Paradise," by the great Toni Morrison was at times quite frustrating to read... The sudden changing, narrative at times made it difficult to follow... And yet at other times the writing is so sublime and hypnotic that it left me speechless. The last fifty pages are a clinic in what it takes to be a great writer.

Steep in African-American history, mysticism, and religious beliefs, it is a novel of breathtaking scope and importance. The town of "Ruby" founded by nine black families escaping the prejudice and lack of opportunity in their previous town of Haven, is a prosperous, industrious, independent town without a police force, liquor stores, or motels. Individuals that are not one-hundred percent black and because of their lighter skin color are looked down upon... And whites are literally considered the enemy and for good reason. They are a community that takes care of its own and they frown upon the younger generation that doesn't necessarily want to follow the rules and have a desire to move away from the "safe haven of Ruby"and see the outside world.

The first step to that outside world is a large house, about ten miles outside the town and it's called "The Convent." Originally owned by bootleggers, catering to the sexual and perverse desires of men and women, and then owned by a convent of Catholic nuns who are brought to the house to set up a school for the Indian children in the surrounding area and with no more money left to support the school and the nuns, it is literally left to one of the orphans, Connie, that the nuns were taking care since she was nine years old. The house becomes a place where all our welcomed, especially downtrodden black women who have been abused in every way imaginable and then some.

Eventually, there is a clash between the sterile, prosperous town of Ruby and the Convent. It is epic and sad and it exposes the darkness beneath the surface of many of the citizens of RUBY.

My experience with Toni Morrison books has not always been easy - I find her style difficult to understand and enjoy. It's like being abandoned into the middle of a busy train station in a foreign city without any understanding of the language or your destination, and suddenly being privy to the thoughts of all those people swirling around you.

I put this book down several times since the first time I started it - and even read 3 or 4 books in between. When I finally got to the last 100 pages - the book picked up momentum and started to make sense.

Unlike the 1000+ page multi-volume fantasy sagas of recent popularity -- the backstory isn't told and retold to keep it fresh in the reader's mind. It's spilled out from one character and then another, tripping around in time, returning to the previous spot years later. The internal voices are so consistent that it's sometimes hard to keep track of whose thoughts or stories are currently on the page.

The words spill out in a rush, a tumble with a momentum that requires a certain pace, like driving on flat washboarded roads -- drive at the wrong pace and the road takes too much of a toll on your suspension, so you either drive at a snail's pace or you put the pedal down and you fly, you surf the washboard and once in a while you drift or take flight on a whoop-de-doo created by a flash floood that wasn't there the last time.

It's like "choose your own adventure" - except you don't get an index to transition to a part that says "We're at a wedding - do you want to go in the house? stay out on the street? look out the window? and with which character? and which stroll down memory lane?" It's complex enough that you could sit down with a notepad to start writing the characters names, stories and chronologies -- as Patricia tried to do with the family trees -- or you just pedal to the metal and hope there are a few more whoop-de-doos to give you a goose before reaching the destination. And, by the way, where is that destination?

The ominous opening is widely debated - "they shoot the white girl first" - but there are so many references to the way that the townfolk of Ruby value the darker skin over lighter skin, that could just as well mean someone who is "tainted" with white blood. We don't really know who is "the white girl" even at the end. We know some of the townspeople are very dark and some are not. We don't really know much about what they look like except with occasional references to height, muscularity and fatness/thinness and eye color: mint green, emerald green, lake blue, chocolate brown, black and amber. They express concern and other emotions.

The townspeople of Ruby have an origin story that is very meaningful to them -- the re-enact it much like the biblical story of Mary & Joseph being turned away from the inn and spending the night in the stable. Turned away from another town by their own people - they in turn reject those who are different, especially the women of the Convent which traditionally took in all comers and provided a safe place for them to heal.

The the isolation of the town of Ruby is threatened by so many things from the outside world: radical ideas being brought into the town by the young people, "greed" for expansion and creating a gas station that would mean paving and connecting to the main roads and increasing visitors to Ruby, and of course the ruinous Convent with the women living independently of men.

