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When I first encountered this book in high school, I was instantly drawn to it. However, at that time, I lacked the life experience to truly fathom its depth and significance, something that I have now gained. This book has a profound connection with me as the culture it presents is so familiar. Growing up in a black family, I am all too aware of the heavy and destructive burden of racism. Reading this story once again broke my heart.

The narrative centers around Nel and Sula, two best friends who unfortunately lose each other and then have to grapple with the aftermath. Friendship among women is an often undervalued aspect within the black community, and is frequently misjudged based on the viral images of black women fighting that circulate on social media. Morrison masterfully describes friendship while also elucidating the consequences of living in and trying to survive in the Bottom.

The Bottom is the community where the events of this book unfold. Its distinctiveness and the individuals who inhabit it vividly illustrate how broken people can find a way to endure. The community itself has a certain tolerance, even for those it deems as evil, which is why Sula is tolerated to some extent. Sula is regarded as evil because she rejects traditional family life and the morals upon which the community depends. Her selfishness can be interpreted in multiple ways, but I view it as an alternative means of survival. Coping with a world that constantly tells you that you are not important can lead to various manifestations. Morrison's poetic writing style and use of metaphors never fail to captivate me whenever I read this book.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to everyone. It provides an honest portrayal of the emotions and experiences of black life. Sula delves into our concepts of what we consider as feminine, as good, as womanhood, and the reasons behind these notions. It manages to explore racism, feelings of inadequacy, post-traumatic stress disorder, and how a community can function as a living entity. Its descriptions of despair and loneliness are truly visceral. This is powerful storytelling at its finest, and I am overjoyed that such a remarkable work exists. It serves as a reminder to all who read it that black people have a unique and significant cultural experience.

Imagine being as brilliant as Toni Morrison. I had deep sympathies for both characters, especially for Sula. It is an extremely challenging task to go against the norms of society, especially for a woman, and even more so for a black woman.

“You can’t do it all. You are a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all independently, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, and leaving what you don’t.” This statement really highlights the constraints and limitations placed on Sula.

I also felt sorry for Nel. Even when she tried to do things the “right way” according to society's expectations, she still ended up alone. It shows that sometimes, following the rules doesn't necessarily lead to happiness or fulfillment.

Both Sula and Nel's experiences make us think about the role of women in society, especially black women, and the difficulties they face in trying to break free from the bonds of traditional gender and racial expectations.

Published in 1973 but written in 1969, in the midst of cultural upheaval, “Sula” is the second novel of the African-American writer Toni Morrison (1931 - 2019).

On the surface, it is a coming-of-age novel. Sula and Nel are two twelve-year-old girls who, from their first encounter, form a tacit friendship pact. Inseparable until the age of seventeen when Nel suddenly decides to get married. After a decade of separation, the two will meet again, trying to reestablish their friendship as if it had never been interrupted.

The setting is a ghetto located on the hills (but ironically called “The Bottom”) of Medallion, Ohio.

This reading is fascinating due to Morrison's masterful writing, which leaves nothing to chance. With this novel, she will launch an important literary career aimed at exploring the many faces of the African-American community.

Sula, like an overseas Madame Bovary, challenges the conventions of those who do not want change.



Wonderful reread!

“Sula si sbagliava. L'Inferno non è lasciare che le cose rimangano per sempre uguali. L'Inferno è il cambiamento”



“Sula” is a remarkable work that delves deep into the lives and relationships of its characters. The story unfolds in a small African-American community, where the lives of Sula and Nel are intertwined. Their friendship, which begins in childhood, is tested by the passage of time and the choices they make.



Morrison's writing is rich and evocative, painting a vivid picture of the community and its inhabitants. She explores themes such as race, gender, and identity, showing how these factors shape the lives of the characters. The novel also examines the concept of change and how it can be both liberating and terrifying.



Sula is a complex and fascinating character. She defies the norms and expectations of her community, choosing to live life on her own terms. Her actions often shock and scandalize those around her, but she remains unapologetic. Nel, on the other hand, is more traditional and conformist. She marries young and tries to build a stable life for herself and her family.



The relationship between Sula and Nel is at the heart of the novel. Their friendship is both beautiful and tragic, as they struggle to understand each other and come to terms with their own choices. Through their story, Morrison shows the power of friendship and how it can endure even in the face of great adversity.



Overall, “Sula” is a thought-provoking and engaging novel that offers a unique perspective on the African-American experience. It is a must-read for anyone interested in literature, race, and gender.

