n  

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

n
Devastating, distressing, a book to be read with care because the stories it tells are harrowing and terrible.

I could write about Morrison's exemplary use of motifs - milk, trees - that weave so masterfully through the narrative, or her imagination and lyricism even when writing of horrors, or the intensity and power of this story that gets right under the skin... but none of those things really does justice to the experience that is this book.

Flawless in execution, and pitch-perfect in offering hopes of healing without ever eliding the terrible ghosts of slavery's legacies.

n  the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home. 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. n

I’m accustomed to hear different stories. I’m accustomed to live around different lives. I’m more used to beauty than ugliness. I’m more used to songs than silence. I’m more used to satiety than starvation. I’m more used to justice than unfairness. I’m more used to freedom than servitude. I’m more used to love than hate. I’m more used to living my life on my own terms. It was not like that. I used to include ‘us’ in my worldly and naïve notions when my infantile imagination was not maligned by any negativity and everything used to be just and equal for everyone. Not anymore. It was never like that. As the years added up to my age, the real picture started unveiling itself step by step. Now you better look at me. Now you should know my name. Now you’re ready to feel my pain. It never demanded sympathy or tried to make me feel guilty. It simply asked for recognition and I’m still in the process of recognizing. It’s a long road ahead where every milestone is a tantamount to a tombstone of unfortunates around the world. Some of them are blessed with names, some are nameless. Some lived to tell their stories; some passed their stories to others. Some left little traces of their existence while others left without a trace. Some waited to be loved and some died because they were loved.

Beloved.

A book like Beloved doesn’t come across as a part of a riveting art or just another attempt at achieving something different in novel writing. These things are secondary. It is first and foremost a tight slap on the face of humanity. A testimony of atrocities for those lives that never had anything easy going for them. It’s all being said, written and witnessed before but what a shame that things continue to remain bleak. In matters of such bleakness, we need such books to extract reminiscences of a past which is not a part of our memories, to see something which is not within our sight and to know the value of things we have received without paying any price.

n  "I'm free, you know."n

No golden cages or endearing masters who sing songs and ask you to imitate them or make you dance on the tunes coming out of their instruments. Not in the least. Walking on the bed of red hot coals is more like it. Swimming in the ocean of lava can be another analogy. The irony lies in the fact that there exists humans who endured all this rather than dying a fast death and when they were offered cold water to nurse their wounds, they must have realized that the time has probably come to proclaim – I’m Free. Toni Morrison has created this novel around this proclamation. She’s a smart writer. She knows how to pass on these stories. The stories of Sethe, Denver, Baby Suggs, Paul D, Sixo and Beloved. She weaves their lives in slow, piercing strides and by the time reader takes in the gravity of her words, it’s too late to escape.

Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off-she could never explain. Because the truth was simple, not a long drawn-out record of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells.

Morisson takes up this form of narration in Beloved. She moves in circle and every circle is marked with a center, a deep abyss of human cruelties and extent of human suffering. The more deep you see the more darkness you’ll receive. The language of characters is marked by the amount of pain they have tied around their chest and in the gaps of their pauses; one can notice the breaths they have saved for a life when they’ll be united with their 'self'. Meanwhile, their lives present itself as nothing but a despicable definition of slavery. The scars on their backs are beautified by calling them Chokecherry Trees. The milk from a mother’s breast is preserved to feed her children but when her guards are down, she is violated and forced to feed the demonic mouths with mossy teeth. And when the nature is defied, supernatural is required to step in. With metaphors, symbolism, pain, death and resurrection, Beloved urges us to hear her silent tears. Her story deserves to be passed on.

With Love.

Beloved.

...being so in love with the look of the world, putting up with anything and everything, just to stay alive in a place where a moon he had no right to was nevertheless there. Loving small and in secret.

An absolutely incredible read!!!

124 — The House of the Baby Ghost


Who was Margaret Garner?

Ms. Garner was a former slave, who murdered one of her kids, and tried the very same procedure with the remaining ones.
After a failed escape, Margaret Garner was determined to end not even her own life, but also the ones of her beloved children.
Yes!... She was desperate enough to commit infanticide, suicide, whatever ... embracing death as an open gate to freedom!...

