A little disjointed and lacking in the mathematical deliberate genius of her other books, the prose is more or less divine and the characters well-realised if a little numerous. Pacing a little uneven… still a really good one

Am început cartea asta prin 2022 și abia acum am reușit s-o dau gata. E prima carte de Toni Morrison pe care o citesc. Ca de obicei când vine vorba de autori laureați cu Pulitzer și Nobel, așteptările au fost, inevitabil, destul de ridicate.

De ce doar 3*?
Proza e fenomenală, atât de bună încât suspectez că până și doamna Morrison s-a îndrăgostit atât de tare de ea și i-a fost greu să se oprească la timp. Cartea e despre un sat aflat în mijloc de secol 20, în mijloc de America, ai cărui locuitori sunt exclusiv de culoare.
Și?
Și cam atât.
Ni se spun multe, dar nu ni se arată mai nimic.
Din ce am reușit să îmi dau seama, satul (numit Ruby) e un fel de enclavă în care puritatea rasială a negrilor fondatori și religia sunt mai presus de lege. Evident intervin elemente străine (și albe) care perturbă viața locuitorilor, iar generațiile noi din Ruby tind să aibă un comportament mai puțin ortodox. Oamenii petrec mult timp negociind un fel de armistițiu șubred. Viața merge înainte printre petreceri, scandaluri, amantlâcuri, nașteri și morți. Totul culminează cu un atac armat al unui grup de bărbați asupra unui conac în care locuiesc o suită de femei văzute ca indezirabile.

Sunt enorm de multe personaje, dar n-ajungem să le cunoaștem cu adevărat decât pe câteva. Cam trei sferturi din carte sunt flash-back-uri care conțin alte flash-back-uri, și povestea merge (mostly) înapoi, în loc să meargă înainte, ceea ce-i foarte frustrant, pentru că pare o poveste foarte bună.

Foarte multă flecăreală și divagații interminabile în direcții irelevante. Proza, deși extrem de bună, am simțit-o uneori prea încărcată, iar narațiunea e adesea cicumlocutorie (i.e. folosește enorm de multe cuvinte pentru a transmite ceva simplu). Probabil nici faptul că e partea a treia dintr-o trilogie pe care n-am citit-o (deși povestea nu pare să aibă lacune, e self-contained) nu ajută prea mult.

Reading a novel by Toni Morrison is an act of faith. She demands much from her language and her readers, but when that faith is rewarded, the effect is stunning.

In "Paradise," her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, she has produced a story sure to generate volumes of feminist appraisal. This novel doesn't reach the emotional spikes of her best early work, but in a way it is more articulate than her rich, exhausting "Beloved" (1987). Oprah Winfrey has already tapped it as the next selection for her TV book club.

Reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937), "Paradise" examines the residual effects of racism on the relationships among blacks, rather than between blacks and whites. The book bursts open with the first shot of a grisly assault on a women's commune by the leading citizens of the isolated town of Ruby, Okla.

Between that attack, set in 1976, and the book's conclusion just a few weeks later, Morrison stirs the long history of this mythical all-black community like a witch's brew. Racism serves as the fluid in which all the events take place, warping values and stirring the paranoia that eventually encourages conflicted men to murder the women they believe responsible for their town's decay.

In a series of swirling chapters, each named for a different woman, the author conflates the beautiful and the horrible, the past and the present. Forged in the fires of white racism and black rejection, the founders of Ruby constructed a paradise of stability and safety entirely detached from the rest of the world in 1949.

They built their homes and lives around a giant stone oven "that both nourished them and monumentalized what they had done." Inevitably the oven cools and this monument of their grandfathers' accomplishment grows irrelevant.

Some citizens find the possibility of change exciting, but the town leaders have identities and fortunes riding on the status quo. For them, Ruby is in a state of moral and physical decay, which only a radical rededication to its founding discipline can cure.

Tragically the drive to rid themselves of impurity slowly demonizes the odd group of women living outside the town in an abandoned convent.

Much of the novel tells the sad, sometimes shocking ordeals these young women endured in a misogynist world before finally stumbling upon this room of their own.

If Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" (1982) romanticized the harmonious culture of women in opposition to the contentious world of men, "Paradise" emphasizes that theme in bold italics. But Morrison is less intent on condemning the brutal, self-centered men in her novel than examining the way a history of instability has made these men fear the creative, unorthodox power of women.

At the center of the abandoned convent is the matriarchal Connie, whose doctrine of universal acceptance and unqualified compassion provides solace to women. With a strange mixture of mysticism, witchcraft, and Christianity, Connie serves as a radical alternative to the town fathers' confirmed xenophobia.

The number of characters spun through the desperate history of Ruby poses significant practical and emotional challenges for the reader. The entwined genealogy of the nine founding patriarchs produces a family tree as daunting as a street map of Los Angeles. Though it's sometimes difficult to feel attached to the individuals in this swirl of names, the effect is bewildering, bewitching, and stunning.

http://www.csmonitor.com/1998/0129/01...

In nearly 5 decades of reading fiction I have focused nearly exclusively on character and plot driven books. This book does have characters (many) and there is plot (the town is the plot) but the title of the book is the driving force in this one.

The characters are all driven towards paradise and the plot dances around this idea for the whole book. Right from the beginning I was immersed into the idea of paradise and how it would weave and hint it's way throughout the myriad of storylines.

Ms. Morrison managed to engross me despite me not getting it sometimes. By the end I see how masterful she was at capturing the unique search that humanity has for paradise here on earth and how it sustains us and yet often delivers an actuality with a much darker side than anticipated.

Paradise was not well received upon its publication in 1997—influential critics like Michiko Kakutani, James Wood, and Zoë Heller disparaged it, and even Oprah's audience, instructed to read it for the talk show host's book club, demurred, prompting Oprah to call Morrison to offer the viewers encouragement. One of the studio audience members protested that, confused by the novel's multiple perspectives and non-linear chronology, she was lost on page 19; Oprah asked Morrison what the poor woman was to do; and Morrison's reply—which I have never forgotten—was, "Read page 20." Unsurpassable advice! Profiling Morrison in 2012, Boris Kachka summarizes the case against Paradise:

Both Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Don DeLillo’s Underworld came out in 1997, the year Paradise did. Both addressed historical eras and themes, as Morrison does, but both spoke directly to contemporary anxieties in a way that Paradise did not. Roth and DeLillo were nostalgic for an old American consensus and alarmed at its disintegration, and both used voices resonant with modern paranoia and neurosis. In contrast, Morrison still seemed to be in cross-racial dialogue with the same long-dead ­Modernists on whom she’d written her thesis in the fifties.

This is both right and wrong: Morrison does reject any nostalgia for postwar consensus (whether or not Roth and DeLillo express this nostalgia is another matter), but in so doing she very much speaks to "contemporary anxieties"; the problem is simply that many readers did not like either what she said or how she said it. They are entitled to their opinions about the "what," but once you have allowed such opinions to cloud your view of the "how"—for example, none of the above critics show any awareness that Paradise is often supposed to be funny—then you have lost critical control.

Let's get the "what" out of the way right now: Paradise bears an epigraph from a gnostic gospel narrated by a female deity, and it concludes with the theophany of a black madonna. Searching for a term to describe its apparent ideology, I could come up with nothing more neutral than "New Age." It is a novel that, parodying the Bible, at least entertains the notion that our religious sensibilities must expand to include female divinity. While this view would undoubtedly not interest Philip Roth much, it, along with other dissident religious approaches harking back to gnostic and pagan cults, was undoubtedly reflected in much late-twentieth-century Anglo-American culture. Such views are embarrassing to the liberal intelligentsia because said intelligentsia legitimates itself by its appeal to secular knowledge and often materialist or at least spiritually orthodox intellectual methods, and not without reason. This religious reflex, I believe, and not simply snobbism or sexism, accounts for the critical cringe Nick Salvato writes about with respect to Tori Amos, some of whose songs (see "Marys of the Sea," for instance) could furnish a soundtrack to Paradise.