Ironic, then -- that the women of Convent are much like the original families of Ruby -- being assaulted and cast out because they are different. They are converted into the original Holy Family by the end of the book - having accepted themselves only to be rejected and terrorized by the fearful men of Ruby who want to keep their town stuck in "Leave it to Beaver" mode forever.

The townswomen who were friends with residents of the Convent express loss at their disappearance. One younger woman envisions them as returning, like Amazon warriors rising Phoenix-like with claws and pointy teeth to tear apart the bubble that envelops the town of Ruby and insulates it from the pulsing, gyrating, throbbing beat of the 70s.

So - what happens in the end? Do the women die? How did they clear out the house in just a few hours so it looked like nobody had lived there recently -- 5 women in a Cadillac? Do they really visit all their family and loved ones for closure, are we being treated with the last dream of a man dying on death row in prison and other dreamers' imagined meetings with the individual Convent refugees? Maybe the women of Convent really did leave their fears and their monsters trapped in paint on the floor of the cellar -- and left to live free and happy lives even before the men of Ruby showed up to battle the idea of what they represented. Is that a spoiler? I may be back in the morning to re-read this (consider this a first draft).

One last thing to note -- I found that while there were so many details that it often blurred my mind and having to decide what to keep and what to toss was a challenge. In the last 100 pages - the descriptions become more lush, more like magical realism - here are a few of my favorite passages:

Lust at first sight (p 228)
... with something like amazement, he'd said, "Your eyes are like mint leaves." Had she answered "And yours are like the beginning of the world" aloud, or were these words confined to her head?

Desolation on the road to solace:
Out here in a red and gold land cut through now and then with black rock or a swatch of green; out here under skies so star-packed it was disgraceful; out here where the wind handled you like a man, women dragged their sorrow up and down the road between Ruby and Convent.

One day a real rain will come...
The first drops were warm and fat, carrying the scent of white loco and cholla from regions north and west. They smashed into gentian, desert trumpets and slid from chicory leaves. Plump and slippery they rolled like mercury beads over the cracked earth between garden rows.

I really, really loved this book. I have never read Morrison before and now I'm wondering what took me so long. I think her writing is just exquisite. This was not an easy book to read, and I am left pondering many things, but where ambiguity usually leaves me feeling dissatisfied, with this book it somehow feels "right", like I am meant to be thinking about this book long after I have finished it.

First of all, let me say that I have an immense respect for Toni Morrison. Besides being a brilliant novelist, she is a very important activist for African American community and a powerful feminist figure. I do believe that her work as an advocate for a interpretation of history that is more fair and truthful in the context of African American situation in USA is very important. Furthermore, I consider Toni Morrison to be an exceptional woman, a remarkable person and a wise soul. She is one of those writers I would love to meet in person.

Prvo, moram naglasiti da imam ogromno poštovanje prema Toni Morrison. Osim što je vrsni romanopisac, ona je i jako važna aktivistica za Afričko-američku zajednicu i snažna feministička figura. Vjerujem da je njen rad kao borca za razumijevanje povijesti koje je poštenije i bliže istini u kontekstu položaja američkih crnaca u SAD-u vrlo važan. Nadalje, smatram da je ona izvanredna žena, nevjerojatna osoba i jako mudra duša. Ona je jedna od onih pisaca koje bi htjela upoznati uživo.

Paradise is my second novel by Toni Morrison. Prior to it, I have read only Beloved. I read Beloved as a student and reading it was such a breath-taking and heart-breaking experience for me. When I started reading Paradise, I was expecting another Beloved but I couldn't have been more wrong. Having read three of her novels so far ( Beloved, Paradise and Jazz) , I can state that every one of them is remarkably unique. I did a mini review of Jazz on my insta account. All of Morrison's novels that I have read so far explore similar subjects, but there is absolutely no repetition in them. Most of all, Morrison’s novels are all superb masterpieces with an amazing set of characters and masterful narrative. All of her novels have great psychological and emotional depth.