She ate that.

It was a simple act, but it held a certain significance. Maybe it was a delicious piece of cake that she couldn't resist. Or perhaps it was a nutritious meal that she needed to fuel her body.

As she took that first bite, she could feel the flavors exploding in her mouth. The texture was smooth and creamy, or maybe it was crunchy and satisfying.

She savored each moment, enjoying the taste and the experience. It was a moment of indulgence, a break from the hustle and bustle of her daily life.

And as she finished eating, she felt a sense of contentment. That simple act of eating had brought her a small measure of joy and satisfaction.

She knew that there would be more meals to come, more flavors to explore, but for now, she was happy with what she had just eaten.

4 1/2 stars. I've long been aware that I haven't read enough of Toni Morrison. Before "Sula," I'd only read "Beloved," which is also an excellent book. Now, having read "Sula," I wonder what took me so long to pick up another of her works.

  Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.

Toni Morrison's writing is honest and unyielding. She crafts characters who are consumed by an unquenchable fire, achieving this through a series of meticulously written moments. These are often ugly, heartbreaking scenes that manage to fully capture a person, a time, a place, or an injustice.

"Sula" is, at times, a peculiar book. It delves into the intense and complex relationship between two black women, Sula and Nel, from the 1920s to the 1940s. I immediately recognized it as the kind of book I adore: filled with small-town politics and gossip, intricate relationship dynamics, and raw, unrestrained storytelling.

It's a short, powerful story that I might call a bildungsroman if that term didn't seem a bit clichéd. Essentially, it's about Nel and Sula growing up in a world of racism, injustice, and segregation, becoming women, exploring their sexuality in vastly different ways, and leading very different lives. Their close friendship is torn apart by an act that is simultaneously straightforward, unforgivably wrong, yet also complex and multifaceted.

Sula is a captivating character. Bold, brash, and in some ways unlikable, yet it's impossible not to feel a deep sense of sympathy for her. In less than two hundred pages, this book takes you deep into the despair and loneliness of life in the Bottom, with Sula at its core.

Morrison is one of those authors who appears to have a profound understanding of certain aspects of life and human nature. I'm eagerly anticipating reading "The Bluest Eye" and "Song of Solomon."

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I want to first preface this with a concept presented by Harold Bloom. Bloom was discussing the admission or omission of 'ethnic' writers from the canon. He argued that the reason there were so many white male writers was not only due to the obvious societal factors of oppression but also because they were the ones doing most of the writing. Bloom does not think we should rewrite the canon with new ethnic writers just for the sake of having them. He DOES believe that an ethnic writer is important and should be acknowledged if they are good, but a significant number of them are not. Many of them simply write about ethnic scenarios and nothing else, which indeed presents a very limited scope.

Morrison has expressly stated that her goal is to create a black canon. This is the opposite of equality. We won't obtain a proper collection of amazing authors by insisting on a collection of just whites, just blacks, just Jews, and so on. The fact that Morrison ONLY writes about blacks and oppression further limits her writing. Don't misunderstand me; I know that Sula is also about women, motherhood, and families, but then again, most of her novels are. This novel, much like Beloved, is about the hardships of motherhood and being black. There are numerous instances in the novel that seem to do nothing but attack whites and men, sometimes both, sometimes just one, and they don't appear to be furthering a point or purpose in the novel except to say that men are kind of awful and whites are certainly awful.

Is the only way to write a story about black people to focus on when they were oppressed, segregated, and enslaved? I thought it was more complex than that. Similarly, I thought women were defined by something much larger than their sexual tendencies, but I'm now sure I was mistaken. I've been called a racist and a sexist for disliking Morrison. That's fine, well, no, it isn't, but what I mean is I don't care. I value ethnic writers who are good writers, not because they are ethnic, but because they are amazing writers (Sherman Alexie and James Baldwin come to mind). Morrison's stories are too similar for my taste, too acidic, too inflammatory. In my readings of her, her stories have numerous plot holes and unexplained oddities, but I guess that's an eccentricity that no one cares to comment on because her novels are so socially important. I'll continue to read books that are'socially unimportant' but manage to be remarkably well-structured, crafted, and told stories. I suppose that makes me quite an awful person, though.

I always had a certain perception of Toni Morrison. I thought of her as one of those writers that your mother might read, perhaps in the same vein as Danielle Steel. How mistaken I was!

For a novel that is relatively short, the scope of time and the complexity of the story it weaves are truly remarkable. I was completely captivated by the dichotomous friendship between Nel and Sula and the way it unfolded and led to its eventual result.