But I did write above that Paradise "entertains" its religious thesis rather than straightforwardly promoting it. As Boris Kachka notes, Morrison remains faithful to modernism. If modernist writers from Eliot to Woolf shared one thing in common, it was a commitment to putting forth their spiritual intuitions in obsessively fragmented and recursive literary forms, to remind readers to take no single narrative on faith, especially not narratives about faith. This brings us back to Oprah's audience and their problem with Paradise: the novel has no single viewpoint, no clear chronology, no central character, and no reliable perspective. The most basic facts of the narrative remain in doubt by its conclusion. Even the miraculous resurrections with which it seems to end could be explained by a mixture of lucky escape and hallucination. Condemning religious orthodoxy and political ethno-nationalism for their shared demand of unthinking assent, Morrison leaves her readers free to differ with her suggestion that they worship the goddess.

"They shoot the white girl first," the novel famously begins. Its opening chapter is really its penultimate one, narrating the story's climax: in July 1976, nine leading male citizens of the all-black town of Ruby, OK, murder five women who are living in a former convent near the town. This first chapter is maddeningly indirect, as none of the men or women is named; moreover, we see through the men's POV so that the perspective is unreliable from the start ("They are nine, over twice the number of the women" they are seeking, the second paragraph begins; but, as Ron David long ago pointed out, nine is not "over twice" five; these little word problems occur throughout the text, making it impossible to read passively). The opposite of a mystery novel—though something of a mystery play—Paradise tells us who committed the murder in the first chapter and then spends the rest of the book seeking an explanation.

The next eight chapters, each bearing a woman's name, tell the story of how four women on the run assembled in the late 1960s and early 1970s in an embezzler's mansion that became a Catholic convent and Indian boarding school before falling into disuse. In the stories of these women—Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas—Morrison enumerates the threats faced by the poor, the young, or the female, such as poverty, state violence, domestic violence, and sexual predation from the "mundane" (Mavis's marital rape at the hands of her husband) to the more outlandish (the Eyes Wide Shut scenario to which Seneca is subjected by a wealthy woman named Norma Keene Fox). Animal imagery abounds in the women's stories, from aforementioned predator "Keene Fox" to the name of Mavis's mother (Birdie Goodroe), as does classical and mythical allusion (Pallas, Seneca), to signal that this novel asks to be read skeptically as a work of exaggeration, as fable and myth rather than strict social realism. In fact, Morrison parodies realism with aplomb in the Mavis chapter, throwing brand names and other "dirty realist" paraphernalia onto the page with witty abandon—this to trick us into thinking that Mavis is "the white girl" of the first sentence by writing about her in the literary idiom associated with the white lower class. Realism too, Morrison here tells us, is a fable, one whose moral we might distrust. As in her oft-misunderstood statement about Bill Clinton as the first black president, Morrison is making the point that "tropes of blackness" are often simply tropes of poverty, the latter fact deliberately obscured by the powers-that-be to divide the poor.

Those eight chapters also interleave the women's stories with the story of the founding of Ruby, "the one all-black town worth the pain." Summarizing this straightforwardly is no easy feat since the narrative comes piecemeal and from partial perspectives. The basic story is this: a group of very dark-skinned black people who had lived near Louisiana since the mid-eighteenth-century found themselves, at the end of Reconstruction, dismissed or oppressed not only by whites but also by lighter-skinned blacks. This led them to found their own town called Haven in 1890 in Oklahoma, when many all-black towns were created due to the federal government's encouragement of homesteading. When Haven fell into poverty and disrepair in the mid-twentieth-century, the grandchildren of Haven's founders set out again and founded a new town called Ruby.

In the 1960s and '70s, however, Ruby is torn by the social conflicts tearing apart the rest of the country—between men and women, old and young, conservative and radical. These conflicts center on the town's symbolic center, a brick oven that bears the words "the furrow of his brow." The contending ideological forces in the town differ over how this message is the be completed: "Beware the Furrow of His Brow," as the conservative town elders insist, or, in the preferred message of the young radicals, echoing the gnosticism that Morrison evokes with her epigraph, "Be the Furrow of His Brow"? Or even, as one of the town's female citizens thinks, "Be the Furrow of Her Brow." Eventually, the town elders come to see the convent women as the source of their troubles—"not a convent but a coven"—and go on a witch hunt.

