Beloved: Pulitzer Prize Winner (Vintage International)
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This "powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinching look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. With an afterword by the author and a new introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
“A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
“Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work.” —The New York Times
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Readers say *Beloved* is a haunting, emotionally intense novel praised for its poetic language and exploration of trauma, memory, and resilience. Many...
The story itself is ok. But she tells it in this really confusing manner that I don't think was either necessary or additive to the story. You just get these massive dumps of backstory, but told from within the consciousness of a character in the first person. Often she mentions a character for the first time as though you are just supposed to know who they are because after all the character thinking / remembering already does. Almost all of the action of the novel is in the past, and all of it is told out of order. Basically I just don't recommend reading this novel if you aren't willing to either take notes or read it again soon afterwards. I don't mind this technique - I love Woolf and Joyce and other free indirect discourse and interior monologue novels - but I don't think Morrison is as good at it because 1. she doesn't give you as many handholds to figure out who is talking and when things are happening and 2. she uses it on ALL of the characters in the novel in virtually equal measure rather than primarily focused on the main characters. You never know what is important and what is a throw away background detail. And ultimately in this particular novel, the theme is not that well developed and the story just isn't that great. Oh and also there's a child bride, which I understand is a historical phenomena but I don't think would have happened in the place and time and manner described here. It felt like a shocker - not realistic.
The underlying story of the brutality of slavery was great but the goofiness of the fantasy portion of the book drew away from that.
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