Beloved
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
15mentions
14people
2009–2026years
40% recommend53% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > I like to think that books (novels and fantasy) are low-resolution prose, so the crux of the matter is distributed — mostly useless info — across several pages.
Well, novels are just more subtle. A good novel will get you deep into the emotional landscape of it's subject, or give you a vivid portrait of a scene that is happening, or transport you to a historical or future time. You get to embody a particular character or world, which builds your own personal knowledge and empathy. We're not just reading a collection of facts or statements. We can get lost in the beauty of a landscape we've never visited before in a novel, which is the crux of the matter, even if it doesn't seem like it.
Those sorts of novels tend to be challenging to read, but most things worth doing challenge us. If you've never read something like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Gabo's 100 Years of Solitude, or many of the other great artistic achievements in literature, you really should challenge yourself to do so. They make us better.
- Heck, the Virginia governor-elect cashed in on this "faux outrage" because a high school senior was so mentally injured by the book Beloved, one of the most regarded pieces of American fiction in the past 50 years.
- I love this opening and it’s one I think about more than I should. I recently read his Chronicle of a Death Foretold and it’s opening felt drawn from this one.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved opening is breathtaking as well.
- My heart is breaking. Toni Morrison was one of the greatest writers of our time. I loved Beloved, but The Bluest Eye is my favorite.
- My first intro to Morrison was thru 'The Bluest Eye'. Afterwards I read many of her books incl 'Beloved'. I loved all of them.
One thing I could however never understand was how a person with such deep insights into the African American experience could call Bill Clinton, 'the first Black President'. I thought at first maybe there was something I didn't understand. But as years passed, I've been increasingly feeling that perhaps that wasn't the case.
- Beloved by Toni Morisson. Such beautiful prose.