Raj je drugi roman ove autorice koji sam pročitala, a prije njega pročitala sam samo Voljenu još dok sam bila student i čitanje toga romana je bilo iskustvo koje je oduzimalo dah i lomilo srce. Kada sam počela čitati Raj, očekivala sam roman sličan prvom, ali nisam se mogla više prevariti. Sada kada sam pročitala tri njena romana ( Voljena, Raj i Jazz), mogu reći da je svaki od njih zadivljujuće jedinstven. Napisala sam par redaka (svojevrsni minijaturni ogled) o Jazz-u na svom instagramu. Prije svega, romani Morrison su vrhunska remekdjela s divnim likovima, vrsnom pričom i velikom psihološkom i emotivnom dubinom.

I know I'm writing in superlatives and singing praises, but I can't help it if this woman is an intellectual giant as well as an incredibly talented writer. In addition, I really feel that she puts her heart and soul in every book she writes. Her language is pure magic. Her language is powerful and enchanting. Her characters are more than credible; they have the tendency of getting deep under our skin. Reading her novels can be quite an intense experience, but I'm not a type to shy away from difficult books, nor have I ever been. I do light reading from time to time, but mainly I see reading as nourishment for my heart and soul.

Svjesna sam da pišem u superlativima i hvalim ju, ali što mogu kada je ova žena intelektualni div kao i nevjerojatno talentirana spisateljica. Uz to, stvarno imam dojam da ulaže srce i dušu u svaki roman koji napiše. Njen jezik je čista magija. Njen jezik je snažan i očaravajući. Njeni likovi su više nego uvjerljivi, oni imaju tu sklonost da vam se uvuku duboko u dušu. Čitanje njenih romana zna biti jako intenzivno iskustvo, ali ja nisam tip koji bježi od teških knjiga, niti sam to ikad bila. Čitam ja i lagano štivo povremeno, ali većinom na čitanje gledam kao na hranu za dušu i srce.

Paradise was published in 1997 and it is often mentioned how it is the first novel Morrison published after winning the Nobel Prize for literature. According to the author itself, Paradise completes a trilogy that includes two of her other novels I was fortunate enough to read, Beloved and Jazz. As for the time period, Paradise is set in modern times (fifties and sixties of the last century) but when it explores different characters, it flashes back and forth in the past that is earlier than that. The story is set in imaginary city Ruby set by black people in an effort to protect themselves against racism and limitations existing for African American people in USA.

Raj je izdan 1997. godine i često se spominje kako je to prvi roman koji je Morrison izdala nakon osvajanja Nobelove nagrade za književnost. Sama autorica kaže da je Raj kraj trilogije koja uključuje i druga dva njena romana koje sam imala sreće pročitati, a to su Voljena i Jazz. Ovaj je roman smješten u moderno vrijeme (pedesete i šezdesete godine prošlog stoljeća, ali ima puno digresija i u raniju prošlost). Priča je smještena u izmišljeni grad Ruby koji je osnovala grupa crnaca u pokušaju da se zaštite od rasizma i ograničenja koje postoje za Afroamerikance u SAD-u.

Ruby can be seen as an attempt of creating Eden, a new and untouched place that will be free from horrors of the past. A lot of interesting questions are being raised as a consequence of the mere act of establishing this town. Can we ever really escape the past? Should we at least try? What the past truly is? All the families and the individuals that make those families, all the people living in this isolated town are very fascinating, as is their community as a whole. Nevertheless, the novel is not only about them. Near the city there is an abandoned catholic convent where a ground of outcast women has found a place for themselves. The tension between the outside world represented by the convent and the enclosed city is the driving force between most of the conflicts taking place in this novel. However, author shows us that it is only the surface. As always in life, the inner conflicts are the true driving force between outside conflicts. Furthermore, the women in the convent are also refugees from the outside world and they have also sought isolation and established a community of their own. Their reasons for escaping the outside world are just as important as those of town’s people. Morrison does a great job of giving us a very personal view into a soul of every woman in that convent. Moreover, she is such a masterful story teller. The way she connects all the stories is simply perfect.