Just before they are hunted down, the women consolidate themselves into a quasi-religious order. The old woman Consolata, who was kidnapped from a Rio slum by the nuns and who has lived in the convent ever since, becomes the "new revised Reverend Mother" for a kind of mystery cult wherein the women shave their heads and heal themselves with "loud dreaming" and artistic expression. These scenes provoked a not entirely unpersuasive objection from Zoë Heller in the London Review of Books ("the narrative itself dissolves into Adrienne Rich-ish poetry"), but just as Morrison is unsparing in her portrayal of the racism and colorism that led the men of Ruby to their extremes of intolerance, so her tongue never quite leaves her cheek in her depiction of this New Age religion, which makes the women too otherworldly to function: "Gradually they lost the days." Warned by a female citizen of Ruby that they are about to be attacked, the women "yawned and smiled," a small detail but a crucial one: Morrison, who once rather hair-raisingly wrote that it is "wildly irresponsible" not to inquire about women's complicity in their own rape or abuse, places supreme importance on personal autonomy and the material means of self-reliance. In the last glimpse we get of the convent women, after they have either come back from the dead or are appearing as ghosts to their loved ones, they are on the road and they are armed.

"Come back from the dead": yes, however hedged by modernist technique, Paradise entertains a spiritual notion. It does not entirely dismiss Christianity; Ruby's newest clergyman, Rev. Misner, is sympathetic to the young radicals in the town and muses with eloquence and authority on liberation theology:

See? The execution of this one solitary black man propped up on these two intersecting lines to which he was attached in a parody of human embrace, fastened to two big sticks that were so convenient, so recognizable, so embedded in consciousness as consciousness, being both ordinary and sublime. See? His woolly head alternately rising on his neck and falling toward his chest, the glow of his midnight skin dimmed by dust, streaked by gall, fouled by spit and urine, gone pewter in the hot, dry wind and, finally, as the sun dimmed in shame, as his flesh matched the odd lessening of afternoon light as though it were evening, always sudden in that climate, swallowing him and the other death row felons, and the silhouette of this original sign merged with a false night sky. See how this official murder out of hundreds marked the difference; moved the relationship between God and man from CEO and supplicant to one on one? The cross he held was abstract; the absent body was real, but both combined to pull humans from backstage to the spotlight, from muttering in the wings to the principal role in the story of their lives.

All the same, the definition and defense of female divinity comes into view as the novel's theme. To the men of Ruby, the women they hunt are "[b]odacious black Eves, unredeemed by Mary." But Consolata tells us that "Eve is Mary's mother," and the novel ends, very beautifully, with Consolata in the arms of black madonna, presumably like that worshipped in her native Brazil:

In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf.

There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had: of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.

When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.

In other words, don't divide Eve from Mary, whore from madonna, but adopt a holistic spiritual view capable of embracing flesh and spirit, capable of leading us away from domination based on or justified by difference.

Do not miss, as the early critics did, the ending's emphasis on "endless work" (nor the admission that "down here" is all the paradise we're likely to get). What is the "endless work"? The work of interpretation. Midway through the novel, Ruby's resident writer Patricia, who has been assembling a genealogy, discovers that the men of the town have been maintaining their racial purity through incest in a parody of white racism ("They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him"). Upon finding this out, she burns her family trees—this to suggest that any attempt at purification is to be rejected as an arbitrary imposition. Ruby's elderly midwife, Lone, takes a view of God that is more in keeping with the novel's narrative mode:

Playing blind was to avoid the language God spoke in. He did not thunder instructions or whisper messages into ears. Oh no. He was a liberating God. A teacher who taught you how to learn, to see for yourself. His signs were clear, abundantly so, if you stopped steeping in vanity's sour juice and paid attention to His world.

Read the clues, try to assemble the narrative, but accept in advance your defeat even as you press forward in trying to understand. I accept—there is so much more to say about Paradise. About characters and their names ("His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason"), about twins and doubles. I have merely alluded to Morrison's parody of the Biblical Exodus and its American re-creation by the Puritan settlers, and I have not even mentioned how the novel emphasizes that both Ruby and the convent exist only because the land was cleared by the state of its prior Native American inhabitants. I have not mentioned the novel's love of nature, its endless invention, its food (the hot peppers that grow only at the convent).