Ms. Garner showed no signs of insanity nor repentance.
Those hedious acts seemed the right thing to do in that particular, cruel, reality picture!

This real life event has been the seed to Beloved and it's probably the only truth you will find there. That, and ... needless to say, all the shocking slavery memories and scars!...

Toni Morrison found the real Margaret Garner fascinating and interesting enough to create a whole story about her:
She gave her thoughts, relatives, acquaintances, and... a house to live — 124, a home fiercely haunted by  the missing 3, who was entitled to an afterlife revenge!
124 was reminding the murderess (if I may say so?!) mother that she once had 4 kids instead of 3!


When I think about this infanticide, all I can say is ... maybe in this particular situation, the line between right and wrong, turned out so thin, that it came about invisible!
Let life be the judge!!!

"Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
the corpse of mercy rots with him,
rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.

But, oh, the living look at you
with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,
whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark
to strike you like a leper’s claw.

You cannot stare that hatred down
or chain the fear that stalks the watches
and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;
cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,
the timeless will." - Middle Passage by Robert Hayden


This book lives up to its reputation. I have known about this book virtually my whole life, long before I thought to be a reader. This book and its author was very celebrated when I was born and the copy I was reading from is from a family member's. For this reason I feel like I am the last person in my family to read this book and I know I am among the last people on Goodreads to read this book. It is because of that, I will not spend this review talking a lot about the plot of the book or my feelings on the author like I did in my review of Song Of Solomon, but I want to talk about the language of the book. This seems to be something that is a specific trademark of Toni Morrison's work of this time.

Because of how famous this book is, I knew the whole plot of it years before I decided to read it. Because of its fame, many people have already discussed this book on the same grounds, "slavery is bad and makes everyone sad." I cannot hope to tread any better than my fellow Goodreads reviewers, but will touch a little bit on it here. I liked the use of memory in this novel (similar to the use of time-travel in Song of Solomon). I liked how what was presently happening could be followed with a past memory. This is the crux of Beloved herself. The question of what she literally is, is secondary to what she represents which is the living(?) manifestation of memory. She seems to have the supernatural ability to bring out the repressed-memories of anyone she comes in contact with. The fact that she is surrounded by people who were formerly en-slaved means that these are some profoundly horrifying memories. The end of the book seems to all but confirm this.

What I really liked about this book was the use of language. I brought it up in my review of Song of Solomon, but it is done very well here as well. Morrison has a very clear command at the written interpretation of African-American Vernacular English. AAVE is something that non-African-Americans think they know, but simply cannot reinterpret. It is even harder to reproduce AAVE in the written word (which even certain black writers have a hard time writing-down). When reading the "dialect" poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar compared to the actual transcripts of folk songs or prose from the formerly enslaved it is clear that being able to write AAVE is a special skill. Toni Morrison masters it throughout this novel and she gets the time-period slang correct. Many people outside the African-American community confuse AAVE and black slang. AAVE contains certain grammar rules that have remained constant over approximately the last 200 years more or less. Slang is vocabulary that can change every year. It takes a skilled writer who can know this and demonstrate it correctly. This is one thing I continually appreciate about Morrison.

The use of southern gothic in the mid-west is another big theme here. If one doubts the influence of Faulkner on her writing, the latter-half of this book would more than convince. Of course the main literary influence is magical realism. The horrific absurdities of slavery and the supernatural occurrences that plague the ex-slaves during Reconstruction, are given the magical-realist treatment you expect to see in a Gabriel García Márquez book. It serves the narrative well, even when you started to know Morrison was playing-up the trope (during the chapters looking into the mental state of the characters).

I really liked and appreciate what this book did for the literary-canon. Because of time, I was not as devastated by it as the people who first read this book three years before I was born, but I understand its impact. I will still probably have a higher regard for Song of Solomon, but that is not to say that I do not realize why this book is the centerpiece of Ms. Morrison's work.