Ruby se može vidjeti kao pokušaj stvaranja Edena, novog i nedirnutog mjesta koje će biti slobodno od strahota prošlosti. Puno je zanimljivih pitanja tu postavljeno kao posljedica samoga čina osnivanja toga grada. Možemo li ikada zaista pobjeći prošlosti? Trebamo li barem pokušati? Što je doista prošlost? Sve obitelji i pojedinci od koji ih sačinjavaju, svi koji žive u ovoj izoliranom gradu su jako zanimljivi, kao što je i njihova cijela zajednice. Međutim, ne radi se tu samo o njima. Blizu grada postoji napušteni katolički samostan gdje je grupa žena odbjeglih od društva pronašla mjesto za sebe. Napetost između vanjskoga svijeta koji predstavlja samostan i zatvorenoga grada je sila pokretnica iza većine sukoba u ovom romanu. Ipak, spisateljica nam pokazuje da je to samo površina. Kao uvijek u životu, unutrašnji sukobi su prava sila pokretnica iza vanjskih sukoba. Nadalje, želje u samostanu su također izbjeglice iz vanjskog svijeta i one su isto tražile izolaciju i osnovalae svoju zajednicu. Njihovi razlozi za bijeg iz vanjskog svijeta su jednako važni kao i oni ljudi iz grada. Morrison je izvrsno uspjela dati nam vrlo osobni pogled u dušu svake od tih žena u samostanu. Nadalje, ona je tako sposobna ispričani priču na pravi način. Način na koji povezuje sve priče je jednostavno savršen.


Paradise, this novel whose opening and last chapter are about a massacre is not about violence. It acknowledges the violence and the conflicts that exist in most of us, but it does so without taking away from us (or the characters in the novel) our humanity. Yes, there is a great deal of violence in this novel, both emotional and physical, both inflicted by one character to another and by many characters to themselves. Nevertheless, it is not about violence. Like all masterpieces it is about many things. For me personally, this novel is about the power of love and survival. This novel opens and closes with bloodshed, but in between lies the explanation and the story that is as profound as life itself. "They shot the white girl first...", says the infamous first paragraph. Morrison herself said she wanted to start off the novel with race but eradicated it by never making it known who the white girl is. What I like most about the novel is how it focuses on women characters. I even felt that just reading this novel empowered me as women. I was especially fascinated by the women living in the convent, by their weaknesses and strengths. This group of dysfunctional women is not idealized in any way, they are full of flaws and some of them are struggling with a mental illness but their connection to one another and their inner strength makes them almost mystical figures.

Raj, taj roman čije prvo i zadnje poglavlje opisuje masakr, pa tako roman počinje i završava masakrom nije roman o nasilju. On priznaje nasilje i sukobe koji postoje u svakom od nas, ali to čini bez da nam ( ili likovima u romanu) oduzme ljudskost. Da, ima dosta nasilja u ovom romanu, emotivnoga i fizičkoga, nasilja koje čine likovi jedni drugima ili mnogi od njih i sami sebi. Ipak, ovaj roman nije o nasilju. Kao i sva remek djela, on je puno toga. Za mene osobno, ovaj roman je o snazi ljubavi i preživljavanju. Ovaj roman počinje i završava krvoprolićem, ali između leži objašnjenje i priča koja je duboka kao sam život. "Prvo su upucali bjelkinju.....", kaže paragraf koji otvara ovaj roman. Morrison je sama rekla da je htjela započeti roman rasom, ali onda to izbrisati tako da se ne zna koji je lik zapravo bjelkinja. Ono što mi se najviše sviđa kod ovog romana je usmjerenje na ženske likove. Osjećam da me samo čitanje ovoga romana osnažilo kao ženu. Posebno su me opčinili likovi žena u samostanu, njihove slabosti i snage. Ova grupa disfukcionalnih žena prikazana je bez uljepšavanja, pune su mana, a neke pate i od psihičkih bolesti, ali njihova međusobna povezanost i njihova unutrašnja snaga ih čini skoro mističnim figurama.

With an opening paragraph like this, 300 pages is a long time to wait for a finale.

They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.

The brilliance is here in Morrison’s work...

Safer in the army than in Chicago, where Easter wanted to go. Safer than Birmingham, than Montgomery, Selma, than Watts. Safer than Money, Mississippi, in 1955 and Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963. Safer than Newark, Detroit, Washington, D.C. She had thought war was safer than any city in the United States.

