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Beloved |
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Author:
Toni Morrison
By Vintage
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £3.55
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780099760115
ISBN: 0099760118
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 1997-08-21
Publisher: Vintage
Studio: Vintage |
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Amazon.co.uk Review
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved. A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law. Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilber
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Haunting, profoundly brilliant--an honor to read it., 2008-10-20
Beloved is a masterpiece. Beautifully written--deeply moving and deeply disturbing. I have never read a novel that I found touched my heart the way this did.
It is a unique story. A kind of ghost story but far more than that. It is a haunting of the heart, the soul--the being.
It will haunt me for the rest of my life.
"That woman is crazy, [but] ain't we all?", 2007-09-15
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1988, Toni Morrison frees herself from the bonds of traditional narrative and establishes an independent style, just as her characters have freed themselves from the horrors of slavery and escaped from Kentucky to Ohio. Revealing the story of Sethe and her family as they survive the brutality of the farm, only to encounter torments even more punishing than whippings after they escape, Morrison presents scenes in a seemingly random order, each scene revealing some aspect of life for Sethe, her boys, her dead baby Beloved, and the new baby Denver, both in the past and in the present. Moving back and forth, around, and inside out through Sethe's recollections, she gradually reveals Sethe's story to the reader, its horror increasing as the reader makes the connections which turn disconnected scenes into a powerful and harrowing chronology.
As the novel opens, Sethe and Denver have lived in #124, a house in Ohio, for eighteen years, refusing to socialize and enjoying no company. When Paul D. Garner, one of the Sweet Home men and a friend of her long-missing husband, arrives on her doorstep and moves in, Sethe slowly reveals her long-buried nightmares, and the two share their stories of the events leading up to their escape. Most haunting to Sethe is the death of her young daughter Beloved, shortly after the escape from the farm, though the reader does not know for many pages the shocking manner of her death. When a ghostly figure who calls herself Beloved arrives at #124, shortly after Paul D., Morrison creates mystery and a heart-stoppingly tense atmosphere, when Beloved, too, moves in. As Beloved gradually takes over the household and seems to demand and then possess Sethe's soul, the sorrow which has burdened Sethe seems close to breaking her.
The sadism of some slave-owners, the devices used to torture, and the desperate measures some slaves took to protect themselves and their loved ones come fully alive here, the horrors growing as the reader gradually discovers the real source of Sethe's torment. By forcing the reader to make the connections, instead of spelling out details in a traditional narrative, Morrison strengthens the impact of the novel and its brutal revelations. Symbols of water, rain, snow, and ice connect the disparate scenes, and the use of shadows and the ghostly character of Beloved keep the reader on tenterhooks until the action is eventually resolved. A powerful, atmospheric, and shocking novel, Beloved is also a searing indictment of slavery and the damage it has done to the fabric of life, damage that cannot be repaired until it is fully recognized through novels such as this. Mary Whipple
 A powerful and heartfelt indictment of the monstrousness and stupidity of the slave trade, 2007-06-08
Toni Morrison's powerful and heartfelt indictment of the monstrousness and stupidity of the slave trade, where individuals were forced to commit atrocious acts as mechanisms for survival, does not make easy reading. It is by necessity raw and uncompromising as she shifts between the past and present of individuals whose lives have been battered and bludgeoned beyond recall. This book again demonstrates how much more effective novels can be than dry historical texts at recapturing periods and events in the past. The principal character is Sethe who some twenty years previously had murdered her baby daughter Beloved to prevent her from being sold into slavery. The story is concerned with the return of the spirit child and her desire for retribution against her mother who continues to love her in spite of all.
I wonder though if this novel was not the definitive word on the subject as the twentieth century threw up events that surpassed in scale and in evil intent - the pathological obsession with the total industrial annihilation of a segment of humanity rather than the ruthless desire for a limitless supply of expendable free labour - even the transatlantic slave trade. Ultimately, the starkness of the narrative, the supernatural element, and the somewhat abstract portrayal of the central characters acted as impediments to believability, and consequently some of the sympathy was lost. A great work, though.
NOT A GREAT TITLE FOR A REVIEW BUT 'BRILLIANT' WILL SUFFICE, 2008-08-14
Engaging, involving, powerful business. Stays with you long after the last drop has been drained from the glass.
Very complicated read, 2008-05-26
My daughter saw the film to this and said it was a good story so i thought i'd try the book. After reading the book reviews i thought i wouudn't mind a challenge, well i made it to pg 133 and just couldn't go anymore. It is very descriptive and Toni Morrison seemed to go off into another dimension and it became quite tedious, sorry folks, but for those who made it to the end, well done, my imagination was stretched to the limit, had to have a long lie down for a week after this ordeal.
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