When I first started reading Beloved I genuinely thought I'd never get through it. I had heard that the book deals with a lot of heavy subjects like slavery, rape, child death and bestiality. And I knew from prior readings of Morrison's work that her novels are never easy. You cannot digest them quickly. Morrison's words will sit with you for a while, there's a lot to chew on. But to my great surprise Beloved wasn't as "bad" as I thought it would be. I actually got through it; fell in love with Sethe and the realities that Morrison created within the narrative.

In the introduction, Morrison writes that she wanted to explore what "being free" could possibly mean to (Black) women. In doing so, Morrison not only explored female freedom but also the complexities of female desire that go along with it, the burden of motherhood and how (generational) trauma manifests itself in manifold ways.

n  I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.n  
n  ROMANS 9:25n

Beloved is a special story. As it opens, Sethe, a Black woman in her late thirties, is living with her 18-year-old daughter, Denver, in a house that the neighbours avoid because it is haunted: "124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims."

The time is the early 1870s, right after the first wrenching dislocations of the Civil War and its aftermath. Sethe and Denver live in an uneasy truce with the ghost until the arrival of Paul D, one of Sethe's fellow workers on her former plantation in Kentucky. Paul exorcises the ghost, only for a mysterious female stranger to show up in her stead. She is 20 years old and strangely unmarked – she has no lines in her palms, for example, and her feet and clothing show no signs of hard travelling. She calls herself "Beloved ", and Sethe and Denver are happy to take her in.

Sethe, Denver, Paul D and every other character in the novel live simultaneously in their present and in their history – the chapters of the novel alternate between the two stories: that of the growing contest between Sethe and Beloved; and that of Sethe's life on the plantation, her escape, and the traumatic events that followed her crossing of the Ohio River and her appearance at the home of her mother-inlaw, Baby Suggs. A crucial, revealing and in some ways impossible to assimilate event takes place about halfway through the novel – Sethe's former enslaver shows up with some officers to recapture the escapees, and Sethe attempts to kill her children. The two boys and the newborn survive, but she succeeds in slitting the throat of the two-year-old.

n  What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.n

Everyone is astonished and appalled by this turn of events (which Morrison discovered in an old newspaper account of the period). Baby Suggs is never the same again; Sethe is shunned by her fellow citizens; Denver grows up isolated and suspicious. Morrison is careful, though, to indicate that while this is a pivotal event in the lives of everyone, it is not the climax, or the worst thing to have happened to Sethe and her loved ones.

The climax of the historical narrative is, in fact, the night of the escape, when several of the escapees were hanged and mutilated, while the present-time narrative builds to Denver's decision to separate herself from what is apparently a life-and-death struggle between Sethe and Beloved, and to go out and find work and friends that will help her save herself.

One of the reasons Beloved is a great novel is that it is equally full of sensations and of meaning. Morrison knows exactly what she wants to do and how to do it, and she exploits every aspect of her subject. The characters are complex. Both stories are dramatic but in contrasting ways, and the past and the present constantly modify each other. Neither half of the novel suffers by contrast to the other.

Especially worth noting is Morrison's style, which is graphic, evocative and unwhite without veering toward dialect. Even though Morrison rejects realism, using a heightened diction and a lyrical narrative method returning again and again to particular images and events and adding to them so they are more and more fully described, the reader never doubts the reality of what Morrison reports.

Just as Sethe recognises Beloved toward the end of the novel, and knows at once that she has known all along who she is, the reader is shocked at the sufferings of the Black characters and the brutality of the whites, but knows at once that every torture and cruelty is not only plausible but also representative of many other horrors that go unmentioned in the novel and have gone unmentioned in American history.

Morrison depicts every incident with such concrete expressiveness that the reader takes it in willingly as truth. She is also entirely matter-of-fact in her assertions - equally so about the presence and identity of the ghost as about the character flaws of the whites. No aspect of the novel is presented as speculation, and so to read on, the reader suspends disbelief.

n  “Sethe, if I’m here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, ’cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you ’fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I’ll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. […] We can make a life, girl. A life.”n

Amongst many other things, Beloved is also a love story. And Sethe and Paul D are one of my favorite literary characters. Throughout the novel Sethe is scared of letting Paul D into her heart because "maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said." Life had let her down too many times to truly trust somebody and let herself fall. Over the course of the book Sethe reclaims her own worth, one that's separate from her children and her role as a mother, and therefore also reclaims her ability to love a man. Seeing their relationship blossom at the end and Paul D reassuring her of her own value actually made me cry.

