sequence in which Paul D discovers just how much he’s worth in dollars and cents, compared to Sethe, who is basically a breeding machine to create more slaves (imagine what that would do to a person’s – a people's? – sense of self-worth). These are balanced out with scenes of kindness and generosity.

Not all the white characters are bad; one feisty young poor white girl helps Sethe deliver her child in a boat, and there’s a subtle portrait of a pair of generous, older white siblings who radiate humanity. And unlike Walker’s The Color Purple, the black men in the book aren’t all fools and rapists. Morrison’s vision is broad, expansive, clear-eyed but ultimately forgiving. The language is earthy yet majestic, with echoes of Faulkner and even the King James Bible.

It’s often hard to read because it feels like you’re wading through an ocean of memories, some of which are buried deep and trying to surface. The point of view shifts repeatedly. In one remarkable section, we’re given the POV of the dead baby in which she’s caught between death and life. Morrison gives you various takes on the same scene but spreads them throughout the book, so you circle around events trying to get to the truth. Is the truth possible?

Do some things remain unknowable? There’s unspeakable, real human pain at the centre. Generations of it. But like much great art, Beloved offers a glimmer of hope and redemption at the end. 'Sethe,' [says Paul D], 'me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.'

Beloved is a novel about haunting; it is a novel about the human inability to move on from the past and how easily it can resurface. We may try to move on, but it never really leaves us.

And when the past is painful and full of blood it literally echoes for an eternity. “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.” Enter Beloved, daughter of Sethe, a girl killed by her mother many years previous to escape the shackles of slavery. Was it murder? Was it mercy? Was i Beloved is a novel about haunting; it is a novel about the human inability to move on from the past and how easily it can resurface. We may try to move on, but it never really leaves us. And when the past is painful and full of blood it literally echoes for an eternity.

“You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.” Enter Beloved, daughter of Sethe, a girl killed by her mother many years previous to escape the shackles of slavery. Was it murder? Was it mercy?

I don’t have the answers, though the past never stays dead. The American slave trade can never be forgotten nor should it. Although Beloved is the physical manifestation that is haunting her mother, the reality is somewhat different. It is her past; it is the injustice she faced and a decision she was forced to make that will never leave her. Beloved is just the embodiment of it. The novel flicks around in time, moving forwards, backwards and then returning the present. Sometimes it’s mid-chapter with no clearly defined shift.

A character’s mind will wonder, returning to a time or place which helps to define who they are in the now. Beloved is no light reading. It is a demanding book.

The plot shifts around with little explanation, point of views change randomly and quickly. But, again, this is because the past never truly leaves us. We may be in the present, though our history will always haunt us. And here America is being haunted by her dark past. Tony Morrison’s prose is eloquent and deals directly with psychological trauma. It’s more than physical scars and life wasted in servitude; it’s about what happens after. The shackles may have been removed but each former slave will always feel them on their wrists biting into their skin.

They flock together, building new communities out of those who experienced, and are still experiencing, the pain and hell slavery wrought them. They do their best to carry on and make new lives, though racial prejudice still remains. And it will for many more years. But who are they now?

There is also a sense of closeness, of inexperience. The world is a vast place, but for former slaves, for those born into slavery, it is dauntingly huge.

Imagine spending your entire life in one enclosed space, knowing but a small handful of people, and then suddenly having the world made available to you. You don’t know it. You don’t understand it. All you have ever known is forced labour and the slave master’s whip.

Where do you go? Where do you belong?

Thus, men like Paul D are forced to wonder with no real sense of belonging. They go from town to town, relationship to relationship, without establishing a strong sense of identity or roots. Pain permeates this narrative. It oozes out of the characters and their sad experiences. Morrison gets to the heart of the matter and she is uncompromising in her honesty.

Certainly, not a novel to be missed. Sometimes reality is too painful to address in plain, simple narrative. Sometimes truth has to be approached in circling movements, slowly getting to the heart of the matter through shifting, loosely linked stories that touch on the wound ever so lightly, without getting too close too fast. Sometimes I read to escape my reality, only to find myself in a universe endlessly more complicated, more painful, more difficult to understand and follow. Sometimes basic statements like 'I could never under Sometimes reality is too painful to address in plain, simple narrative. Sometimes truth has to be approached in circling movements, slowly getting to the heart of the matter through shifting, loosely linked stories that touch on the wound ever so lightly, without getting too close too fast.

Sometimes I read to escape my reality, only to find myself in a universe endlessly more complicated, more painful, more difficult to understand and follow. Sometimes basic statements like 'I could never understand why a mother would kill her child' seem to dissolve, leaving a confused feeling of not knowing exactly anymore what is right and what is wrong, given specific cruel circumstances. Sometimes novels shake me and leave me scarred, endlessly sad and grateful at the same time.

Beloved Toni Morrison. Your voice sounds loud and clear through the fog of political thought. Your characters live and breathe and DO NOT ALLOW FOR simplistic explanations. If you want to know what slavery does to people, read Beloved. It will not leave you unaffected. It left me speechless. This is probably my least favorite book I have ever read.

I think I hate it even more because so many people like it so much. Unlike really trashy novels, people actually try to argue that this is a great book. But it definitely embodies all the things that make me hate books. It's heavy handed with its message, which ultimately ruins some pretty spectacular imagery. Its also just a giant pastiche of people who can actually write, which makes it just feel disjointed and annoying since it switche This is probably my least favorite book I have ever read. I think I hate it even more because so many people like it so much.

Unlike really trashy novels, people actually try to argue that this is a great book. But it definitely embodies all the things that make me hate books.

It's heavy handed with its message, which ultimately ruins some pretty spectacular imagery. Its also just a giant pastiche of people who can actually write, which makes it just feel disjointed and annoying since it switches between standard narration and stream of conciousness and surrealism in intensely awkward ways. It's not even like that switching between different narrative structures is inherently bad, but this book definitely does it in the most ridiculously annoying way of any book I have ever read. Along with the heavy handedness of the whole affair is that this whole book is just trying to make me guilty for being white. It is probably one of the top 3 most unfortunate things in the history of the world that slavery not only ever existed but went on for so long, but I already get that.

So really Toni, no need to beat that into my head with a bloody axe (So to speak). Seriously, even thinking of the entire month I spent reading and analyzing this giant piece of trash gives me a headache. I'm convinced that this book strikes the ultimate low-point on the acclaim vs. Enjoyability graph. It's just artsy-fartsy nonsense for people who want to feel like they're reading real literature when they're not. I'm pretty sure I don't have proper words to express my hatred for this book (Or, rather, if I expressed my hatred for this book, my words would not be proper), so I'll just leave it at that. It has been a while since I last was online (according to this computer's calculations: thirteen days ago) & since then I have finished the monumental 'Beloved.'

