Words like Holocaust, Slavery, War etc. loose over time the terror they should inspire upon one's mind. Reminding us about what these evils feel like is one important role art plays. Toni Morrison does exactly that in this book, and in a effective way.

n  Pastn

She starts her story in the middle when slavery is already banned and biggest horrors have already passed. however this is not a happily-ever-after. In fact, for people who have been slave (or to generalize suffer miserably in anyway) for any significant period of time; it is impossible to find a perfect happiness -there will always be ghosts of past to torment; slapping the Disney idea out of park of possibilities. In this case, we actually have a real ghost of past (the Hindi word for 'ghost' and 'past' is same).

Within very fist few pages Morrison takes art's ability of creating compassion to a new level as she makes us feel that dark past within our skins in which residents of 124 live; even if, like Denvar, we are ignorant of its details. It is scary and un-ignorable, almost visible - the characters are trying not to 'look' at it, which is understandable given its darkness:

"To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping past at bay."

We remember 'rememory' this past as Morrison brings us details in (irritatingly unannounced) flash-backs. A normal narration of events would have left readers only memories of darkest events, and we wouldn't have realised what it feels like to be a slave for all your life. The book works so brillantly because you could see the depravity felt in the smallest things and how much would those tragedies shadow any happiness that may fall in victim's way.

The past does figuritively become alive in form of Beloved, all flesh and bones. ""She reminds me of something. Something, look like, I'm supposed to remember." Although these are Paul D's words, they give experience of many people with Beloved. She was there or was a sort of metaphor of one's efforts to get over dark pasts. You can't run away from it, you need to accept it. The residents of 124 did - and they all come out of the thing better. Of course it hurt a little but Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

Slavery

How much bad do a life have to be, if a loving mother choose to kill her children rather than have them live it?

But what is slavery? It is being effectively reduced and compared to animals. It is not being allowed to love freely:

"Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to lo ve just a little bit; everything, just a little bi t, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one."

Being fueled by Morrision's prose, I could go on rambling but Baby Suggs' very first thoughts upon being freed seem to do it brillantly:

What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-le gged dog need freedom for? And when she steppe d foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn't; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.
Something's the matter. What's the matter? What's the matter? she asked herself. She didn't know what she looked like and was not curious. But suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, "These hands belong to me. These my hands." Next she felt a knocking in her chest an d discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud.
Mr. Garner looked over his shoulder at her with wide brown eyes and smiled himself. "What's funny, Jenny?"
She couldn't stop laughing. "My heart's beating," she said.
And it was true.

This is a powerfully disturbing, poetically dense exploration of the consequences of slavery on the psyche and spirit of a woman named Sethe. It’s fascinating, complex, and often beautifully written, but there are aspects of Morrison’s ambitious approach that also create something of a distancing effect, at times. Her ear for dialogue is impeccable, though, and I greatly admire the way she allows her characters to interact in delicately drawn encounters, filled with subtlety, and blessedly without any authorial commentary.

This novel is very much a ghost story, and as such, it’s worth noting that while it has never (to my knowledge) been shelved among SFF or horror literature, it very much belongs there. This, to me, underlines how limited and narrow a view of SFF and horror literature the mainstream literary world seems to have. I would also recommend that any writer working on a ghost story read it to learn a great deal about how to convincingly pull it off.

No matter how this novel is shelved, I’m very impressed by how deftly Morrison has woven ineffable mysteries into her tale, and how effectively she has shown how terribly confusing the haunting of our past can be on our present.

I read this at this time in honor of Banned Books Week.

This is probably my least favorite book I have ever read. I think I hate it even more because so many people like it so much. Unlike really trashy novels, people actually try to argue that this is a great book. But it definitely embodies all the things that make me hate books. It's heavy handed with its message, which ultimately ruins some pretty spectacular imagery. Its also just a giant pastiche of people who can actually write, which makes it just feel disjointed and annoying since it switches between standard narration and stream of conciousness and surrealism in intensely awkward ways. It's not even like that switching between different narrative structures is inherently bad, but this book definitely does it in the most ridiculously annoying way of any book I have ever read. Along with the heavy handedness of the whole affair is that this whole book is just trying to make me guilty for being white. It is probably one of the top 3 most unfortunate things in the history of the world that slavery not only ever existed but went on for so long, but I already get that. So really Toni, no need to beat that into my head with a bloody axe (So to speak).
Seriously, even thinking of the entire month I spent reading and analyzing this giant piece of trash gives me a headache. I'm convinced that this book strikes the ultimate low-point on the acclaim vs. enjoyability graph. It's just artsy-fartsy nonsense for people who want to feel like they're reading real literature when they're not. I'm pretty sure I don't have proper words to express my hatred for this book (Or, rather, if I expressed my hatred for this book, my words would not be proper), so I'll just leave it at that.