n  “She left me.”
“Aw, girl. Don’t cry.”
“She was my best thing.”
[…]
“Sethe,” he says, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of
tomorrow.”
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.
“Me? Me?”n

Beloved is one of the few American novels that take every natural element of the novel form and exploit it thoroughly, but in balance with all the other elements. The result is that it is dense but not long, dramatic but not melodramatic, particular and universal, shocking but reassuring, new but at the same time closely connected to the tradition of the novel, and likely to mould or change a reader's sense of the world.

As Morrison claims in her introduction, to me Beloved is a novel about freedom. Therefore, I want to share several quotes with you that show the journey that the characters, especially the main character Sethe, go on to accept that freedom for themselves:

"Of the two hard things—standing on her feet till she dropped or leaving her last and probably only living child—she chose the hard thing that made him happy, and never put to him the question she put to herself: What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped 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."

"Paul D convinced me there was a world out there and that I could live in it. Should have known better. Did know better. Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be."

"Sethe recalled Paul D’s face in the street when he asked her to have a baby for him. Although she laughed and took his hand, it had frightened her. She thought quickly of how good the sex would be if that is what he wanted, but mostly she was frightened by the thought of having a baby once more. Needing to be good enough, alert enough, strong enough, that caring—again. Having to stay alive just that much longer."

"Last time I saw her she couldn’t do nothing but cry, and I couldn’t do a thing for her but wipe her face when I told her what they done to me. Somebody had to know it. Hear it. Somebody."

"Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that—far worse—was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean."

I don't think there's much to say about these quotes. They not only show Morrison being brilliant at her own craft but also trace the journey that Sethe goes through from being scared of freedom, yet cherishing it, feeling like her freedom (and the freedom of her loved ones) is limited, yet also realising how important it is to claim spaces (freedom) and speak/making yourself heard, and also realising the limitations that come with solely defining yourself over your children and being unable of putting oneself first.

Sethe has a lot to learn. And so do we. Morrison shows us a possible path towards what Black female freedom can truly look like. And for that, we shall cherish her forever. In addition, as she writes in the epigraph to her novel – "Sixty Million and more" – we shall never forget our ancestors and the people who walked and fought before us. Everything we do, we do for them.

Não há dúvidas que algumas leituras exigem mais do leitor. Às vezes, começamos uma obra e, mesmo depois de várias páginas, ainda sentimos dificuldades para compreender por onde a autora está nos conduzindo. Mas o que fazer nessas horas? Desistir? Percebi que “Amada” foi uma leitura desafiadora para vários seguidores, que logo vinham me pedir dicas para não precisar abandonar o livro. ⁣
⁣
E a primeira dica que costumo dar é: leia a sinopse do livro. Assim, você já consegue se ambientar mais na história, apesar das lacunas deixadas pela autora. Uma outra coisa que ajuda é ler os textos de apoio e resenhas escritas por outros leitores, que podem ter dicas mais específicas para aquela leitura. ⁣
⁣
No caso de “Amada”, a dificuldade inicial se dá principalmente pela mistura que a autora norte-americana faz entre o momento presente e as lembranças dos personagens. Ao iniciar a obra com esse aviso, a gente já presta mais atenção nessas mudanças bruscas dos momentos da narrativa. E essa dificuldade também vai melhorando ao longo da obra…⁣
⁣
Toda essa introdução serviu para encorajar você, leitor, a começar ou prosseguir com essa leitura incrível. “Amada” é a obra-prima de Morrison, primeira escritora negra a receber o Prêmio Nobel de Literatura, em 1993. A obra narra uma forte e sensível história de escravidão e racismo no século XIX. Sethe, uma mulher escravizada que fugiu da fazenda em que era obrigada a trabalhar, agora vive com sua filha em uma casa assombrada por um fantasma. O passado de Sethe é angustiante e muito sofrido. E esse fantasma nada mais é do que um resquício das tristezas vividas pela personagem. ⁣
⁣
Paul D, um ex-escravizado que vivia na mesma fazenda que Sethe, surge repentinamente na casa em que vivem mãe e filha. A partir disso, mudanças começam a acontecer na vida dos personagens, o que é agravado com a chegada de uma nova garota na vida dessa família: Amada. A personagem chega para remexer nos fantasmas que habitam em Sether, Denver e Paul D.⁣
⁣
Um livro forte e marcante. Apesar das dificuldades iniciais, a leitura depois flui muito bem e a escrita de Morrison consegue mexer com os sentimentos do leitor.