The only way I can describe this sure classic is: 'it's a mix between the most brilliant of Hawthorne (his Scarlet Letter bears plenty of similarities to Beloved since it too deals with a time of intense persecution in this country; the roles women played at such historical crossroads; the ghosts of the burdensome past making cameos It has been a while since I last was online (according to this computer's calculations: thirteen days ago) & since then I have finished the monumental 'Beloved.' The only way I can describe this sure classic is: 'it's a mix between the most brilliant of Hawthorne (his Scarlet Letter bears plenty of similarities to Beloved since it too deals with a time of intense persecution in this country; the roles women played at such historical crossroads; the ghosts of the burdensome past making cameos in the present; haunted house motifs galore. And the secret history which comes back again and again) & the poetry of Maya Angelou.' This was written in the 198-!

Hardly a long time ago, it was analyzed/embraced then as it is now for its hodgepodge of ghost story elements, & romance, and historical biography. Because slavery is such a muddy record in our books, it is certain documents like these, which widen the scope significantly to include various P.O.V.s & jumps in time, that are truly significant to American Literature. The book mirrors the psyche of a woman who chooses liberating death for her child, rather than the awful clutch of slavery. It decidedly marks a usually-undocumented moment when ex-slaves got something close to freedom-- and had to find out how to live, survive, or try to make way for the upcoming generation-- outside of slavery. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.

To view it, You who read me keep your repugnance and horror to yourself. I am here to tell you my story with an iron smile under my chin. The men without skin stole my milk so my mother punished them with my blood. You don’t understand, her love was too thick. I was the already crawling baby waiting to be loved. I am Beloved.

Which kind of unimaginable atrocities can lead a mother to murder her own baby to spare it a certain life full of humiliation and wanton abuse? How much suffering can a human being unde You who read me keep your repugnance and horror to yourself. I am here to tell you my story with an iron smile under my chin.

The men without skin stole my milk so my mother punished them with my blood. You don’t understand, her love was too thick. I was the already crawling baby waiting to be loved. I am Beloved. Which kind of unimaginable atrocities can lead a mother to murder her own baby to spare it a certain life full of humiliation and wanton abuse? How much suffering can a human being undergo before he loses touch with reality and turns to derangement as the only way to cope?

But I do wonder, derangement or conscientious remembrance as a sort of self-inflicted punishment? “Beloved” is a piercing cry of sorrow, angst and promise impregnated with magic realism which disrupts the mind and upsets the body. Set in the 1870s Ohio, this story reveals, in a disturbingly subtle and poignant way, the real value of freedom as opposed to a life of slavery. Sethe’s has been an oppressed and undignified life, for she is a negro, and she is a woman. Baby Suggs, the mother of her spouse -only in the eyes of God- Halle, tries to warn her about the risks of being a slave woman and insisting on loving her children too dearly.

But Sethe blooms with the seed of light which is growing inside her and plans an escape with her family to be able to love freely. Until one fateful day, when the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, disguised as men without skin, come to take what they believe to be their right. They come to teach a lesson to these proud animals which have had the boldness to believe they can be human beings. It’s an arduous task. They undermine the body and tear the flesh, proving their power and manhood, forcing their entrance.

They arise as the masters, squeezing all kind of fluxes from emaciated carcasses: urine, spit, blood and milk. But not tears, never tears. The fluxes blend into a streaming river of sorrow and lost hopes which will never reach the cleansing waters. They wear out the spirit and subjugate the soul, chocking and chopping. The hummingbirds sing, flapping their wings, and the sunbeams shine through the branches of the trees, which are now adorned with hanging limbless torsos.

The natural world, which becomes the imperturbable setting for this irrational carnage, watches as an indifferent spectator. There is no place to run away to but Sethe’s instinct to feed her children moves her towards a fragile safety where her baby daughter is born. Twenty-eight days of respite it’s all they are given, for the hunting hasn’t finished yet and the Horsemen come to claim their missed prey. Now, I am not a mother and I don’t know whether I will ever be, but the dread of imagining the flesh of your flesh having to undergo such shaming and degrading misery has to be terrifying. Sethe’s love is too thick, and she can’t remember whether she has two or four feet, animal or human? The only thing she knows is that she can’t allow her children to go through the kind of hell she went through, she wants to spare them all.

She only has time to spare one before she is stopped. Or a selfless, desperate act of a loving mother?

“Beloved” is the unfinished name that Sethe could afford to engrave in her baby’s tombstone after selling her body. ”Beloved” is also the haunting otherwordly presence and the only company that Sethe and her only remaining daughter, Denver, have in 124 Bluestone Road, after Baby Suggs dies and her two sons disappear one mundane evening. The perturbing phantasmagorical presence of the killed baby, which at some point is inexplicably reincarnated in flesh, taking the form of a young and attractive woman who appears out of nowhere in Sethe’s porch, drenches the novel in myriads of ways.

”Beloved” is as threatening as she is reassuring. ”Beloved” portrays the perpetual symbol of an act of sheer love, reminding Sethe of her doleful past.

”Beloved” craves for nourishment not wanting to realize that Sethe’s milk has gone sour and is now poisoning what little is left of her humanity. It is now up to Denver to try to atone for her mother’s sin and to Sethe to allow a blessed man from her past, Paul D., a kind of man who could walk in a house and make the women cry, to offer her the possibility of a future. This is the sort of novel that defies words and syntax, challenging the reader to put the scabrous pieces together, forcing him to move forward and backward in time, for there isn’t another way to portray its brutish reality than to merge fantasy and facts, dreams and yearnings, magic rituals and ancestral beliefs into a single powerful voice, the voice of the guilty conscience, which becomes the ultimate narrator of the story.

The act of embracing the mystery doesn’t smooth any of the atrocities portrayed in this novel, although the lyrical prose and the symbolic patterns, challenging notions of life and death, make it possible to put across an overwhelming message of hope in the natural goodness of human beings. An individual might not find enough strength in him to exorcise the ghosts from his past, to break free from his long life bondages, to recover from the nonhealing wounds of his soul. But when embraced by the nourishing arms of the community, when allowed to enter its collective memories and sorrows, he becomes miraculously empowered to banish his worst nightmares, to let go of the shame and the guilt. A future, free from the shadow of slavery is possible then, where a so much coveted peace of mind can be envisioned, where the hummingbirds will sing and the sundrenched grass will gleam in harmony with smiling faces instead of iron grimaces and scarred necks. “The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out. Slave life; freed life- every day was a test and a trial.” (page 256) Disremembered and unaccounted for, I am not lost because no one is looking for me, and even if they were, they can’t call me, for I have no name.

I am the girl and I am still waiting to be loved. This is not a story to pass on. This is a story to forget so that a new beginning can be born. But I’m still here.

I am “Beloved” and this story is mine. 'Working dough. Working, working dough.

Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.' - Toni Morrison, Beloved 'Beloved' focuses on the psychological trauma of slavery which permeates the very atmosphere and even emerges in ghost form. It seems to be a good book to read in the light of the recent discussion on the Roots reboot, as well as the recent New York Times article which discusses how African-American DNA bears signs of slavery.

I feel that for many thi 'Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.' - Toni Morrison, Beloved 'Beloved' focuses on the psychological trauma of slavery which permeates the very atmosphere and even emerges in ghost form.

It seems to be a good book to read in the light of the recent discussion on the Roots reboot, as well as the recent New York Times article which discusses how African-American DNA bears signs of slavery. I feel that for many this isn't too much of a surprise.

