Updated, August 2019: RIP, Toni Morrison

Over the past 15 years, I've made several attempts to read Toni Morrison's epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that delves into murder, guilt, ghosts, and the brutal, intricate physical and psychological aftermath of slavery.

The dense, poetic prose and the elliptical nature of the storytelling initially made it seem impenetrable. After reading a chapter or two, I would give up, completely perplexed. And yet, I've read the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf! How could this novel be part of Oprah's Book Club?

Thankfully, I persevered.

About a third of the way through, I began to realize the meticulousness with which Morrison had constructed the narrative. It hinges on two harrowing events: one where a mother kills her child (inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner), and the other, which leads to the first, involving an attempted escape by a group of slaves at a plantation and its violent consequences.

The setting is Ohio in 1873. Sethe and her daughter Denver live in a house on 124 Bluestone Road. Once a vibrant place where freed slaves gathered after Emancipation for news and socializing, it is now desolate and eerie, haunted by the vengeful ghost of Sethe's deceased two-year-old child. This is not a spoiler as it is 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 start to change. He and Sethe worked on the same plantation, ironically named Sweet Home as it was anything but, decades earlier. They share a history, both good and bad, and each harbours secrets from the other. Paul D's presence causes the ghost to leave, but he alienates the shy and awkward Denver and begins to make Sethe break free from the past... until a mysterious stranger, with no lines on her hands or face, appears at 124 and disrupts everything.

Beloved is filled with an abundance of stories: some tragic, some malicious, some joyous, and some filled with love.

It takes some time to keep all the names straight, and I often found myself flipping back to see when a character was introduced. Although it's not a long book, of average length really, it is dense and rich with layered, complex imagery. There are references to water (it's no coincidence that Sethe's name evokes "Lethe," the river of forgetfulness and oblivion), colours, milk, and metal. I will never forget the description of Sethe's back, severely scarred from whippings to resemble a multi-branched tree, or Paul D's account of slaves having their mouths pried open with horses' bits.

Other aspects that will haunt and disturb me include the comparison of black slaves to animals and the sequence where Paul D discovers his worth in dollars and cents compared to Sethe, who is essentially a breeding machine to produce more slaves. These are balanced by scenes of kindness and generosity.

Not all the white characters are bad; a feisty young poor white girl helps Sethe deliver her child in a boat, and there is a nuanced portrayal of a pair of kind, older white siblings who exude humanity. And unlike in Walker's The Color Purple, the black men in this book are not all fools and rapists. Morrison's vision is broad, expansive, clear-eyed, and ultimately forgiving.

The language is earthy yet majestic, with echoes of Faulkner and even the King James Bible. It is often difficult to read as it feels like wading through a sea of memories, some buried deep and striving to surface.

The point of view shifts frequently. In one remarkable section, we are given the perspective of the dead baby, caught between death and life. Morrison presents different takes on the same scene throughout the book, making you circle around events in an attempt to uncover the truth. Is the truth attainable? Do some things remain unknowable?

At the heart of it all is the indescribable, real human pain. 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.

Rabbia, paura, amore...


In these days, there are many people who comment on the recent events in Minneapolis and the spreading revolt with embarrassing superficiality. If Trump showed understanding for those good boys who protested with guns in hand in Michigan against the lockdown last month, today the music is different. If it is blacks expressing dissatisfaction, then they are delinquents and must be suppressed with the National Guard.


The anger of the African American community has been a burning fire for a long time. The arduous and slow conquest of civil rights has not actually found a response in a real pacification in the US. Discrimination continues either insidiously (I read of a study showing that the resumes of people with "African American" names receive half the responses from companies compared to those with "racially neutral" names... for example) or blatantly. A knee pressing on a black neck for eight/nine minutes is an image that represents this continuous pressure.


The social, political, historical, psychological...constraint has been the literary theme of all of Toni Morrison's work. “Amatissima” is the most incisive emblem of her message.


In L'origine degli altri, the author tells us about the genesis of this novel. She was an editor at Random House when, for the realization of the book “The black book” (a text that collected photographs, songs, patents of inventions, testimonies, etc...), she came across a newspaper clipping from 1856 where a Baptist reverend talks about a visit made in prison by a certain Margaret Garner, a runaway slave from Kentucky to the free state of Ohio, who was involved in a crime that caused a great stir. On this case, Morrison weaves the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver, Baby Suggs, Paul D. A double binary: reality and the dream which is anyway a metaphor for the agony of a people. And it is known that for every ounce of pain there is as much resentment.