"Il tuo amore è troppo grande".
"Troppo grande? (...) L'amore c'è o non c'è. L'amore piccolo non è amore per niente".

Esta novela es, esencialmente, un dramón.

Una mirada poética a algo terrible: las secuelas psicológicas (y físicas) que dejó la esclavitud en la población negra estadounidense. Porqu sí, tras la Guerra de Secesión eran libres, en teoría. Tenían libre albedrío (hasta que un blanco sospechaba y les mataba de un tiro), podían trabajar libremente (siempre que encontraran trabajo y no fueran explotados laboralmente por un plato de comida), libertad política (hasta que venía el klan y te linchaba porque habías osado presentarte a un cargo político) o libertad para pensar lo que quisieran. O recordar lo que quisieran. Y sinceramente, dado que las vidas de muchos de ellos hacían parecer Mauthausen un picnic, muchos decidieron no recordar. Porque el estrés postraumático de esta gente tuvo que ser colosal. Y los que sí quisieron recordar... bueno, tienes que saber escribir para poner tus recuerdos por escrito y que perduren. Es toda una generación, todo un grupo de personas, cuyas vivencias han sido mayormente olvidadas. Toni Morrison les da voz. Una voz mágica, llena de belleza, dolor, trauma y mucha, mucha empatía.

No mentiré, me costó entrar, pero cuando lo hice y sobre todo, a partir de la revelación de la página 182, me cautivó por completo. Es una mezcla de realismo mágico, historia de fantasmas y novela histórica.

This was my second or third reading of Beloved, a book that broke my heart and remade it once again. The tree on Sethe's back is a map to both pain and redemption. I feel like I am going to quote nearly the entire book if I keep to copy out all of my notes. From the initial haunting of Beloved and her return - the tale of Sethe is the tale of the revolting violence and sexual underpinning of the institution of slavery. The stories from Sweet Home are all heartbreaking (particularly once Schoolteacher takes over), and yet even across the river at 124, those who escaped are unsafe. The novel does a fantastic job of capturing the love of Sethe and Paul D, the emergence of an "I" for Denver and the pain of loss for Baby Suggs. Memorable from start to finish, this is truly one of the greatest works of fiction of the last century. I loved how it ended as Denver takes control of her life and in doing so, saves Sethe. Love conquers all.

Sethe is defiant at the beginning of the book when Paul D arrives: "I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. Now more running - from nothing." (p. 15). Paul D, being the kind soul that he is, listens to the shards of her story. The reader needs to be patient because the full meaning of the loss of milk, the lost sons Buglar and Howard, the whitegirl - all of these will be peeled off of the story like layers of an onion. The emotion is overwhelming and creates tenderness between Sethe and Paul D: As she raised up from the heat she felt Paul D behind her and his hands under her breasts. She straightened up and knew, but could not feel, that is cheek was pressing into the branches of the chokecherry tree. (p. 17). And just like that, Paul D casts the ghost of 124 out, leaving Denver confused and alone:Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had. Denver dipped a bit of bread into the jelly. Slowly, methodically, miserably, she ate it. (p. 19). What is impressive is the power of Morrison's writing and how much she packs into these first 20 pages of the first chapter, it is breathtaking to read.

The afternoon lovemaking of Sethe and Paul D opens up vistas in their memory of the previous slave life they shared at Sweet Home when Sethe was with Halle and got pregnant with Denver. Most of the memories are rife with the inherent inhumanity and violence of slavery. To survive, the slaves of Sweet Home had to derive pleasure from very small, nearly insignificant things like corn in the field in which Halle and Sethe had made love the first time:What he did remember was parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just under, so as not to graze a single kernel. The pulling down on the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced her it hurt. As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shiny rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed up flavor ran free. No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free. (p . 27). A lot to unpack there, but it is amazing how the memories of Sethe and Paul D intertwine - Sethe remembering the sex in the field and comparing it to the pain of opening the corn husk and Paul D remembering the sensations - both tactile and gustatory - of the raw corn.

One important thing to keep in mind when reading Beloved is the deep vernacular used by the protagonists that requires sometimes reading out loud to get a feel for the sing-songy diction and how time is strictly non-linear as each of the characters shifts back and forth over memories too painful to bear all at once. There is also an extremely sensual aspect to Morrison's writing where the various senses blend together:The closer the roses got to death, the louder their scent and everybody who attended the carnival associated it with the stench of the rotten roses. (p. 47). I took this to be another way of displacing the painful memories and dispersing them so as to dampen their bite.