This novel is also surprisingly disturbing, in a way that reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis. There are elements that are quite disgusting, yet there is a certain allure to it. I have always had a penchant for twisted tales, and Toni Morrison has definitely won me over. I can't wait to read more of her works that are just as engaging and thought-provoking.

Please, give me more like this!

These events take place in a poverty-stricken black community named Medallion in Ohio during the 1920s.

The story mainly centers around two young women, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who have been fast friends since they were twelve years old. Despite coming from very different families, they share the same dreams and rely on each other for everything.

As they grow older, Sula moves away to live in the city, while Nel stays behind and marries a local boy. Sula misses her pal deeply, and years later, she returns home to see the person she considers as "the closest thing to both an other and a self."

However, something shocking is about to occur that will put their friendship to the ultimate test.

I believe this is the first time I've ever lamented about a novel being too short. It is less than 200 pages long and covers over fifty years in the lives of these characters. I desired to learn more about the friendship between Sula and Nel.

I think Sula's betrayal would have been even more egregious if we had more details about their relationship.

What the book does excellently is document the struggle against white oppression and present us with powerful, complex female characters to ponder upon. I wish I could have engaged with the story a bit more, but I still feel like I gained a great deal from it. And Toni Morrison truly has a remarkable talent for writing beautiful sentences.

Looking for great books to read during Black History Month and throughout the other eleven months? I'm going to share some of my favorites this month, hoping they'll find new readers!

Thanks for this book.

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.

This one gets 4 "please don't hit me again, Sula!" stars. And to be honest, for more than half of it, it was leaning towards 5 stars, not just because of Stockholm syndrome.

I had never read Toni Morrison before. Her name was at the top of my "authors I have never read, much to my great personal shame" list, along with Tolstoy, Balzac, Alice Munro, and others. Before this book, my impression of her was that she was a very rigidly literary American author who wrote important books about important themes, technically masterful but taking themselves very seriously and probably not much fun to read.

Well, that's not the case with this one, at least.

Right from the start, I was smitten. It had all the things I loved - it was like Winesburg, Ohio, it was grit lit, it was small-town gossip and neighborly scrutiny, it was the ingenuity of the disenfranchised, it was the sun rising like a hot white bitch, and best of all, it was FUN! But, like, my kind of fun, where people get set on fire and playtime ends in a body count. This is V.C. Andrews without the incest!

Now I understand why this book kept hurting me - Sula does NOT play nice. It's a rough book full of rough things too powerful to be contained between the covers of the book itself. Or maybe the book was just trying to get my attention because it knew I would like it so much. Either way, it was worth the price of a few battle scars marking me like Sula herself, whose birthmark gives her face a broken excitement.

To me, this book was absolute perfection when it focused on the childhood friendship of Sula and Nel, but it lost something once they grew up. Which is a shame because the childhood parts were SO GOOD. She writes the intensity of Nel and Sula's intertwined perfectly:

They never quarreled, those two, the way some girlfriends did over boys, or competed against each other for them. In those days, a compliment to one was a compliment to the other, and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other.

And she captures that transition from girlhood to half-understood sexuality wonderfully:

It was in that summer, the summer of their twelfth year, the summer of the beautiful black boys, that they became skittish, frightened and bold - all at the same time.

Although I have to say, her overreliance on the word "beautiful" as a descriptor for men and boys is grating. Every man is beautiful, which is statistically improbable, and it's also lazy writing in someone who has proven herself to be much better than that.

But back to the sexy bits, because you know I'm not into romance or erotica unless it involves all the hilarious ways a human can copulate with a monster or a tater tot or something like that. But human-on-human gyrations tend to leave me cold. However, while it doesn't involve actual intercourse, her descriptions of Sula and Nel at twelve, wishbone thin and easy-assed, walking to the ice cream store through the gauntlet of men who are themselves passing the time sitting on stoops watching women walk by, through this valley of eyes chilled by the wind and heated by the embarrassment of appraising stares, knowing and not-knowing their effect, delighted and ashamed all at once, and despite the fact that it's totally gross to call a situation in which men in their twenties up through to elderly gentlemen are ogling twelve-year-old girls "hot," still, there's something here that worked on me the way no Fifty Shades of Story of O has, and it comes from the perspective of the girls themselves, and the mysteries of what they have yet to experience:

It was not really Edna Finch's ice cream that made them brave the stretch of those panther eyes. Years later their own eyes would glaze as they cupped their chins in remembrance of the inchworm smiles, the squatting haunches, the track-rail legs straddling broken chairs. The cream-colored trousers marking with a mere seam the place where the mystery curled. Those smooth vanilla crotches invited them; those lemon-yellow gabardines beckoned to them.

