nao sei se eu demorei pra terminar pq nao gostei, ou se nao gostei pq demorei pra terminar.

a escrita da toni morrisson nao me cativou muito, o enredo é bom mas a forma com que é escrito não é a minha preferida. tem muitos personagens com nomes estadunidenses e isso me confundia um pouco. também torço um pouco o nariz pra coisas produzidas nos EUA, o que pode ter influenciado minha visão do livro.

dá pra sentir que é bom mas a leitura nao foi prazerosa pra mim.

There’s a narrative device that annoys me. It’s when a writer starts at the climax and then goes back to the beginning to show the reader how the characters got there. I’m not saying it’s bad storytelling, just that I don’t like it.

Toni Morrison uses it in this book and it’s part of the reason I haven’t rated this one as highly as the first two books in this trilogy (it’s a very loose trilogy; you could read any of them as a standalone novel). The other reason is that she turns up the god-botheriness (it is so a word) to eleven, which isn’t to my tastes.

Other than that, this is another really good Toni Morrison book. Fans won’t be disappointed.

This is one of those books that is probably a masterpiece, but to which I could not find the right access.

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

These first two sentences are - I think - a strong entry into a novel. Together with the blurb they have convinced me to buy the book. The crime is described in the first chapter, and the rest deals not so much with the question who committed it, but why. Why did the nine men from the small town of Ruby decide to savage those women in the out-of-town convent? What are their motives?

To answer these questions Toni Morrison takes a big swing. Too big for my taste. The life history of both the victims, and, above all, the history of the nine founding families is rolled up; families to which the perpetrators belong. Many, very many, too many, characters populate the pages of this book. I had to re-read some parts several times, and tried to keep a record of the family trees but had to give up at some point. In the end I concentrated on only a few people that I liked for one reason or another. The rest I simply took for granted.

Self-righteousness and bigotry are probably central themes of this story. That those two non-virtues are so prevalent in the small town of Ruby in rural Oklahoma, is, in my opinion, not surprising, considering the facts that this town neither has a gas station, nor bus traffic to other towns, but three churches. Outsiders are not welcomed at all. One would think this must be a town of "White Trash" people who decided to eliminate some of those outsiders. It's not. Ruby is an all-black town. My take on this? Hatred knows no distinctions of race, creed or color. There are as many white devils in the world as there are black angels and vice versa. I just wish this book had been 100 pages shorter with only half as many people to think about.

2⅔ of 5 stars.

n  n
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The last 4 Chapters were beautifully breathtaking. The build up to that point was complex and at times hard to follow. Toni Morrison writes so eloquently it is just nice to read the sentences one after another but to not lose the thread in those well structured sentences can be difficult

Maybe Morrison's most overtly confusing novel, a work in the lineage of Faulkner that seeks to fracture culturally constructed notions of race, time, place, and history into shards of glass that reflecting back that which we would rather not see. It's "Recitatif" reshaped into a narrative of greater multiplicity, a form which otherwise would proclaim some sort of objectivity through the helping hand of a perspectival pile on, yet Morrison allows no such thing. The omniscient (though ever so close) third-person narrator depicts the distinctions of various individual's subjectivities while bridging these consciousnesses via repeated images/phrases and reoccurring mythologies. The town of Ruby presents itself as a paradise for dark-skinned descendants of freed slaves, but Morrison's conception of paradise relies on exclusion, thus leading to the multilayered scapegoating of the Convent women who are the victims of violence from the iconic first sentence. There is so much historical and personal pain, so much history weighing heavy, so much to love and hate, so much to muddy the soul that the men (and many of the women) judge and judge and judge until their souls develop a casing of hardened tar that only violence can crack open. There are sequences and images I just feel I will not forget.

And I think Michiko Kakutani's contemporaneous panning of the novel proves to be at odds with the novel's actual goals. The didacticism Kakutani dislikes feels to me a byproduct of a novel situating itself during the Civil Rights movement. Morrison pseudo-sloganeers. But so much else goes on that I feel like simple conclusions are implausible. The conflict at play here is not simply colorist and misogynistic and black exclusivity emulating white racism, but a reflection on our inability to self-actualize, to never want to process what's within, to desire to singe another's flesh rather than allow the flame within us to peter out. Among other things. There are many other things in this novel. A packed novel of place.

" They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the convent, but there is time, and the day has just begun. They are nine. Over twice the number of the women, they are obliged to stampede or kill, and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement--rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, mace, and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns."- Toni Morrison, Paradise

In my opinion Paradise is one of the most complex books Morrison has written, and possibly the one I've had the most trouble reviewing. This is my second reading of it and I feel I need at least a couple more before I truly get it; I’m happy with what I gleaned from it this time around, but to put it all down in words is still difficult.

Paradise tells the story of the black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, founded by former slaves who find themselves rejected both by white people but also by lighter-skinned black people ("Us free like them; was slave like them. What for this difference?"). Ruby was created to insulate the townspeople (as much as possible) from Out There, the outside world:

"Out There where your children were sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be annulled..."