Nota: 9,5/10

Leia mais resenhas em https://www.instagram.com/book.ster/

Updated, August 2019: RIP, Toni Morrison

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. Shame. Desperation. Guilt. Generations of it. But like much great art, Beloved offers a glimmer of hope and redemption at the end.

n  

"Sethe," [says Paul D], "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."

n

Amen.

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

n  n

I FINISHED!!!!!!

n  n

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????

n  n

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 . . .

n  n

I did manage to finish, but WHAT. A. SLOG. 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!

n  n

La escritora estadounidense ganadora del Premio Pulitzer y el Premio Nobel de Literatura, Toni Morrison, publicó en 1987 una de sus obras más famosas: “Beloved”. Se inspiró en la historial real de una mujer para escribirla y me he animado a leerla después de varios años esperando en mis estanterías gracias al #blackhistoryjuly.

La historia, ambientada después de la Guerra de Secesión, nos presenta a Sethe, una mujer que logra huir de la esclavitud junto a su hija Denver. Una sombra las perseguirá desde entonces, una casa encantada, media vida privada de libertad y un pasado que no permite el descanso y que engulle todo a su paso sin miramientos.

Quizá debería advertir que en un comienzo el lenguaje o estilo narrativo de la autora puede resultar confuso, incluso extraño. Pero demuestra ser sumamente inteligente, cambia continuamente de personajes, utiliza flashbacks y un sin fin de estrategias para desconcertar al lector, para no dejar indiferente y brindar una lectura imprevisible y conmovedora. Sin duda es dura, en ocasiones macabra pero a la vez está escrita con tanta brillantez que resulta imposible no disfrutarla.

El uso que le da Morrison al realismo mágico es sencillamente magistral, brindarle un toque fantástico a una historia desgarradora es una elección acertada. Crea un ambiente oscuro, turbio, que roza lo agobiante en ocasiones y demuestra lo escalofriante que puede llegar a ser un relato que une lo paranormal con lo real. Una historia que combina a la perfección el simbolismo, la maternidad, los remordimientos, la ansiada liberación y la esclavitud.

Para concluir esta reseña, solo quiero advertir que no le he podido hacer justicia al escrito y es que me ha dejado literalmente sin palabras. Que grata y emocionante sorpresa conlleva descubrir un libro del que desconoces absolutamente todo su argumento, cuando te dejas llevar y súbitamente te hallas ante una de tus mejores lecturas del año. Leer a Morrison es una de las mejores cosas que podéis hacer y que os recomiendo encarecidamente.

Più che un libri, un vero e proprio pugno nello stomaco a ogni pagina. Ho letto molto sulla schiavitù afroamericana e sui protagonisti che la combatterono ognuno a suo modo, ma pochi romanzi mi hanno scosso così. La storia si dipana a piccoli pezzi, a piccoli frammenti come sono le vite di questi protagonisti, distrutte dal pregiudizio e dall'odio che non concede tregua. A nulla servono fughe ed espedienti: nella vita esistono esperienze che non si possono dimenticare e che neppure la strenua lotta per riconquistare la propria dignità d'esseri umani può sopire. Sono pagine toccanti e bellissime in cui disperazione e speranza si contendono ogni riga: dove presente e passato rivolgono a un mondo ingiusto la propria accusa.

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 Moby-Dick), 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 Sound and the Fury, 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 Huck Finn 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.

So. 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? Yes! 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! Seven-O!" as he smolders. This is mastery on a puzzle level that's Nabokovian.

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, Cormac McCarthy, 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." Barf, right?

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.