They moved toward the ice-cream parlor like tightrope walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance of tension and balance. The least sideways glance, the merest toe stub, could pitch them into those creamy haunches spread wide with welcome. Somewhere beneath all of that daintiness, chambered in all that neatness, lay the thing that clotted their dreams.

So you see why I'm frustrated by her repetition of "beautiful" when she can pull off such superior writing. Even her descriptions of nature become erotic, although this passage has more of that b-word gumming up the works:

Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. And the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. Even their footsteps left a smell of smoke behind.

Very saucy stuff, that.

So, yeah - I really loved this book. I loved the final third less than the beginning because I didn't really understand what I was meant to be getting out of the story's turn, but it was still excellent writing, and it closed very nicely, so it's an easy four stars, and immunity granted for all injuries sustained.

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Okay, I finished the book. If it lets me live long enough, I will review it soon.

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IMPORTANT UPDATE: A SECOND ASSAULT UPON MY PERSON BY THIS BOOK:

Okay, so here's something weird. I started this book yesterday and read several chapters just before bed. When I woke up, I had this gigantic bruise on my eyelid:

I have no memory of any trauma to my eye (and I am eye-attack-phobic, so I'd remember) and I wear my glasses all day, which protects me from such trauma. The only way this could have happened would have been when my glasses were off, while I was asleep. When my glasses were off, while I was asleep, WITH THIS BOOK NEXT TO ME IN BED.

Seriously, Sula - what's your beef with me?

Although I gotta say, I like how it makes me look like I'm wearing fancy new wave eyeshadow.

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The final book in my quarterly literary fiction box from pagehabit:

Sula…

Here's the story with me and Sula. Long ago, when I was working at Barnes and Noble and we hosted the New Yorker Festival every year, I was in the back room on the fourth floor, gathering books to restock the festival displays. While I was grabbing books from a shelf far above my head with my monkey-arms, a hardcover copy of Sula slipped from the stack and its very solid lower spine-corner hit me right in the center of my skull with all the force of gravity and book-malice behind it. Naturally, I yelled "FUCK YOU, SULA," and naturally I vowed never to read that book, ever. But then this box-thing happened, and now I have to read it, regardless of the abuse I have suffered at its hands. Fortunately, this is a paperback, and it is not as tough as its momma. I remain vigilant - I could still get papercuts, after all…

Come to my blog!

I had the "first time read" of Toni Morrison in many years. And she truly didn't disappoint me. Her works are so deep and poignant that they always manage to speak to the cultural truths. She is simply incomparable. The way she weaves her stories and the emotions she evokes are truly remarkable. It's like taking a journey through different cultures and experiences. I read her works on Kindle, which made it even more convenient. I could carry her words with me wherever I went. I gave her book 4ish Stars because it was really that good. It made me think, feel, and appreciate the power of literature. I will definitely be reading more of Toni Morrison's works in the future.

So I found myself reading the last pages while sitting in a bar.

The soft glow of the lights and the gentle hum of conversations around me provided a strange backdrop to the story unfolding in my hands.

As I reached the final lines, emotions welled up within me, and before I knew it, tears were streaming down my face.

To my dismay, the bartender, who had been going about his business, noticed my state. Now, he knows what I look like when I'm crying.

Thankfully, I already had a glass of wine in front of me. I took a sip, allowing the smooth liquid to soothe my raw nerves.

The wine seemed to blend with my tears, creating a bittersweet concoction that mirrored the complex emotions I was feeling at that moment.

I sat there, lost in thought, the story still echoing in my mind, and the bartender's gaze a silent witness to my vulnerability.

Despite that rather strange author hand placement thing, I have been seriously fixating on all these author photos of Morrison's huge lion's head on the back of her books. I search for some external indication of all the furious, demented, and psychotic stuff within. However, by all appearances, she seems to be a lovely woman. It has reached a point where I have to stick duct tape over the author photo. That way, every time I read some crazy stuff and my OCD acts up, I won't be able to flip to the back cover and stare anymore.

Once again, there are the hands.





The hands seem to add an element of mystery to the whole situation. I can't help but wonder why they are placed in such a particular way. Maybe it's a subconscious gesture or a deliberate choice to convey something specific.