What is the right measure of love and what is that of resentment? Is there a limit to tolerance? A rereading that today, as a mother, I do with a different eye... ...how long is the scar?

Damn the humans.

They are truly the most enigmatic beings to have ever walked the earth. Their hearts hold reasons that elude the understanding of reason itself, and their minds fabricate worlds that the real world has never witnessed. They have the propensity to kill the very things they love and then are haunted by memories that, although they fade with time, never truly disappear. Instead, they become like ghosts, constantly gnawing at one's nerves, for always and forever.

To be a mother is an experience that brings with it the most consummate feeling. It is a feeling that is both celestial and earthly. You share your blood and flesh with the tiny being who resides within your womb, completely ignorant of the outer world. The bloody walls and the thumping of your heart are his only world. A seed as small as a grain gradually grows into something that you come to love unconditionally. This little one feeds on your flesh and sucks your milk, and the experience of being a mother is almost godly.

Then there is a world that is vastly different from ours. It is a world of less-humans who are bought and sold like mere corn. In this world, to live is a curse and to die is a luxury. You are never certain of getting enough bread to satisfy your hunger. You are never free enough to feast your eyes on the sight of the sky. You are only aware of one color, the color of dirt and the hint of sweat. And in this world, you are not named but numbered.

Sethe does not want this world for her children. She runs past this world and steps into another world, our world, the world of soulless meats and suspicious beasts. In this world, to love unconditionally is seen as something beyond question and buffoonery. Here, people are physically stuffed enough to ponder the starvation of the soul, if they even have one.

She kills the baby girl and will forever be haunted by her ghost. The baby, denied the opportunity to suck milk, will instead suck the life out of her mother. Denied the warmth of her mother's lap, the baby will haunt the home where her mother lives. Denied the chance to breathe life, the baby will turn the lives of others into a living hell. She is Beloved, and she refuses to die.

Morrison is at her absolute best in constructing the most complicated of characters who are stuck in a bizarre tapestry of relations. Her handling of magical realism is masterful. One wrong step and you completely lose the thread of the story. Beloved becomes more than just a repressed memory; she also represents the entire community. "A wounded, enraged baby is the central figure of the book, both literally, in the character of Beloved, and symbolically, as it struggles beneath the surface of the other major characters."

All of Morrison's characters grapple with the psychological repression of their pasts. While much of their pain stems from the horrors of slavery, it also originates from their relationship with Sethe. Throughout the novel, Sethe endures more psychological damage than any other character, making it logical that others would find themselves intertwined in her life.

As a character, Beloved represents not only her own history as one who, before her murder, lived on the edge of the line between freedom and slavery, but also the history of several generations. She acts out the pain of others by forcing them to remember. As Morrison so poignantly says: "Anything dead coming back to life hurts."

⛓️ I was conducting a research study at Duke University, which focused on African-American slavery. It was on the campus of Duke that I came across this remarkable work. Firstly, the poetry within her writing style completely captivated me. It was as if I was being carried away on a gentle breeze. Secondly, the strong and clear flow of her narrative was truly exhilarating and vigorous. It felt like a powerful current pulling me along. Thirdly, her courage was palpable. The book itself is a brave testament to her convictions. Fourthly, her compassion shone through. The pain and angst of the story, along with its painful denouement, brought tears to my eyes as I thought about the things that have broken the human heart over the thousands of years. It is indeed a powerful book.

One of the most harrowing aspects of American slavery was the way in which newborn babies were regarded as free gifts of property to slave owners. And perhaps no book can better convey the particular anguish of this for a mother than Toni Morrison's Beloved.

This mother's empathy for her daughters runs so deep that it penetrates her very being, until we witness Sethe, the book's protagonist, transform into Medea before our eyes. Morrison endows her with far more humanity than Euripides did, and even more than David Vann could in his Bright Air Black. Now, I truly understand Medea.

In this story, Morrison spares us the details of direct abuse of children by whitefolks (I appreciate how that is written as a single word) by instead depicting the abuse between the mother and others. And even this, Morrison relegates to the past, revealing how such suffering scars a person for life and encroaches upon the present. Not much actually occurs during 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, which becomes trapped within 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 is a bit like an Epic poem. The structure feels like a series of eddies swirling around and colliding with each other, sometimes even at the sentence level. It disoriented me; until I was sucked into a whirlpool that dragged me so deep that I almost didn't make it back. And while I was submerged, I was knocked into a second eddy, this time sliding into the depths of someone else, until Morrison brought me up for air. Talk about intimacy! The characters seem like amoebas, merging and splitting, merging and splitting, until new beings emerge, the desire between them visceral, symbiotic, and all-consuming. For all these reasons, this was an artful read. The thing is, I had to work 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, while 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.”