This was a tough read, even tougher the second time around. I never get used to books like this; if anything they get more painful as I become more and more aware of what slavery consisted of. One of the things that always gets to me when reading slave narratives is the burdens the slaves had to endure and with little to no help, but I'm learning about the little things they did to try to endure and survive.

Some of their methods may not sound healthy, from our perspectives (for example, limiting love because you know that any time your family could be taken away from you), but this book shows us in many ways how unless we are in a certain situation, it's really impossible for us to know how we'll react to it. At the beginning of the book, former slave Baby Suggs is contemplating colour, all because she is about to die and she has never had the time to do so before. The world of a slave is small and it doesn't belong to them. And even with freedom the past still haunts them: 'Her past had been like her present--intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.'

Love is one of the themes in this book, and throughout I wondered whether love is ever enough to get over the past. Paul D and Sethe's love story is against the odds, with Paul D guarding his heart and Sethe still recovering from deaths, abuse, and children running away. Two very broken people, and Paul D with this sort of mentality: 'He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.

He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him.'

And Sethe: 'Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?' This time around I tried to focus more on the characters I didn't dwell on much in my first read, so Denver, Sethe's daughter, received more of my attention. I pictured her loneliness, loneliness that caused her to value the company of a ghost, which is why she clung to Beloved, who demands so much attention and affection.I ended up liking her character transformation the most: 'In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out.' Pain is a given throughout the book, and I've been thinking a lot about the following quote: 'Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.'

Such a hard truth and the characters in this book had so much more to heal from than the rest of us. (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called 'classics,' then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Book #23: Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987) The story in a nutshell: To understand the importance of 1987's Beloved, you need to understand that before this first (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].

Find all of my reviews at: I FINISHED!!!!!! I realize this is a classic and a Pulitzer Prize winner and yada yada yada, but oh my goodness am I glad to be done. Dear Oprah, what’s going to happen to me since I hated it???? That’s what I was afraid of. Going in to this book I knew nothing about it except for the fact that it was on the Banned Books List and that Oprah said I should read it...

I did manage to finish, but WHAT. There are only about 47 Find all of my reviews at: I FINISHED!!!!!! I realize this is a classic and a Pulitzer Prize winner and yada yada yada, but oh my goodness am I glad to be done. Dear Oprah, what’s going to happen to me since I hated it???? That’s what I was afraid of. Going in to this book I knew nothing about it except for the fact that it was on the Banned Books List and that Oprah said I should read it... I did manage to finish, but WHAT.

There are only about 47,000,000 reviews out there and I kind of feel like I sacrificed 1,000 years of my reading this instead of just two days so I’m not going to hash and rehash every detail I didn’t like. Really, let’s face facts. No matter what reason I give for not liking this one there’s a good chance I’ll get trolled for daring to have an unpopular opinion so why bother? I will say that Beloved is the only book I can remember reading where I was in love with the story but hated the way it was told.

(Sidenote: Beloved is realllllly strangely fitting if you’re someone still looking for a ghost story to add to your October reading list.) I think Toni Morrison’s writing style is one that you’re either going to love or hate. Obviously I fall in to the hate it category, but I’m glad I can say I finally read her. As for Beloved being touted one of the best books of all time???? Thanks for nothing, Oprah!

In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like.I could leave it like that. I should, really, I should. Leave it, in her words, in her meaning, in her context and effort and heritage and everything that is not mine.

Never will be mine, these things that should rightfully flay me alive every time I happen to dwell upon them, whether in flight of fanciful musings or serious consideration as they so rightfully deserve. The only t In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like.I could leave it like that. I should, really, I should. Leave it, in her words, in her meaning, in her context and effort and heritage and everything that is not mine.

Never will be mine, these things that should rightfully flay me alive every time I happen to dwell upon them, whether in flight of fanciful musings or serious consideration as they so rightfully deserve. The only thing I own is the history, and god forbid I forget it for a length of breath. I see the decriers of her prose, and I wonder. I see the decriers of magical realism, and I wonder. I see the decriers of characters, of plot, of calves in particular, and I have to wonder, especially at the calves. That was what made you stop?

You should know better, by now, there is no excuse calibrated enough to sail you past the port of truth. Especially that.

So I will try. I, descendant of Virginia landowners and parents who refuse to believe in the fact and face of the current US president, will try, and I can only hope for Toni Morrison to let me be. This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone.There, just that, are the words you really need.

More of hers, I know, but truly, I have nothing to fall upon besides vague nuances of 'slavery', 'United States', 'the evil that men do'. And women, and people, and the days rolling by on the backs of millions, chokecherry trees bleeding through the centuries to a boy named Trayvon Martin today and so, so many others.

No answers; no redemption. Just facts and figures and cultures spliced and split along veins of the void, how much can one thing break another, and how long, and how shall it ever be unbroken.

'It's gonna hurt, now,' said Amy. 'Anything dead coming back to life hurts.'

The voice, though. The voice carries all of that, and beyond it. Listen to the voice long enough, and you will begin to see the hazy and bloodcurdled outlines of the question, the content, the situational chaos bounded by need on one side and means on the other, and the world that will never be able to afford to stop picking up the pieces. All those cultures, crossed over and carted through and cultivated by greed and power, and the voice of a single woman, the last Laureate of Literature of her country, a country still obsessed with whitewashing its foundations. “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh.

They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick them out.

No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands!

Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth.

Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth.

You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here.

Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up.

And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”There is the fiction, and then there is the reality.

You will never get a grasp on the latter. But the former, here, will help you on your way. But only if you can bear it, and if and only if you have any hope for tomorrow. For if you have, you must.

Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh. Damn the humans, they are the most enigmatic beings who ever lived, their hearts have reasons that reason knows not, and their heads fabricate worlds the world have never seen, they kill the things they love and are haunted by the memories that fade away by the time but never disappear, but becomes a ghost and gnaws at your nerves, for always and forever. To be a mother is the most consummate feeling one can have, the one most celestial and earthly alike, you share your blood and flesh with the Damn the humans, they are the most enigmatic beings who ever lived, their hearts have reasons that reason knows not, and their heads fabricate worlds the world have never seen, they kill the things they love and are haunted by the memories that fade away by the time but never disappear, but becomes a ghost and gnaws at your nerves, for always and forever. To be a mother is the most consummate feeling one can have, the one most celestial and earthly alike, you share your blood and flesh with the one who resides in your womb ignorant of the outer world, the bloody walls and thumping heart his only world, a seed size of a grain gradually becomes something you come to love unconditionally, who feeds on your flesh and sucks your milk, to be a mother is almost godly! Then there is a world different than ours, a world of less-humans who are bought and sold like corn, where, to live is a curse and to die a luxury, where you are never sure to get bread enough to calm the hunger, where you are never free enough to entertain your eyes with sight of sky, where you are aware of only one color, the color of dirt and hint of sweat, and where you are not named but numbered!