Not long afterward, Beloved comes to 124 and the heart of the novel is how she has a dysfunctional, fusional relationship with Sethe, a distant, opportunistic relationship with Denver, and a violent, sexual relationship with Paul D driving him away from the house. It takes Sethe a lot longer then Denver to realize this because of Beloved's all-consuming devotion: Sethe was flattered by Beloved's open, quiet devotion...the company of this sweet, if peculiar, guest pleased her the way a zealot pleases his teacher. (p. 57) Paul D, before leaving, is tortured with memories that he long hid deep inside:He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents, it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no read heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him. (p. 73). Note that Mister was a rooster back at the Sweet Home farm.

Halle was Sethe's husband and the father of her children before the flight from Sweet Home to where Halle's mother Baby Suggs had escaped in free Ohio, 124. Near the house, there was a clearing where she would give open air speeches to the other fugitives and survivors:Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them. Pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear...This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. (p. 88) Sethe bitterly misses the 28 days between her arrival at 124 and the catastrophe that consumes her, she misses especially the comfort of Baby Suggs:Just the fingers she thought. Just let me feel your fingers again on the back of my neck and I will lay it all down, make a way out of this no way. (p. 95)

In his reminiscing, we learn of Paul D's incredible journey and the countless acts of violence and predation that he survived including a chain gang under the beating sun of Georgia singing songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt who folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones - the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, and maybe even buried her - kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back. (p. 109) During his wandering, he finds little consolation with the Cherokee who suffered the fate of genocide at the hands of white settlers. Decimated but stubborn, they were among those who chose a fugitive life rather than Oklahoma. The illness that swept them now was reminiscent of the one that had killed half their number two hundred years earlier. In between that calamity and this, they had visited George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets,led Oglethorpe through forests, helped Andrew Jackson fight Creek, cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain, been experimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their language, resisted settlers, shot bear, and translated scripture. All to no avail. The forced move to the Arkansas River, insisted upon by the same president they fought for against the Creek, destroyed another quarter of their already shattered number. (p. 111). Equally horrifying was on his way to 124, having tied up his boat he notices something red:Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet wooly hair, clinging still to a its bit of scalp. (p. 180) He keeps the ribbon which comes to symbolize for him the tiniest hope for survival among the ferocious slave bounty hunters and the promised haven of 124.

In the wake of Paul D's leaving after learning the complete story from Stamp Paid, things collapse in 124 into complete insanity as Sethe and Beloved become inseparable and push Denver out. At the end of the novel however, Denver finds a way to banish Beloved definitively by rallying the community of women in a beautiful scene (p. 261). Paul D rushes back to the side of Sethe, sick, and recalls a description of love by another victim of Sweet Home, Sixo, and his lover, the Thirty Mile Woman:'she is a friend of my mind. She gathers me, man. The pieces I am, she gathers them and gives them back to me in all the right order. It's good you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind. As the curtain falls on the book, the exchange between Sethe and Paul D:
Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers.
"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 and holding hers.
"Me? Me?" (p. 273).

This is truly one of the most painful and beautiful books I have ever read and should be required reading for high school kids to understand fully the de-humanizing aspects of slavery and how sex was used as a tool for oppression. But mostly for the stunning love story of Sethe and Paul D.

Fino's Toni Morrison Reviews:
The Bluest Eye
Sula
Song Of Solomon
Tar Baby
Beloved
Jazz
Paradise

I am not worthy to review this brilliant, visceral, mysterious, and powerful book.
The story is simple, but the telling is not - like watching a petal on the surface of turbulent water, unpredictably changing direction.
I understand the individual words, but the sense and sentences are elusive, even as they are beautiful and sometimes ugly - like trying to decipher an unfamiliar dialect or make sense of a half-forgotten dream.
I empathise with Paul D:
“The feeling a large, silver fish had slipped from his hands the minute he grabbed hold of its tail”.


Image: Catching a fish with bare hands (Source)

Freedom from slavery does not free people from the past. Not even from the past of their forebears. Beloved shows the shocking brutality and the catastrophic multi-faceted consequences handed down generations, but the quicksilver prose casts a veil on the horror (rather as the Nadsat slang does in Clockwork Orange, which I reviewed HERE).

The narrative switches points of view and jumps about the timeline. What is true and what is imagined is muddled, muddy, moot, most especially who - or what - is Beloved. Elemental liquids mix and take on a mystical element: blood, milk, and water.