Nor have I mentioned Paradise's flaws: it really is too short and feels thinner than it should as a result, with poetic prose often doing duty for narrative and characterization (James Wood was not wrong in this complaint). A novel of this spiritual and political ambition should be as long as The Brothers Karamazov, and I am convinced that Morrison would not bore us at that length.

Well, every narrative is flawed, including that of Paradise, as Paradise itself tells us. Even so, after twenty years we can say that its first critics judged it too hastily or too ideologically. It sits on the shelf without embarrassment next to the most ambitious fictions of its time. Don't take my word for it. Read it and "see for yourself."

I've now read all but one of Toni Morrison's novels ("Love" is the last one), and I have to say that this one might be a contender with "Song of Solomon" for my favorite. In fact, I'd venture so far to suggest that these two could be paired together, they take place at roughly the same time and involve many of the same themes. But "Paradise," coming almost twenty years after "Song," is deeply evocative and profound in ways that "Song" hinted at. It's almost sacrilege for me to say "Paradise" is better, but it's a masterpiece on its own merits that is worthy of the comparison (and yes, I've read "Beloved" and loved it, but not as much as "Song").

The inhabitants of Ruby, Oklahoma, have constructed their town around the myth of the "nine families" that came west, first from slave times and then again from another all-black community in the state, Haven, that proved to be too permissive in their eyes. Theirs is a patriarchal community, where the men control everything and the women have to abide by that. So when a mysterious woman uses an old house outside the town, called "the Convent" because of its former ties to the Catholic Church, as a refuge for women who won't go along with the tenets of the town, the city fathers are threatened. They come to the boiling point one summer day in 1976, and unleash a wave of violence. But it's not what it appears, once the men have finished their deed. In a Toni Morrison novel, it rarely ever is.

The build-up to that moment, and the history of the town and the families within it, is the focus of this long, beautiful novel. You dread the ending because you think you know how it will turn out, but Morrison is crafty. You go into it *thinking* you know the ending, but you would be wrong. There's more at work here than what's on the surface. This is a beautiful, haunting, elegiac work that might very well be among her best (it's certainly the best of her post-"Beloved" work).

The floor creaks under your feet as you step inside the abandoned building. Cobwebs blow in the corners as a soft breeze filters through the broken windows. The musty smell permeates your nose and you realize this place has been abandoned for years. You walk through the rooms, imagining what went on within these walls. You hear the laughter and you can almost detect the hint of seasonings embedded in the walls of the run-down kitchen. But then you hear it... screams.

Toni has a beautiful way with words. Her use of vivid descriptions drew me into this story and held me there.

Paradise takes you into the tiny town of Ruby where you’ll meet a huge host of characters. It was a little overwhelming for me at first. So many characters to meet and learn about, but if you stay focused on the stories you’ll be able to see the characters and place them properly within the story.

Ruby holds a deep history and the town holds onto that history proudly... mostly. The convent though? The men have a problem with the women at the convent and want to rid the area of its presence.

A lot unfolds in this book, but I enjoyed every page!

This book may be decades old, but I recommend picking it up! I was entertained.

TW: Abortion, Murder, Alcohol Abuse, Discrimination/Racism, Death of a Loved One/Child.

There are few authors that know how to break a reader’s heart and mind quite like Toni Morrison. Marking the final entry of her spiritual trilogy that includes Beloved and Jazz, Paradise certainly ends with a bang.

Similar to the previous two novels, Paradise opens with a tragedy. While I do feel Beloved is still the strongest of the three, with each successive novel the characters cast as victims become increasingly complex, which makes for great layered drama and escalating stakes. Furthermore, as with the previous two novels, I do not think we are meant absolve the murderers of their sins. Rather, Morrison crafts narrative to better allow for the understanding of how cycles of suffering perpetuate themselves. Trauma begets trauma; it’s a tale so old it’s downright biblical.