Sethe don’t want this world for her children, she ran past the world and stepped into another world, our world, the world of soulless meats, of suspicious beasts, where to love unconditionally is seen beyond question and buffoonery, and where people are stuffed enough bodily to ponder the starvation of soulif they have one! She kills the baby girl and will be haunted by her ghost, the baby denied to suck milk, will suck life out of her mother, the baby denied of the warmth of lap, will haunt the home her mother lives, the baby denied to breathe life, will turn the lives of others into living hell.she is beloved and she denies to die! Morrison is at her best in building most complicated of characters stucked in bizarre tapestry of relations, magical realism is handled craftily, one wayward step and you lose thread of the story wholly, Beloved becomes more than just a repressed memory, but also a representation for the entire community. “A wounded, enraged baby is the central figure of the book, both literally, in the character of Beloved, and symbolically, as it struggles beneath the surface of the other major characters. All of Morrison’s characters struggle with the psychological repression of their pasts.

While much of their pain stems from the horrors of slavery, it is also comes from their relationship with Sethe. Throughout the novel, Sethe suffers more psychological damage than any other character, making it logical that others would find themselves entangled in her life. As a character, Beloved represents not only her own history as being one who, before her murder, lived along the edge of the line between freedom and slavery, but the history of several generations as she acts out the pain of others by forcing along their remembrances.as Morrison says: “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.' There are reasons why was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Beloved may be the biggest one. The structure is a ghost story about a woman who killed her own children rather than see them be dragged back from freedom to live a life of slavery, and how the guilt of that act comes back to haunt her.

But the real payload here is a portrayal of the slave existence, how it seeps into every pore, affects every emotion, defines one’s world view, how one values education, how willing o There are reasons why was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Beloved may be the biggest one. The structure is a ghost story about a woman who killed her own children rather than see them be dragged back from freedom to live a life of slavery, and how the guilt of that act comes back to haunt her. But the real payload here is a portrayal of the slave existence, how it seeps into every pore, affects every emotion, defines one’s world view, how one values education, how willing one can be to love another human being. It is a triumph, a masterwork by one of the world’s great writers, working so well at several levels. Sethe is the main character.

Having already sent her children ahead, this pregnant woman flees slavery in the south and takes up residence with her grandmother, Baby Suggs. But when a posse comes to bring her back, she kills her children rather than allow them to become slaves. There is a lot here about identity, defining oneself in one’s own terms and not the owner’s for example.

Also, there is commentary on the need for and value of community. Sethe’s daughter Denver never strays from their home, but when she finally does, she finds that there is help to be had. When Paul D is in need the community of free blacks is more than willing to help. The story is based on a real case, on in which Margaret Garner (remembered in this book as the family name given to the less horrendous slave owners) in 1856 killed her children for the same reason. Most men in this book are oppressors, but a few rise above. Mister Garner, although a slave owner, shows at least some signs of humanity. Paul D is the most developed male character, struggling with his fears and weaknesses, but in search of truth and peace.

Morrison utilizes expected literary devices like foreshadowing (an early image of a white-clad figure hovering over Sethe), flipping back and forth among several time lines, changing from third person to first, classic references (p 174 When the four horsemen came—schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sherrif—the hours on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late.) to great effect. More than just a great ghost story or an outstanding tale of slavery, Morrison has written a classic of 20th century American literature. It will be read forever.

“Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows.” - Toni Morrison, Beloved “Beloved” is a beautiful, haunting story that is set around the time following the slavery emancipation declaration. It’s mysterious and supernatural, as well as being a love story, a tale of horror, forgiveness, loss and confusion. It’s very poetic and lyrical, full of metaphors and powerful imagery. The book tells the story of Sethe, a runaway slave who has left her home in the South but is still living in the past “Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows.” - Toni Morrison, Beloved “Beloved” is a beautiful, haunting story that is set around the time following the slavery emancipation declaration. It’s mysterious and supernatural, as well as being a love story, a tale of horror, forgiveness, loss and confusion.

It’s very poetic and lyrical, full of metaphors and powerful imagery. The book tells the story of Sethe, a runaway slave who has left her home in the South but is still living in the past. Her deceased two year old baby supposedly haunts 124, the house in which she and her daughter Denver live. Later, we find out the awful way in which the baby died and that makes the story even more tragic. The house is an ominous character in the book; it had a life of its own. I felt the hopelessness of Sethe and Denver who had no place else to go: “So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted for her. Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behaviour of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air.

For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light.” The love story in this book is a different kind of love story, a love story that involves a couple,Sethe and Paul D, who were once slaves. How can people move on from being slaves to being in free relationships? As slaves they became accustomed to their loved ones, their parents, children and lovers being sold or running away. The past has left scar marks like the scars in the shape of a chokeberry tree on Sethe’s back.

“And then she moved him. Just when doubt, regret and every single unasked question was packed away, long after he believed he had willed himself into being, at the very time and place he wanted to take root- she moved him. From room to room. Like a rag doll.” What I found very powerful was the term Morrison used “rememory,” which is remembering memories. I experienced it when I visited a slave memorial in Zanzibar and entered the dungeons where the slaves had been kept. Obviously the slaves aren’t there anymore but I felt a multitude of emotions and I felt as though they were still there in some form. I found it nearly impossible to read large chunks of the book at a time; I had to take breaks.

Toni Morrison stands in a class of her own.This book was beautiful yet tragic; a true masterpiece. This is the worst book that I have ever read. It epitomizes what elite academics love about literature: It is dark and nasty (which, to an academic, means realistic) and it is obscure and incoherent (to an academic, this means deep and profound). This is like the deliberately hideous painting that is called 'art' by intellectuals: Common-sense individuals question its merit and are told it is complex, beautiful, and beyond the untrained understanding and crass sensibilities of the uneducated. I This is the worst book that I have ever read. It epitomizes what elite academics love about literature: It is dark and nasty (which, to an academic, means realistic) and it is obscure and incoherent (to an academic, this means deep and profound). This is like the deliberately hideous painting that is called 'art' by intellectuals: Common-sense individuals question its merit and are told it is complex, beautiful, and beyond the untrained understanding and crass sensibilities of the uneducated.

I disliked everything about this book - its leftist message, disgusting characters and grotesque writing style (a conglomeration of broken grammar rules, disorganized structure and ungainly narrative). It is mired in filth with its references to bestiality, sexual assault, psychological torture, violence and infanticide.

'Beloved' is quintessential of the literature embraced by academics and which I think is morbid, uninspiring and worthless. I hate this book. But I guess I should say why. Some might say that I was too young to read this book since I read it when I was 15 but I'm a few years older now and I still hate it with seething anger. I heard that Toni Morrison was a good writer so when we had to pick a book from this long list I decided to read it. I didn't like any of the character - at all-or the plot.

I know the book is supposed to give you a view on the cruel treatment of slaves but after I finished I actually I hate this book. But I guess I should say why. Some might say that I was too young to read this book since I read it when I was 15 but I'm a few years older now and I still hate it with seething anger.

I heard that Toni Morrison was a good writer so when we had to pick a book from this long list I decided to read it. I didn't like any of the character - at all-or the plot.