Beloved has been canonized more rapidly and comprehensively than any other modern book. As a result, it endures two curses.

The first curse is that of the classic itself, the so-called Moby-Dick curse. Everyone reads it too early, and thus no one likes it. It's not overly difficult (nor is Moby-Dick), but it's not easy either. A high school student forced to read it will suspect it's good for them, which isn't enjoyable for anyone. When I surveyed my bookish friends about this book, I received many tepid responses like "Er... I read that 20 years ago and it was probably okay," or sometimes just silence. In fact, I got more lackluster comments about this book than any other I can recall, including Moby-Dick and even Sound and the Fury, which is far more of a headache.

The second curse, which leads to the first, is that it's about slavery. It was canonized because it's excellent, but also because it's the best novel everyone could agree on that was written by a black person and about slavery. That's not Toni Morrison's fault; it's to her credit. But because Americans are fixated on race and the legacy of slavery, and because we all feel terrible about it in various ways, any book about slavery will face criticism forever. Mark Twain likely knew when he wrote Huck Finn that it would always be discussed in the context of race; Toni Morrison most definitely did. When she wrote Beloved, she knew that everyone in the country would take shots at it for as long as it exists, which seems likely to be a very long time.

So, Toni Morrison, a brilliant author at the peak of her powers, writes a savage, uncompromising epic about the horrors of slavery, and everyone focuses on its subject rather than its writing. Is it brilliant? Yes! It is indeed brilliant. Does it deserve to be canonized, or is it in part canonized because it fills a niche we needed filled? The answer is yes to both.

What amazed me about Beloved is how completely Morrison controls the narrative. The way she hints at events and then gradually returns to flesh them out again and again from different perspectives. She sets up numerous mysteries, like what 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 a fine line throughout the book. She absolutely condemns slavery, hitting 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 a certain cheesiness deep within Morrison, especially when it comes to love, that made me roll my eyes several times. And while she usually manages to keep her Faulkner fetish in check, there are moments when the modernist jargon resurges, particularly towards the end from Beloved's perspective. We didn't need to get inside her head to know she was insanely nuts; Morrison could have trusted that she'd already conveyed that effectively.

But these are critiques in the context of a great book. I'm nitpicking because Beloved is good enough to deserve a thorough dissection. It is a great book: rewarding, captivating, unique, and important. It earns its place.

Beloved is a profound and haunting novel that delves deep into the human psyche and the inability to escape the past. It explores how the past, especially when it is filled with pain and injustice, can resurface and haunt us for an eternity.

The story centers around Sethe and her daughter Beloved, who was killed by Sethe many years ago to spare her from the horrors of slavery. The question of whether it was murder or mercy lingers throughout the novel, highlighting the complex and difficult decisions that slaves were forced to make.

The novel's non-linear structure adds to its intensity and realism. It jumps around in time, mirroring the way our memories work and how the past can suddenly intrude upon the present. The shifting points of view also allow us to see the story from different perspectives, adding depth and complexity to the characters.

Tony Morrison's prose is masterful, painting a vivid and detailed picture of the lives of former slaves. She doesn't shy away from the harsh realities of slavery, but instead confronts them head-on, making the reader feel the pain and suffering of the characters.

Overall, Beloved is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that forces us to confront the dark history of slavery in America. It is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the human condition and the lasting impact of trauma.

There is no doubt that some readings demand more from the reader. Sometimes, we start a work and, even after several pages, we still feel difficulties in understanding where the author is leading us. But what to do in those moments? Give up? I noticed that "Beloved" was a challenging reading for several followers, who soon came asking me for tips to avoid having to abandon the book.

And the first tip I usually give is: read the synopsis of the book. In this way, you can already get more immersed in the story, despite the gaps left by the author. Another thing that helps is to read the supporting texts and reviews written by other readers, who may have more specific tips for that reading.

In the case of "Beloved", the initial difficulty mainly lies in the mixture that the North American author makes between the present moment and the memories of the characters. By starting the work with this warning, we already pay more attention to these abrupt changes in the moments of the narrative. And this difficulty also improves throughout the work…

All this introduction served to encourage you, the reader, to start or continue with this incredible reading. "Beloved" is the masterpiece of Morrison, the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The work tells a strong and sensitive story of slavery and racism in the 19th century. Sethe, a enslaved woman who fled the plantation where she was forced to work, now lives with her daughter in a house haunted by a ghost. Sethe's past is anguishing and very painful. And this ghost is nothing more than a remnant of the sadness lived by the character.