The light falling from the April sky was a gift.

Above the altar, high into its clean, clear space, hung a three-foot oak cross. Uncluttered. Unencumbered. No gold competed with its perfection or troubled its poise. No writhe or swoon of the body of Christ bloated its lyric thunder.

Six yellow apples, wrinkled from winter storage, are cored and floating in water. Raisins are heating in a saucepan of wine. Consolata fills the hollow of each apple with a creamy mixture of egg yolks, honey, pecans and butter, to which she adds, one by one, the wine-swollen raisins. She pours the flavored wine into a pan and plops the apples down in. The sweet, warm fluid moves.

But there was no pity here. Here, when the men spoke of the ruination that was upon them—how Ruby was changing in intolerable ways—they did not think to fix it by extending a hand in fellowship or love. They mapped defense instead and honed evidence for its need, till each piece fit an already polished groove. (I’m thinking what lies underneath our defense budget.)

One thing in particular she had quickly understood: the only voice not singing belonged to the one conducting the choir.

Grief plus blame was a heady brew.

And then here: a final paragraph to relate to the opening one.

A backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them.

Once again, Toni Morrison brings her eviscerating scalpel to the subject of racism. But here she also puts misogyny under the microscope: Men (black or white) and power. The book comes together incisively, with all the morbid suffering beauty of a Toni Morrison novel. To me it doesn’t hang together like most of her novels, therefore, the reading is a bit more work. However, the clarity and the emotional impact are the same.

3.5 stars, it was good. However the characters seem quite disjointed.

Once I put down this book, I didn't read anything else the rest of the day. Being Sunday, its when I read the most but instead I chose to go out; out of my room, my home, my society and went to a Japanese film festival to purge my mind of the violence that was Paradise. Personally I have a detached feeling towards the media that I consume and its very advantageous trait to have while reading emotionally challenging books. But the acts of violence, apathy in this book was a bit too much for me to handle. Its the violence for the sake of violence using a flimsy excuse.

What a book.

3.5, even. I enjoyed the plot, the writing, and the messages, but I think it just wasn't for me, structurally speaking. I normally don't mind non-linear storytelling and there's an element of fun in puzzling things together but this was made unnecessarily difficult by the countless amounts of unnamed POVs, leaving readers not just to figure out what was happening when and where, but also who was doing what. I think there is room for passages or even entire books with minimal plot, but there's also a balance to be struck between telling a story and conveying your own personal philosophy and the way in which this balance was struck in Paradise just wasn't to my tastes. Will definitely be giving Toni Morrison's work another try though.

I didn't write my review of this right away, as I was still trying to decide exactly how I felt about this book. It was very difficult to read and about half way through, I went online to read other readers' takes on it.

Either people loved it or they hated it. If they loved it, they had read it two or three times and read/watched numerous interviews with the author as she explained her themes, just so they could understand it. I am willing to explore deeper meanings in a book, but it has to be entertaining on the surface and this just isn't. It was at times pretentious, and always elusive. Anything that might have actually made the story interesting was only hinted at and never explained fully.

The first sentence in the book is "They shot the white woman first." In a novel that was all about skin color, I think it is indiciative of the whole style that the reader was left to figure out for themselves which woman was white, until the very last couple of pages.

Wanted to finish it and out of pure stubborness, did.

Wanted to hate it. Didn't. Wanted to love it. Didn't.

I have read all of Toni Morrison’s novels over the years but am rereading them. I first read Paradise in 2001! As with all the rereads I am doing, this was rewarding and gave me a deeper understanding. I have concluded that when I first read these novels I was lacking in my knowledge of Black lives and my ability to assimilate literary fiction.

Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, the first Black woman to win. Paradise was the novel she published after winning the prize. It made the top ten on the bestseller list that year. The last sentence I wrote in my reading log after finishing the book this time: “She goes everywhere, manipulating many stories, characters and issues like a top orchestra conductor and composer.” Yes, that is what she did!