I know the book is supposed to give you a view on the cruel treatment of slaves but after I finished I actually less sympathetic for them. How exactly am I supposed to feel sympathetic to people who screw cows -that is just disturbing on so many levels- and kill their own babies. Paul D even admitted that the male slaves usually rape the girls.

Beloved (the charater) is supposed to give the book more depth but she was just confusing and quite annoying, so is the mom by the way. The writing of the book was good and believe me its painful for me to give any praise whatsoever to this book. There are metaphors, similes, symbols, personification, and basically everything that is an English teachers dream. But that does not mean it was a good book in the least. I like a decent metaphor as much as the next person but that is not what I think makes a good book.

You know how your supposed to feel all deep and intelligent after you read classic book. Nope didn't happen. I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running - from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth.

I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much. What's the difference between tragedy and melodrama? To me Sethe is one of the most tragic heroines in literature, but not everybody feels the same. The most peculiar critic I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running - from nothing.

I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much. What's the difference between tragedy and melodrama? To me Sethe is one of the most tragic heroines in literature, but not everybody feels the same. The most peculiar critical comment I have come across after I finished reading the story of this runaway slave and her children claimed that Toni Morrison didn't take a necessary step back from her characters, that she was too passionate and too fierce about her subject, lacking in proper academic detachment and biased towards pointing out only the horrors of the institution of slavery.

To me it seems like somebody is trying o demonstrate that the Holocaust wasn't all that bad, that there were reasons for the actions of the killers, that not all Germans were bad. I know I have come across in the past over portrayals of the coloured people in a paternalistic manner, arguing that the slave owners were doing them a favor by giving them shelter and food in exchange for work, liberating them from a savage life back in Africa and so on. Since the first generations of slaves were mostly illiterate (and insistently kept that way by their masters) there are very few direct accounts to challenge this self-serving theory. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. For Toni Morrison this is part of her personal history, and she makes herself the voice of this legion of ghosts whose stories some people would like to remain buried and forgotten.

With her artistic sensibilities, she takes a real case of a woman pushed beyond the limits of endurance by the system (Margaret Garner) and makes it a poem of pain and redemption, of the awakening of individual conscience and of the sense of belonging to a community of the opressed. The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless. To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts.

The inspiration for the novel and the focus on the meaning of freedom, according to the introduction written by the author, has its source in the moment of release of the mind from the petty concerns of holding on to a job with limited satisfactions, of being for the first time sole master of her own life after she gave up an editing job to dedicate herself to full time writing. I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew my thoughts to what 'free' could possibly mean to women. In the eighties, the debate was still roiling: equal pay, equal treatment, access to professions, schools.

And choice without stigma. To marry or not. To have children or not.

Inevitably these thoughts led me to the different history of black women in this country - a history in which marriages were discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was requirred, but 'having' them, being responsible for them - being, in other words, their parent - was as out of the question as freedom. Assertions of parenthood under conditions peculiar to the logic of institutional enslavement were criminal. Encapsulated in this passage in the core of Sethe's tragedy: born into slavery, denied the care of her own mother, sold to a 'liberal' houselhold that was still part of the system, Sethe is tricked into believing she can have a normal life, that she can love another slave and have his children. When the farm changes ownership to a more severe patron, Sethe has to chose between running away or abandoning her children.

Without going into details, her love for the children drives her to an abominable act, and for eighteen years she has to cope with the trauma and with the neighbors shunning. The ghosts of Sethe's past are manifest in the novel, given first an invisible, malefic presence in the house she lives in, and later given flesh and breath in the form of a mysterious young woman who calls herself 'Beloved'. The structure of the novel is non-linear, with the revelations about Sethe, about her children and the men in her life presented gradually, in painful flashbacks, reflecting the tortured mind that shies away and denies the painful memories, approaching them obliquely and fearfully, lest they shred her sanity once more. The question whether Beloved is a ghost or a real person is never settled, leaving the possibility that she is either a figment of the mother's imagination or another victim of the persecution and torture of the coloured people by the system.

Seen as an exercise in magic realism, Sethe stands as a mythical figure in the liberation movement, together with her mother-in-law, another former slave who gained her freedom through the sacrifice of her son, Sethe's partner, the only one of her eight children that was allowed to stay by her side and work towards paying her manumission. Baby Suggs is a religious figure to the new community of escaped slaves on the banks of the Ohio, and for me she is special because she steps away from hate. Through her improvised sermons, urging her people to put down the sword and the shield of revenge and learn how to love themselves and the world they live in, Baby Suggs is probably the only character in the novel who really believes in the future. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. Baby Suggs is a dreamer, drunk with the unexpected awareness of freedom, leading a wild dance of happiness in the midst of a forest clearing, but the world has this nasty habit of crushing visions of utopias of fellowship and understanding under a tide of greed, hatred, envy. The same events that set Sethe's blood boiling with helpless rage [ killing her own children rather than allowing them to be returned to slavery ], broke the belief of Baby Suggs in that better future.

In all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby's eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning than nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children. You know, sometimes I just don’t get other readers. I can’t relate to their reactions, their expectations, their way of looking at things. Take Beloved, a book that I have only ever part read, having given up about a third of the way into it.

Reaction to the book seems to be about evenly split between those who hate it and those who love it. Which is fine, of course. Yet the haters appear to base their antipathy on the subject matter; they, according to the reviews I’ve read, have a problem with You know, sometimes I just don’t get other readers.

I can’t relate to their reactions, their expectations, their way of looking at things. Take Beloved, a book that I have only ever part read, having given up about a third of the way into it. Reaction to the book seems to be about evenly split between those who hate it and those who love it. Which is fine, of course. Yet the haters appear to base their antipathy on the subject matter; they, according to the reviews I’ve read, have a problem with someone writing about slavery; they compose their reviews metaphorically throwing their hands around in wild fashion as if to keep this objectionable topic away. It’s as though Morrison was trying to convert them to Catholicism or something.

I can’t get my head around it at all. Their argument, as far as I can gather, is that slavery was, y’know, a long time ago and we’re now entirely inclusive and lovely towards all people and so writing about slavery is tantamount to trying to make us [by which I mean white people] feel guilty for something that 1.

We didn’t ourselves do and 2. We can’t control i.e. The colour of our skin. Honestly, go look around the web [including this site]; I’m not making this shit up. What do you say to ignorant crap like that? Part of me would prefer to say nothing because I find it exhausting arguing against such obvious idiocy. But if I was forced to respond I might well state, first of all, that, uh, racism does actually still exist.

And so the subject is, er, not entirely irrelevant. Secondly, even if it didn’t exist in our society, even if we were all living in multi-cultural hippy communes, what exactly would be wrong with someone writing about slavery and persecution? I might be wrong of course [I’m not], but I’m pretty sure Morrison didn’t put the necessary effort and time into writing a book just to make some twat in Milton Keynes feel guilty. If you ask me, I’d guess that it may be that, as a black woman, as a human being, she would be interested in exploring and understanding such a pivotal and lamentable part of [her/our] history. For me, the point of writing a book like Beloved is to elevate a terrible part of history beyond mere statistics. Like with the holocaust, it’s easy sometimes to get lost in numbers, to forget that individual people were affected or perished. Beloved personalises slavery, which makes it easier for people-in-general to identify with the subject.