Paul D, an ex-enslaved person who lived on the same plantation as Sethe, suddenly appears in the house where mother and daughter live. From then on, changes begin to happen in the lives of the characters, which is aggravated with the arrival of a new girl in the life of this family: Beloved. The character comes to stir up the ghosts that inhabit Sether, Denver and Paul D.

A strong and remarkable book. Despite the initial difficulties, the reading then flows very well and Morrison's writing manages to touch the reader's feelings.

Note: 9.5/10

Read more reviews at https://www.instagram.com/book.ster/

I give this book as a gift to people I hate.

This might seem like a strange or even cruel thing to do. But sometimes, when we have strong negative feelings towards someone, we look for ways to express them.

Giving a book as a gift can be a passive-aggressive gesture. It could be a way to show that we think the person has something to learn or improve upon.

Maybe the book contains ideas or perspectives that we believe will challenge their beliefs or make them uncomfortable.

However, it's important to consider the consequences of such an action. Giving a book to someone we hate might not achieve the desired effect.

It could potentially escalate the conflict or make the situation worse.

Instead of using the gift as a weapon, it might be more productive to try to resolve the issues through communication and understanding.

But if we still choose to give the book, we should do it with a clear conscience and be prepared for any reaction that might come our way.

“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 truly lives up to its esteemed reputation. I have been aware of this book for nearly my entire life, long before I even considered myself a reader. When I was born, this book and its author were highly celebrated, and the copy I read belonged to a family member. Due to this, I feel as if I am the last person in my family to read this book, and I know I am among the last on Goodreads as well. For this reason, rather than spending this review discussing the plot or my feelings about the author as I did in my review of Song Of Solomon, I want to focus on the language of the book. This seems to be a particular trademark of Toni Morrison's work during this time.

Because of its great fame, I knew the entire plot of the book years before I decided to read it. Many people have already discussed this book on the common ground of "slavery is bad and makes everyone sad." I cannot hope to surpass my fellow Goodreads reviewers in this regard, but I will touch on it briefly here. I liked the use of memory in this novel, similar to the use of time-travel in Song of Solomon. I liked how the present could be intertwined with past memories. This is the essence 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 into contact with. The fact that she is surrounded by formerly enslaved people means that these are some profoundly horrifying memories. The end of the book seems to confirm this.

What I truly loved about this book was the use of language. I mentioned it in my review of Song of Solomon, but it is done exceptionally well here too. Morrison has a remarkable command of the written interpretation of African-American Vernacular English. AAVE is something that non-African-Americans may think they understand, but it is difficult to reinterpret accurately. It is even harder to reproduce AAVE in written form, as some black writers also struggle with this. When comparing the "dialect" poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar to actual transcripts of folk songs or prose from the formerly enslaved, it is clear that writing AAVE is a special skill. Toni Morrison masters it throughout this novel and gets the time-period slang correct. Many people outside the African-American community often confuse AAVE and black slang. AAVE contains certain grammar rules that have remained relatively constant for approximately the last 200 years. Slang, on the other hand, is vocabulary that can change every year. It takes a skilled writer to understand and demonstrate this correctly, and this is something I continuously appreciate about Morrison.

The use of southern gothic in the Midwest is another significant theme here. If there is any doubt about 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 haunt the ex-slaves during Reconstruction are given the magical-realist treatment one would expect to see in a Gabriel García Márquez book. It serves the narrative well, even when one starts to recognize that Morrison is playing up the trope during the chapters exploring the mental state of the characters.

I really liked and appreciate what this book has contributed to the literary canon. Due to the passage of time, I was not as deeply affected by it as those who first read it three years before I was born, but I understand its impact. I will probably still have a higher regard for Song of Solomon, but that does not mean I do not recognize why this book is the centerpiece of Ms. Morrison's work.

There was a time when the color of your skin allowed you to take possession of another person, to exploit them, to subject them to any barbarity, and even to kill them at any moment.

As a result, 60 million or more people were forgotten, disappeared, and never claimed just because of the color of their skin.

Some endured it, others fled, and there were those who revolted for the sake of their children so that the same thing would not happen to them. The latter is the story of 124.

This is not a story to be passed on. It is a tragic and shameful chapter in human history that we must remember and learn from to ensure that such atrocities never occur again. We should strive for a world where everyone is treated equally, regardless of the color of their skin or any other characteristic. Only then can we truly move forward and build a better future for all.