I was quite confused on my first reading of this novel. This time I paid more attention and found an immensely helpful character list on Wikipedia. Ruby is an all-black town in Oklahoma, founded by the sons of a man who had created an earlier all-black town called Haven. The history of these towns is revealed gradually throughout the novel. It is a history of the Reconstruction era, post-Civil War, when the emancipated slaves had a time of freedom until those freedoms were again severely restricted. It is now 1976 and the grandchildren of the original founders are questioning everything, as young people do. Turmoil reigns amid the rigid hierarchies and iron control of the town’s leaders.

Then there is the Convent: another kind of haven for women who have had traumatic lives and are being protected by Connie, an adoptee of its former Mother Superior. The four young women whom Connie has accepted there are wild, broken, sometimes hysterical and fall into a mystical kind of coven. Of course, the male leaders of Ruby decide they must be eliminated.

The novel opens with a gruesomely violent scene and concludes with the outcome of that violence. All the rest is revealed throughout the story. It is not a hopeful tale because even today, despite some more progress having been made concerning racism in America, Black lives are still at risk every day. As James Baldwin made clear, racism produces a kind of madness in both the discriminated against and the discriminator. This kind of oppression can be found around the world in every land where humans have perpetrated conquest, colonialism, and genocide.

Is it beneficial to confront, to study, to understand this madness? I suppose that depends on who you ask, who can find hope in an increased understanding of the human condition. I am not sure that even Toni Morrison found hope, but she certainly did add to the exposition of our human condition. She also paved the way for many Black voices in American literature to come into print. Apparently, she had strong religious beliefs and I hope that means she is now a saint.

I'll confess that, though I'm an adoring Morrison fan, I've avoided three novels (this one, Jazz, Tar Baby) because of the less-than-stellar things I've heard about them. (Not to mention I found Love tedious.) Well, I went in as a skeptic and I came out a believer.

The first sentence, quoted again and again here on GR, really deserves another show: "They shot the white girl first." It's so perfect, so emblematic of Morrison's ability to write both elegant, haunting, ornate sentences, and--just as skillfully--these jarring, monstrous and clipped phrases that seem so easily comprehensible, but end up being so much more. Not only is it a fantastic opening to a fantastic opening chapter (the scene, revisited at the end of the novel, is horrifying and thrilling at once), it also forces the reader into an uncomfortable whodunnit exercise of trying to figure out which one is the "white" one for the rest of the novel (an ultimately futile exercise, which makes it worthwhile rather than trite, and very fitting for Morrison's oeuvre). The writing, of course, is on the whole impeccable. I suppose I was more engrossed with certain "parts" of the novel than others (Ruby, Mavis, Lone, Consolata), but Morrison really only has a bad sentence once in a blue moon.

Everything that Morrison does well is here: trauma, gendered violence, faith, genealogy, (critiques of) history, racism, racialization (and how we map it onto bodies--this really peaks in the Patricia section), &co&co. Unlike Love, though, this didn't strike me as a novel that sounded like some hack trying to write a Morrison novel. It genuinely worked through these nuanced topics in ways that I don't think her other novels have (not for better or worse, just differently). I'm frankly still a bit stunned by it. I think I'll have to return to this review. It's no Beloved or Sula, but then--what is? Just a phenomenal story, an experimental way of handling it, and a beautiful way of telling behind it all.

Four or 3.5 stars in relation to other Toni Morrison books I’ve read (Beloved, The Bluest Eye), but still a five in general.

A kaleidoscopic narrative of an all-black town in Oklahoma, set in the 70s. Beautiful explorations of violence, religion, magic, misogyny, community and much else. It is not an easy read. At times, the multi-character perspective was difficult to follow, but the rhythmic, dreamlike writing soon makes this disorientation not feel important. Morrison’s ability to be in so many characters’ heads is masterful. My only issue was the ending. Without spoilers, I wanted the last ten pages either not to be there or to be different, somehow. But, I very much enjoyed it and always feel enriched by her writing.

Also — she wins at chapter openings:

“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.”

“The neighbors seemed pleased when the babies smothered. Probably because the mint green Cadillac in which they died had annoyed them for some time.”

It was like reading an alien language. I hated the book and didn't get it. I would have to reread it to give a reasonable review.