I would say that is very important. As far as I’m concerned, we should not be allowed to forget, to push these things under the carpet. You cannot live in a vacuum, where history is meaningless except for passing exams and making a HBO mini-series. This stuff is part of who you are and continues to play a role in how the world, your world, works.

And, yeah, I know what people say, which is that there are plenty of tragedies not given the same status, or attention; these people ask, why aren’t we talking about what happened in Bosnia, Serbia, Nigeria, etc? My response: stop whinging and write a book about those places/conflicts/tragedies, then. However, I did, of course, quit Beloved without finishing it, although my doing so, my quitting, obviously had nothing to do with white guilt; my issues with the novel aren’t political ones, but, rather, they are bookish ones. I didn’t feel as though Toni Morrison was preaching at me, but I did feel as though the book was too heavy-handed and overwrought, and even cringingly trite and saccharine. In fact, the thing struck me as something like what Faulkner might have produced had you plied him full of E and asked him to write a chick-lit novel. Just consider this line: 'Jump, if you want to, ‘cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you ‘fore you fall.'

And this: 'He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers.'

The most polite thing I can say about those two quotes is that neither strike me as good writing. What about this: 'In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.

They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it.

And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth.

Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here.

Flesh that needs to be loved.' I mean.dear God. And the thing is, I totally agree with the sentiment of almost everything in the above passage; it’s the presentation of that sentiment that bothers me. Every sentence in Beloved aches [or creaks] with emotion, with meaning and significance; and, for me, the impact of the story, and the full horror of the subject that Morrison was dealing with, was compromised by that. Cards on the table, I found the book entirely ridiculous. Throughout my reading, I wanted on almost every page to tell her: tone it down, and let the story breathe a bit; I wanted to chide her: you’re trying too hard.

I felt as though some of her choices weren’t made in order to serve the story, but because she was trying to impress. Ironically, for someone who, I think I am correct in saying, teaches or taught English literature or creative writing, I would say that she needed advice and guidance herself.

Someone needed to look at the manuscript and take a red pen to it, with little notes in the margin saying 'is this necessary?' What is strange about Beloved is that it is both saccharine and brutal. There’s a weird tension between the florid style, the sentimentality, and the subject matter and some of the content; it is a book that screams excess; everything is taken just a bit too far; Morrison displays a distinct inability to rein in it, and a lack of subtlety and control. So, one minute we’re getting told about how breast milk was forcibly harvested from Sethe, the next she and Paul D are sharing a tender moment, as he feels up the scars on her back and rambles on poetically-symbolically about a tree. Probably the most glaring misstep in the novel occurs long after I gave up on it.

Struggling badly to overcome my reservations about the quality of what I was reading, I had a look at some online reviews. It was then that I came across the opinions outlined in my initial paragraphs, but it was also then that I found out that the baby – the ghost baby, the slaughtered baby – at some point in the novel is apparently heard in the text; by which I mean that we have access to its thoughts or words.

And, I, ah, I dunno about you, but that just seems ludicrous to me; it’s almost akin to gross incompetence or mishandling of your material. Why on earth would you do that? The fate of that child speaks loudly enough, all Toni Morrison is doing by giving it a voice [a stream of consciousness voice, I believe] is cranking up the melodrama to 1000. And I had a thought upon that discovery, a thought that ran: I’m not reading all this to get there. Beloved: Toni Morrison's Novel of the Cost of Freedom First Edition, Beloved, Alfred Knopf, New York, New York, September, 1987, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1988 The task of the Underground Railway has been made more difficult. As a part of the Compromise of 1850, our Nation, in yet another effort to stall a War Between the States, has passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. A Federal Officer is subject to a fine of $1,000.00 if he fails to aid a slave owner in returning Beloved: Toni Morrison's Novel of the Cost of Freedom First Edition, Beloved, Alfred Knopf, New York, New York, September, 1987, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1988 The task of the Underground Railway has been made more difficult.

As a part of the Compromise of 1850, our Nation, in yet another effort to stall a War Between the States, has passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. A Federal Officer is subject to a fine of $1,000.00 if he fails to aid a slave owner in returning an alleged runaway slave to the property owner's jurisdiction. All that is necessary is an owner's sworn affidavit that the alleged runaway is his property. Those, such as members of the Underground Railway, are subject to a term of imprisonment of up to six months and a fine of $1,000.00 for rendering aid to an alleged runaway slave. Is 's novel based on the Margaret Garner case. In 1856, Margaret, her husband, Robert Garner, and children crossed the Ohio River from Boone County, to Cincinatti, Ohio. When slave catcher's attempted to round up Margaret's family, she attempted to murder her children, succeeding in killing one child, by cutting her throat with a butcher knife.

Margaret's defense attorney attempted to circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act by having his client tried for murder in the State of Ohio. The effort was unsuccessful and Margaret and her family were returned to Kentucky. The Garner family was transported South on a steamboat, ironically named 'The Liberator.' After colliding with another ship, both Margaret and her other daughter were thrown overboard. Margaret's daughter drowned, for which Margaret was happy to know her daughter would not be returned to a life of slavery. The Garners were sent to friends of their owners in Kentucky to New Orleans where they disappeared from all records. Robert Garner was located in 1870 by a reporter of a Cincinnati newspaper.

Garner reported that Margaret died of typhoid fever in 1858, imploring him not to remarry in a state of slavery, but wait until he could marry in freedom. Margaret Garner became known as the Modern Medea.

'The Modern Medea' by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, 1867 Garner's is a tough story. Morrison made it tougher in 'Beloved.' Sethe is Margaret Garner's fictional counterpart. Sethe did not end up in New Orleans, but was subsequently released from jail and returned to her home in Cincinnati.

Eighteen years after murdering her child, Paul D, one of the men who had worked as a slave on the Kentucky farm, has entered Sethe's life as lover and potential husband. But, Paid Stamp, a former worker for the Underground Railway, shows Paul D the original newspaper clipping concerning the case. In denial, Paul refuses to recognize the drawing of Sethe in the paper as being her and approaches her with the article as if it were a joke. I got us all out.Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. And it came off right, like it was supposed to. Each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn't no accident.

I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it; me saying, Go on, and Now. Me having to look out. Me using my own head. But it was more than that. It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good.

Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide.

Look like I love em more after I hot here. Or maybe I couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon--there wasn't nobody in the world I couldn't love if I wanted to. You know what I mean?'

Paul D is beginning to see what Paid Stamp wanted him to understand. Sethe continues to explain, 'I stopped him,' she said, staring at the place where the fence used to be. 'I took and put my babies where they'd be safe.' Paul D's response comes as no surprise. 'What you did was wrong, Sethe.You got two feet, Sethe, not four.' But was she wrong?