You know, sometimes I really struggle to understand other readers. Their reactions, expectations, and perspectives often seem so foreign to me. Take "Beloved" for example. I've only managed to read a third of the book before giving up. The reactions to this book are divided almost evenly between those who despise it and those who adore it. That's fine, of course. But what puzzles me is that the haters seem to base their dislike on the subject matter. According to the reviews I've read, they have an issue with someone writing about slavery. They compose their reviews as if they're metaphorically throwing their hands up in horror, trying to distance themselves from this "objectionable" topic. It's as if Morrison was trying to force them to convert to a different religion or something. I just can't wrap my head around it. Their argument, as far as I can tell, is that slavery was a long time ago and we're now all inclusive and nice to everyone, so writing about slavery is like trying to make us (meaning white people) feel guilty for something we didn't do and can't control, like the color of our skin. Seriously, go look around the web; I'm not making this up.

What can you say to such ignorant nonsense? Part of me wants to say nothing because arguing against such blatant idiocy is exhausting. But if I had to respond, I might start by saying that, um, racism still exists. So the subject is, er, not completely irrelevant. Secondly, even if racism didn't exist in our society and we were all living in multicultural hippy communes, what would be so wrong with someone writing about slavery and persecution? I might be wrong (but I'm not), but I'm pretty sure Morrison didn't spend all that time and effort writing a book just to make some twat in Milton Keynes feel guilty. If you ask me, I'd guess that as a black woman and a human being, she was interested in exploring and understanding such a crucial and tragic part of history.
For me, the point of writing a book like "Beloved" is to bring a terrible part of history to life beyond just the statistics. Just like with the Holocaust, it's easy to get lost in the numbers and forget the individual people who were affected or died. "Beloved" personalizes slavery, making it easier for people in general to relate to the subject. I think that's very important. As far as I'm concerned, we shouldn't be allowed to forget or sweep these things under the rug. You can't live in a vacuum where history is only important for passing exams or making a HBO mini-series. This stuff is part of who we are and still affects how the world works. And, yeah, I know what people say, that there are plenty of other tragedies that don't get the same attention. They ask, why aren't we talking about what happened in Bosnia, Serbia, Nigeria, etc? My response: stop complaining and write a book about those places/conflicts/tragedies yourself.
However, I did, of course, stop reading "Beloved" before finishing it. But my decision had nothing to do with white guilt. My issues with the novel are not political; they're more about the writing itself. I didn't feel like Morrison was preaching at me, but I did feel like the book was too heavy-handed, overwrought, and even cringingly trite and saccharine. In fact, it reminded me of what Faulkner might have written if you'd given him a bunch of E and asked him to write a chick-lit novel.
Just look at these lines:
"Jump, if you want to, ‘cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you ‘fore you fall."
"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."
The most polite thing I can say about these quotes is that they don't strike me as good writing.
And what about this:
"In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. 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. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved."
I mean...dear God. And the thing is, I mostly agree with the sentiment in this passage; it's just the way it's presented that bothers me.
Every sentence in "Beloved" is filled with emotion, meaning, and significance. And for me, that actually detracts from the impact of the story and the full horror of the subject Morrison was dealing with. To be honest, I found the book completely ridiculous. Throughout my reading, I wanted to tell her on almost every page: tone it down and let the story breathe a little. I wanted to scold her: you're trying too hard. I felt like some of her choices were made not to serve the story but to impress. Ironically, for someone who teaches or taught English literature or creative writing, I think she could have used some advice and guidance herself. Someone should have looked at the manuscript with a red pen and written little notes in the margin asking, "is this necessary?"
What's strange about "Beloved" is that it's both saccharine and brutal. There's a strange tension between the flowery style, the sentimentality, and the subject matter and some of the content. It's a book that screams excess. Everything is taken just a little too far. Morrison shows a clear inability to rein it in and a lack of subtlety and control. So, one minute we're hearing about how breast milk was forcibly taken from Sethe, and the next she and Paul D are having a tender moment as he feels the scars on her back and rambles on poetically-symbolically about a tree.
Probably the most obvious misstep in the novel occurs long after I stopped reading it. Struggling to overcome my doubts about the quality of what I was reading, I looked at some online reviews. That's when I came across the opinions I mentioned at the beginning, but it's also when I found out that the baby - the ghost baby, the slaughtered baby - is apparently heard in the text at some point. I mean, I don't know about you, but that just seems crazy to me. It's almost like gross incompetence or a mishandling of the material. Why would you do that? The fate of that child already speaks volumes. All Morrison is doing by giving it a voice (a stream of consciousness voice, I think) is turning up the melodrama to 1000. And when I found out about that, I had a thought: I'm not going to read all this just to get to that.