Taking place in Oklahoma during the 1970’s in a very small town called Ruby, we are slowly introduced to a group of troubled women living in a “convent.” In actuality, this is a building that was originally built as an embezzler’s mansion. It was later repurposed to serve as a boarding school of indigenous girls (who were stolen from their actual families to be “civilized” and forget their culture) until the last girls run away. Then, it slowly fell into disarray until it's ruins became a place for troubled people, mainly women, to come for solace and respite.

I find this setting to serve as a greater metaphor for the town of Ruby itself. There are troubled origins for the small black town in a Southern state, but with the strict adherence to religion, settlers try to “reform” their setting into a greater creation. But that said, “A cross was no better than the bearer” (154). People who look to iron out a better life for themselves at the expense or exclusion of “lesser” humans, are by no means truly virtuous. If your goodness rests on looking down on people who have culturally different values than you, then you probably aren’t such a good person, and no amount of religious righteousness is going to assuage those feelings of insecurity.

Each of the women who arrive at the convent are inherently flawed, but all they want is to live safely anew and in peace, and they are able to tentatively build such a space for themselves. While they congregate on the outskirts of town, the people in Ruby become increasingly vexed as their presence threatens the town’s rigid social structure. The women are called “witches” and “bitches,” and with their systematic dehumanization in the eyes of the angry men, so too comes demise and tragedy.

I think that the path that leads to this tension is best summarized with the following conversation:

“’...There was a whole lot of life before slavery. And we ought to know what it is. If we’re going to get rid of the slave mentality that is.’
‘You’re wrong and if that’s your field you are plowing wet. Slavery is our past. Nothing can change that, certainly not Africa.’
‘We live in the world Pat. The whole world. Separating us, isolating us—that’s always been their weapon. Isolation kills generations. It has no future.’
‘You don’t think they love their children?’
Misner stroked his upper lip and heaved a long sigh. ‘I think they love them to death.’” (210)

The past is ever present and lies not just within historic texts, but within the vitality of everyday life. I think that it’s normal to put up walls after experiencing trauma—the body keeps the score after all. Morrison presents this very real response on the societal level, I believe to demonstrate how unprocessed trauma can manifest into something even more tragic. In an effort to avoid being a victim, protective anger can morph a once well-intentioned individual into the villain. Especially if you feel emboldened by your beliefs that you are inherently superior to people who don't fit the mold.

Overall, I found this to be a fascinating meditation on generational trauma and religion. I highly recommend this and pretty much everything else I’ve ever read by Toni Morrison. She’s a genius who lives up to her hype and then some.

I started reading this book because it is Black History Month and I thought it was appropriate to finally, after years of good intention, mark it in some way with my reading. Conveniently, I've been wanting to read something by Toni Morrison, and have often lifted her books from my shelf, examined the cover and read the back, but they've always been put back. I was never brave enough. The weight of reputation around her persona - and around some of her books - is heavy. I went with Paradise for no good reason. The name seemed interesting. And it wasn't Beloved. Beloved frightens me.

It retrospect, Paradise likely should have frightened me just as much. I knew nothing about it aside from what the back told me. I looked at Kirkus Reviews and saw that it was one of the few Morrison books which did not receive a starred review. I didn’t read anything more, butI assumed this book was lighter and simpler than some of her other work, and so I - a mere fan of good fiction and nothing more - might be able to enjoy it.

I finished the book a couple days ago. I haven't yet been able to think about how to write about it all that much. Kind of. I have, actually. The bigger challenge is putting words to those thoughts.

One word is exceptional. This book is exceptional.

Daring. Intelligent. Brilliant. This book is all of these things. It is tender. It is malicious. It is rich and complex. It glides through your mind slowly, and then shifts to a rapid pacing, and then slowly it glides. It is not merely a book but a meal. The best meal of the year - the kind where you savour it because you think that this could be your last meal. It is surprising.

This book is all of these things.

Perhaps it is worth talking about what I was expecting from this novel.

I was expecting to learn something about the African American experience when I read this book. I’m quite certain I did that. It is impossible to read this novel and not recognize how it is deeply centered in the African American experience. Slavery and white-man violence loom heavy over this story. But Morrison is better than that - more intelligent than that. She doesn’t want to essentialize the African American experience - she wants to talk about something much more important. She wants to talk about Race.