How many mother's never knew if their children lived to adulthood, of if they did, what they looked like? The spirit of 'Beloved,' Sethe's slain child serves as a force to remind Sethe and Paul D of their lives in slavery. Perhaps it is not Beloved's spirit that haunts them, but their own repressed memories. Toni Morrison has broken my heart twice with this novel. There is no doubt that she will yet again when I read it once more. In her acceptance speech for the Frederic Melcher Award for Literature in 1988, Ms.

Morrrison said “there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby” honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. “There’s no small bench by the road,” she continued.

“And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of), the book had to.” On Sullivan's Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, there is a bench placed by the Toni Morrison Society in July, 2008. It commemorates the port of entry for over forty percent of all sixty million and more African-Americans brought to this county in bondage. “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” ’s is a melancholic but beautifully written story about Sethe, a slave woman who having escaped slavery will never be free. She is daunted not only by her memories, but also by the ghost of her baby daughter that died nameless. On her grave there is just a word: Beloved. Her suffering is poignant and heartbreaking.

“Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or w “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” ’s is a melancholic but beautifully written story about Sethe, a slave woman who having escaped slavery will never be free. She is daunted not only by her memories, but also by the ghost of her baby daughter that died nameless. On her grave there is just a word: Beloved. Her suffering is poignant and heartbreaking. “Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.

Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me?” Masterfully written, it is powerful and poetical at the same time.

It is considered a great example of American literature, and I can do no less. Despite it all, it was so tragic that it injures the soul: it is enslavement at its worst, for even after escape there is no freedom; it is wretchedness of loss, that torments the living. And amid all this suffering, there is beauty in Morrison's lyrical delivery: “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin.

Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.” I can say honestly that I cherished Beloved like certainly it deserved, however I was depressingly impacted, and it left me with a very sorrowful taste.

As Morrison doubtless felt and foresaw in her readers when writing Beloved. For its theme requires no less. 'Beloved You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again; you have come back to me You are my beloved You are mine You are mine'If you have not read Beloved, I urge you to do it! The clear blue sky above, the richness of life around, stretching from the vivid colors in the nature to the exquisiteness that material life offers. The soft milky ambrosia not once maligned by the sweat of forced labor, the promise of a day to mull over existence for the mind is not strained with the thought of an empty stomach.

Granted free thought. The assurance of a smile on your kid’s face for he has never known deprivation or fear. The assurance of a smile on your face for you have always The clear blue sky above, the richness of life around, stretching from the vivid colors in the nature to the exquisiteness that material life offers. The soft milky ambrosia not once maligned by the sweat of forced labor, the promise of a day to mull over existence for the mind is not strained with the thought of an empty stomach. Granted free thought. The assurance of a smile on your kid’s face for he has never known deprivation or fear.

The assurance of a smile on your face for you have always been able to look after him. Disassociation is not even a distant possibility. No ghosts looming in the backyard or playing with your mind for no beloved ever died an unnatural death. This is your world. But did there ever exist different worlds in this world; a world different from ours? One waking up everyday to a beautiful blue dawn and other where the night never seemed to disappear, a world denied to its living, where to realize one’s heart beat was a luxury unaffordable, a world with no colors save that of a grey or earth-brown so that when red came, it turned it upside down?

‘Beloved’ existed in that world. An existence hanging between the living and the dead, furious to take a revenge for the life it could be, forbidding her people to forget the vicious past and prohibiting them from coming to terms with freedom. For the milk she was deprived of, she thought it befitting to suck life out of her mother. Her mother’s daughter, whose life was taken by her mother because she couldn’t see her die. Since she was given red, she wanted to be called red. Beloved; a poignant prose with so many layers that it is difficult to address it in few hundred words, an account of forced slavery and its repercussions, blind love of a mother and unspoken ties, female sensitivities and words unuttered, beliefs and disbeliefs, complete resignation and utter shock. Beloved is this and more.

It is a bewildering chronicle of distraught slaves under the strain of Fugitive Slave Law pre Civil War and the horror of Middle Passage (1), the “Unspeakable things Unspoken”(2) according to Toni Morrison. It is a sad tale based upon a true story of one Margaret Garner, who killed her own daughter rather than let her grow up to be a slave.

It is a portrayal of horrid human hunger for emotions and their affirmation. It is an account of need of freedom not only from the external bondage but also from the self trapped somewhere in the past. It is a saga of a child deprived of her first recognition, in form of a relation with her mother, as a human and a living entity.

Toni Morrison wove magical realism through this work where years as well as characters permeated the boundaries of time and progression only resulted in diminishing the limits further. While her prose reminded of One Hundred years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in this passage her writing seemed akin to Beckett’s in The Unnameable, seeping through present, past and future and loosing a sense of consciousness: She played with me and always came to be with me whenever I needed her. She's mine, Beloved.

How to review a book like this, and it is a great book; I’m not sure I have the superlatives it deserves. Morrison based the novel on the story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her child as she was being recaptured, to save the child a lifetime of slavery. The setting is around the time of the civil war.

The plot and the storyline are well known and it seems most of my GR friends have either read it or have it on their tbr lists. The writing is great and there is a strong sense of How to review a book like this, and it is a great book; I’m not sure I have the superlatives it deserves. Morrison based the novel on the story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her child as she was being recaptured, to save the child a lifetime of slavery. The setting is around the time of the civil war. The plot and the storyline are well known and it seems most of my GR friends have either read it or have it on their tbr lists. The writing is great and there is a strong sense of place; “And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his.

He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its grave-yards and low-lying rivers. Or just a house—solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it.” But it is a horror story (and I don’t mean the ghost), horror in the true sense of the word, slavery.

It has been argued that Morrison is confronting and highlighting things not recorded or told by histories narrated by white historians. It isn’t comfortable and it is difficult to read; as it should be. I think this is also where some of the negative reviews come from; because the novel is not polemical and the characters have and enduring humanity with nuance.

There are reviews saying this is the worst book ever, expressing hatred and loathing for the novel. Hatred and loathing; worst book ever! There are so many bad, bad books out there. This isn’t a bad book, I can understand difficult, I can understand not really liking magic realism or the use of the ghost motif. I don’t get the hatred. I wonder if it is being forced to look at something in the past, that is still in the present and that we are unwilling to face.

It seems that slavery has now to be a topic studied in history; making it too real and present creates strong reactions. We still minimize and gloss over in the west the horrors we perpetrated on other parts of the globe.

The European powers and the US killed far more than the Nazis did in the slave trade and we still have a problem calling it genocide. Morrison makes it all human and personal and brings it home. I have long believed in ghosts, but not in the supernatual or paranormal sense.

I believe ghosts are memories or what Toni Morrison names as 'rememory.' I heard on NPR this week a man say that he was the grandchild of slaves and when he went into the voting booth and cast his ballot for Senator Obama he saw his grandparents faces, rememory. I once went to Auschwitz in Poland and my friend said to me as we walked thru the sadness, 'they are looking at us, they are in the flowers,' rememory. I hav I have long believed in ghosts, but not in the supernatual or paranormal sense. I believe ghosts are memories or what Toni Morrison names as 'rememory.' I heard on NPR this week a man say that he was the grandchild of slaves and when he went into the voting booth and cast his ballot for Senator Obama he saw his grandparents faces, rememory.