Since reading Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, I've been curious about the founding of black towns.Through this fictionalized account I was able to think more about how black towns were formed (the "why" is easy enough to guess at), but it's also clear to see that towns like these, often founded with high hopes, are definitely not utopian. Ruby ends up becoming quite insular and patriarchal, and full of strife not only due to inter-generational quarreling, but also because of the women in the Convent. Throughout the book independent women, such as the women living in the Convent, are met with ridicule, scorn, hatred, and fear. The Convent is a haven, a refuge for women who have experienced trauma and hardships in their lives, and a place where women are enterprising and self-sufficient. The Convent women actually benefit the town, but all that labour and kindness is taken for granted and unappreciated in the end. It's practically a witch-hunt where strong, independent women are the scapegoats when things aren't going well:

"So, Lone thought, the fangs and the tail are somewhere else. Out yonder all slithery in a house full of women. Not women locked safely away from men; but worse, women who chose themselves for company, which is to say not a convent but a coven."

Morrison is one of the best at illuminating different aspects of African-American history with human stories. This always helps me appreciate the history even more and also think of the people involved, not just the bare facts and figures that we are often fed when we are taught history, so much so that we often feel removed from it. Definitely recommended for those who enjoy challenging reads!

sorry i know morrison is a genius but i cannot make peace with that ending, 4 stars otherwise

I think I'd need to read this about ten more times to get all the details and properly appreciate each character. Stunning.

Another Morrison read and as ever I’m in awe of her rich prose, nuanced characters and multilayered narrative. It’s the 1970s, and follows many characters during their time in the fictional, all-black town of Ruby as well as their lives before, and is a beautiful blend of classic storytelling and magic. I loved that aspect of Beloved and Morrison wields her subtle use of magical realism and mysticism just as artfully in Paradise.
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The opening line is so powerful, setting up the shocking events to unfold later on, and you spend much of the book on edge, waiting for the inevitable violence to erupt as the utopian town takes a dark turn. As usual, heavy themes are deftly tackled such as the fear of integration and change, tension between older and younger generations, and hierarchies within an all-black town, where the lighter skinned ‘mixed’ residents are looked down upon by the original, ‘8-rock’ families.
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There are a LOT of characters in this novel, all of which have a variety of different nicknames, so it gets a bit confusing at times (I learned the hard way, it’s not really a book to pick up and put down on a commute), but if you stick with it, the pay off is worth it. A few family trees might have been useful though! But even with so many characters to keep track of, each one is as layered as the next and I could have read full-sized novels on many of them.
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The women in this book are particularly compelling, as is the almost character-esque house, The Convent, which holds a dark glamour over the rest of the town, sitting way out into the country, attracting the women of the town like moths to flame...
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One of those books that just screams for a reread further down the line to catch all those things you didn’t on your first run.

Paradise is my seventh Toni Morrison novel, and sadly my least favorite. It was her first novel published after earning the Nobel; seems she decided to write the kind of book that Nobel laureates write, with a leaning toward Faulkner (who she studied), a solid dose of her contemporary, Garcia Marquez, and resonating with a the tone of biblical history, yet indisputably her own thing. Paradise is admirable, thoughtful, wide-ranging: it begins by addressing race, a group of dark-skinned African-Americans found their own town after being shunned by lighter-skinned blacks. But before the reader knows it, Morrison has swerved into studying women's roles and patriarchy in this blacks-only town, and is asking why paradise has to be founded on exclusion (food for thought). This is a serious book, as she's known for, and for me the first two-thirds was a long slow slog. Too much history, too many characters that seemed like an author's creation, and too many plot points that had no buy in. I didn't see that Morrison wanted me to care. The last few chapters almost redeemed what came before, but by then I was just ready for the book to be over. Despite all my struggles with Paradise, as one certainly does with writers like Faulkner or Pynchon, I'm unsure that it detracts from her position as the greatest American writer of our lifetime.

Somewhat weird, somewhat creepy, a mansion located near a town called Ruby, that is occupied by a group of women who are different but to some men living in Ruby appear to be a threat to them. I found it so strange I wanted to just dnf it but kept putting it down and picking it up again. Without a doubt the author writes a very creative and enthralling work of literature. Strange as it is I ended up for the most part thinking it a well written story.

I could never get into the flow of Paradise for long. The narrative was jaggedly broken up in time and told from dozens perspectives. A crowd of intricately (or barely) related characters confused me. Morrison was introducing new characters even in the very last pages. I needed a spread sheet to understand who everyone was: tiresome.

Plus what exactly happened? Morrison was deeply vague but hinted at miraculous happenings. The sexy balladry baffled me.

Some compelling characters and the all black Oklahoma town kept this novel bearable, along with the exploration of intriguing themes: men oppressing women, greed, the young vs elders, the abused becoming the abuser. Unfortunately, the witchy women trope reared its ugly head. Overall an admirable, experimental work, making an extremely demanding read I wouldn’t recommend for most readers.