Image: Blood and water mixing (Source)

Themes

I'm sure there are many books, theses, and GR reviews exploring these far better than I can, and I will shortly look at friends' reviews. The key themes I saw include:
•tMother-daughter-sister love and sacrifice
•tIf and when murder is the kinder option
•tGuilt, redemption, and revenge
•tWho has the right to know and tell of a partner’s past
•tMasculinity, especially for the enslaved
•tMemories and the balance of past and future
•tTrauma/PTSD
•tThe nature of ghosts
•tA house as a character
•tThe power of community
•tColor - not just in the sense of race.


“A fully dressed woman walked out of the water”, almost like Ophelia in reverse

Image: Ophelia by John Everett Millais (Source.)

Quotes

Nature
•t“It was April and everything alive was tentative.”

•t“The chimney coughed against the rush of cold shooting into it from the sky.”

•t“The sky above them was another country. Winter stars, close enough to lick, had come out before sunset.”

Emotion
•t“Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved’s eyes… Their two shadows clashed and crossed on the ceiling like black swords.”

•t“Threads of malice creeping toward him from Beloved’s side of the table were held harmless in the warmth of Sethe’s smile.”

Racist oppression
•t“How much is a nigger supposed to take?...
All he can.”

•t“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle… The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human… the more tangled the jungle grew inside… It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them.”

•t“Just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.”

Past and future
•t“She worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe.”

•t“The future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.”

•t“It wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood.”

•t“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.”

•t“Me and you, we got more yesterdays than anybody… we need some kind of tomorrow.”

Rating

Enjoyment = 2*
Objective quality = 4*+
Overall = 3*

One of the most devastating things about American slavery is how newborn babies were considered free gifts of property to slave owners. And there may be no better book than Toni Morrison’s, Beloved, to convey the specific pain of that for a mother.

This mother’s empathy for her daughters is so deep it burrows through her to the other side, until we find Sethe, the book’s protagonist, become Medea before our eyes. Morrison gives her way more humanity than Euripides did for me, and even more than David Vann ever could in his Bright Air Black. Now I understand Medea.

Morrison spares us details of direct abuse to children by whitefolks in this story (I love how that’s written as a single word) by showing instead the abuse to and from the mother. And even this Morrison leaves in the past, revealing instead how that kind of suffering scars one for life and crowds the present. Not much actually happens at the time of the main story, but that time is literally haunted by the past. And it is in the past where the drama lies, the pain of being human, that gets trapped in this family’s home.

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

Morrison was a prose poet, and this book a bit like an Epic poem. The structure felt like a series of eddies swirling about and knocking into each other, sometimes even on a sentence level. It disoriented me; until I fell into a whirlpool that took me down so deep I almost didn’t make it back. And while she had me submerged I was knocked into a second eddy, this time sliding into the deep end of someone else, until Morrison brought me up for air. Talk about intimacy! The characters felt like amoebas, merging and splitting, merging and splitting, until new beings emerged, the desire between them visceral, symbiotic and engulfing. For all these reasons, this was an artful read. The thing is, I worked hard for it. I became hyper-vigilant of the big picture as I was knocked aside, bounced around, and sometimes kicked out. I held on tight, leaving the rest of me loose enough to trust the ride.

“She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague and intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was.”

“White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were…how human… the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread….It spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

“Nobody saw them falling.”

“Nobody saw them falling.”

“It was not a story to pass on.”

This really was an amazing book. I didn't expect a book I was required to read for English class to be so good. It makes total sense why this won the Nobel Prize. I feel sorry for all of the people in my class who are only reading the SparkNotes.

A re-read and absolutely worth it - beautiful!

⛓️ I read this in NC when I was on a research study at Duke focused on African-American slavery. I read it on campus. First, the poetry of her writing style swept me away. Second, the strong and clear flow of her narrative was exhilarating and vigorous. Third, her courage, for the book is brave. Fourth, her compassion, for the pain and angst of the story, and it’s painful denouement, brought my tears for the things that have broken the human heart down through the thousands of years. A powerful book.

I don't give books low marks lightly. If anything, I am prone to being carried away by the author's enthusaism and rate books more highly than they deserve. I am an aspiring author, myself, and that also leads me to be kind to the books.

That being said, I really hated this book.

I like fantasy and magical realism. I find the dreams and allegories that live just underneath the skin of the world we can more readily see and touch endlessly fascinating. I like my stories intense and emotional, and I like it when characters are so full of passion that it obscures their sense of the world around them.

That being said, I really hated this book.

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

Did I mention that I really hated this book?

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