I once went to Auschwitz in Poland and my friend said to me as we walked thru the sadness, 'they are looking at us, they are in the flowers,' rememory. I have long believed in ghosts, and Toni Morrison brings us Beloved, a story of ghosts and rememory. I'm not sure if 124 was haunted by the already crawling baby or if it was haunted by the rememory of slavery, but that does not matter. It is spiteful, it is loud, it is quiet. Every word writes is razor sharp blade, every sentence a daggar that drives the blade into your soul. Beloved is a painful read.

Beloved is a story of rememory.the past and present blend together. Beloved is a painful read.

Dearly Beloved. Beloved is our rememory. Our rememory of pain and shame.

A ghost story of a not so long gone America. Words like Holocaust, Slavery, War etc. Loose over time the terror they should inspire upon one's mind. Reminding us about what these evils feel like is one important role art plays.

Toni Morrison does exactly that in this book, and in a effective way. Past She starts her story in the middle when slavery is already banned and biggest horrors have already passed. However this is not a happily-ever-after. In fact, for people who have been slave (or to generalize suffer miserably in anyway) for an Words like Holocaust, Slavery, War etc.

Loose over time the terror they should inspire upon one's mind. Reminding us about what these evils feel like is one important role art plays. Toni Morrison does exactly that in this book, and in a effective way. Past She starts her story in the middle when slavery is already banned and biggest horrors have already passed. However this is not a happily-ever-after. In fact, for people who have been slave (or to generalize suffer miserably in anyway) for any significant period of time; it is impossible to find a perfect happiness -there will always be ghosts of past to torment; slapping the Disney idea out of park of possibilities.

In this case, we actually have a real ghost of past (the Hindi word for 'ghost' and 'past' is same). Within very fist few pages Morrison takes art's ability of creating compassion to a new level as she makes us feel that dark past within our skins in which residents of 124 live; even if, like Denvar, we are ignorant of its details. It is scary and un-ignorable, almost visible - the characters are trying not to 'look' at it, which is understandable given its darkness: 'To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping past at bay.' We remember 'rememory' this past as Morrison brings us details in (irritatingly unannounced) flash-backs.

A normal narration of events would have left readers only memories of darkest events, and we wouldn't have realised what it feels like to be a slave for all your life. The book works so brillantly because you could see the depravity felt in the smallest things and how much would those tragedies shadow any happiness that may fall in victim's way. The past does figuritively become alive in form of Beloved, all flesh and bones. 'She reminds me of something.

Something, look like, I'm supposed to remember.' Although these are Paul D's words, they give experience of many people with Beloved. She was there or was a sort of metaphor of one's efforts to get over dark pasts. You can't run away from it, you need to accept it. The residents of 124 did - and they all come out of the thing better. Of course it hurt a little but Anything dead coming back to life hurts. Slavery How much bad do a life have to be, if a loving mother choose to kill her children rather than have them live it?

But what is slavery? It is being effectively reduced and compared to animals. It is not being allowed to love freely: 'Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to lo ve just a little bit; everything, just a little bi t, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.' Being fueled by Morrision's prose, I could go on rambling but Baby Suggs' very first thoughts upon being freed seem to do it brillantly: What for?

What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-le gged dog need freedom for? And when she steppe d foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn't; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her. Something's the matter. What's the matter?

What's the matter? She asked herself.

She didn't know what she looked like and was not curious. But suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, 'These hands belong to me. These my hands.' Next she felt a knocking in her chest an d discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along?

This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud. Garner looked over his shoulder at her with wide brown eyes and smiled himself. 'What's funny, Jenny?' She couldn't stop laughing. 'My heart's beating,' she said. And it was true.

Beloved has been more quickly and thoroughly canonized than any other modern book, so and because it suffers from two curses. The first is the curse of the classic itself, what you might call the Moby-Dick curse: everyone read it too early so no one liked it. It's not exactly difficult (nor exactly is ), but it's not easy either, and a high schooler forced to read it is going to suspect it of being good for her, which is no fun for anyone. When I polled my bookish friends about this boo Beloved has been more quickly and thoroughly canonized than any other modern book, so and because it suffers from two curses. The first is the curse of the classic itself, what you might call the Moby-Dick curse: everyone read it too early so no one liked it.

It's not exactly difficult (nor exactly is ), but it's not easy either, and a high schooler forced to read it is going to suspect it of being good for her, which is no fun for anyone. When I polled my bookish friends about this book, I got a lot of 'Er.I read that 20 years ago and it was probably okay,' when I didn't get silence.

In fact, I got more tepid comments about this book than any other I can remember, including Moby-Dick and even which is immeasurably more of a pain in the ass. The second curse - the curse that leads to the first curse - is that it's about slavery. It was canonized because it's very good, but also because it's the best novel everyone could agree on that was by a black person and about slavery. That's not Toni Morrison's fault, it's her credit.

But because we in America are obsessed with race - with the legacy of slavery - and because we all feel pretty shitty about it, in many different ways (or, at least, definitely two) - any book about slavery is going to come under fire forever and ever. Mark Twain probably knew when he wrote that it would never be talked about outside of the context of race; Toni Morrison most certainly did. When she wrote Beloved, she knew that every asshole in the country would take swings at it for as long as it lives, which looks like it's going to be a very long time.

Toni Morrison, a brilliant author at the height of her powers, writes a savage, no-holds-barred epic about the horrors of slavery, and everyone talks about its subject instead of its writing. Is it brilliant? It is brilliant. Does it deserve to be canonized, or is it in part canonized because it fills a niche that we needed filled? And the answer is yes to both.

What astonished me about Beloved is how fully in control of the narrative Morrison is. The way she hints at events, and then slowly returns to flesh them out again and again, from different perspectives.

She sets up like ten different mysteries - what, to take a minor one, happened to Sixo? And she resolves each one in turn. Sixo gets [the wonderful last line, 'Seven-O! As he smolders.

] This is mastery on a puzzle level that's And Morrison walks this tightrope throughout the book: she absolutely indicts slavery, she cudgels us with its reality - the incident this book is based on is real - but she stops just short of punishing us for reading the book. (Unlike her canonized peer, who is all about punishment.) It's not a perfect book. There's an essential corniness way deep down inside Morrison, particularly when it comes to love, that made me roll my eyes several times: 'They stayed that way for a while because neither Denver nor Sethe knew how not to: how to stop and not love the look or feel of the lips that kept on kissing.' And while she usually manages to keep her Faulkner fetish in check, there are moments where the modernist gobbledygook surges up: particularly in a bit toward the end from Beloved's perspective. We didn't need to get inside her head to realize she was insatiably nuts; Morrison could have trusted that she'd already gotten that across just fine. But these are judgments made in the context of a great book. I'm picking on minor quibbles because Beloved is great enough that it deserves to be picked apart thoroughly.

It is a great book: rewarding, captivating, different, important. It deserves its place. Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford), is an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author 'who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.'

Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best k Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford), is an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author 'who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.' Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best known are her novels,, and, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 2001 she was named one of 'The 30 Most Powerful Women in America' by Ladies' Home Journal.