I wasn’t expecting to learn something about feminism while I was reading this book. My assumption was that Morrison was a one-trick pony - what a silly assumption, really. No, Morrison is better than a one-trick pony. She is a magician of many years of experience and she has wisdom to impart. And so I learned a great deal about the women’s experience, the need for liberation from patriarchy, the constant threat of violence, the unending disregard by men who wish only to use them.

I wasn’t expecting to learn about religion and its corrupting power. But Morrison seems to understand this quite well. In particular, she shows how religion can encourage schisms and produce conflict and hate. She also understands how it can redeem and inspire greatness, inspire a desire to not be broken off from the rest of the world. Morrison is neither generous nor cruel in her estimation of religion, but she is honest. And that is wonderful.

I wasn’t expecting to learn about the experience of history as a community grows aware of itself. Goodness me, I hope that makes sense. But I’m a historian by trade, and I have studied a great deal of history - a lot of local and cultural histories at that. And I have always thought that the individual stories that produce the collective experience are the screws which lock people together and the bars that keep others out. But Morrison understands the depth of history much better than I do.

I wasn’t expecting to learn about goodness, or wisdom, or evil, though I suppose it is the battle between good and bad that is at the centre of most books and so I shouldn’t be surprised I guess. But Morrison shows that goodness is rare, but to be cherished. And badness is really just the benign development of goodness. Badness is rarely intentional until it becomes rationalized. I think, anyways. We often become bad when we are working to defend ourselves from those things that we think will infect our goodness. I think, anyways.

I think that might be something like what Morrison thinks too.

Anyways. This is a rich, wonderful, elegant book. Beautiful. It comes with my highest recommendation.

this was more than i could've imagined and i think it'll continue sinking in for a while. from a seasonal lens, it had perfect magical realism/enchanting vibes to move into autumn..

i appreciated how i had to be open and absolutely locked in when sitting with it so that each passage could take me on its journey. the contents and the experience of it were emphatically poetic. reading it and listening to ms. morrison's narration simultaneously made it perfect.

it felt like she spoke to something in me that is requesting to either be recognized to me right now or be cultivated or shepherded..

i'm grateful that i read this when i did and grateful i'll be able to continue discovering her. when i end up rereading this someday, sometime in my future, it'll be a pleasure to unravel it further and understand more with new awareness.

A second reading after years and years. Of course, now at my advanced age, I have a much greater appreciation for masterful prose, and is there anyone more masterful than Ms. Toni Morrison? The one thing of course you never forget about this novel, the myriad of characters. I thought years ago, a scorecard was needed, and that is still very much the case. But she brilliantly weaves each into the story while providing the reader with enough of their personal history to keep us engaged. The amazing way they are all tied into Ruby, Oklahoma is profound in its construction. I’m sure I didn’t absorb all that in the first reading and I remember feeling frustrated about the various goings-on. Time and maturity has transformed frustration into fascination. This is really an unparalleled excellent accomplishment.

Not going to leave a rating on this one because I’m DNF-ing at 64%.

I struggled with the writing style of Paradise from the very first chapter and felt completely lost. There were moments of clarity then I would be lost again. Morrison’s writing is intricate, and the story takes time to unfold.

The novel shifts between past and present in a nonlinear fashion, which is both a unique stylistic choice and a challenging one. While I can appreciate the ambition behind this structure, I often found myself struggling to follow what was happening. The constant timeline shifts, combined with a large cast of characters, made it difficult to stay fully engaged. I frequently lost track of who was who, which became a significant barrier to enjoying the book.

Despite these struggles, Paradise is undeniably rich in symbolism and deeply explores themes of gender oppression and the systemic exploitation and abuse of women. These are powerful and important topics, but I personally found that the disjointed storytelling prevented me from fully connecting with them. I ended up deciding not to finish the book at 64% because I simply wasn’t enjoying the experience.

That said, I did read chapter summaries for the remaining sections, and I can see how Morrison’s vision ties together in the end. I just wish the story had been presented in a more linear, accessible way—I think I would have enjoyed it much more if that were the case.

Even though Paradise wasn’t for me, I still admire Morrison’s writing and will absolutely read more of her work. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even give this one another try someday.