Sula
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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2recommend
5mentions
4people
2013–2024years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I love Ursula Le Guin's writing so damn much. I am reading, "Lathe of Heaven" right now, such a great book to come off of Sula by Toni Morrison.
Maybe if I pull the right strings, I can get reincarnated as one of Luisito's nose hairs, https://luisurrea.com/2018/01/tolfink-was-here-on-ursula-k-l...
> Then she terrorized us by bringing Toni Morrison into the room to meet us.
- I suggested Toni Morrison and held without a doubt that she was the greatest living writer until her passing last year. She'll likely always hold that top spot in my mind, no one can compare. Go read "Sula" or "Song of Solomon" or "Beloved" or "The Bluest Eye". Her work will make you a better human.
- (Disclaimer: I have not read any “actual” work by Toni Morrison, so my knowledge is limited to the following, which I wanted to share.)
There's a great profile of the editor Robert Gottlieb who worked with her, including a few wonderful quotes from Toni Morrison revealing how she worked (search the page for "Morrison"; there are about 10 quotes), from 1994: https://web.archive.org/web/20161227170954/http://www.thepar... — the whole thing is a great read even if you don't care about Toni Morrison (every lover of reading is likely to enjoy it), but if you do, it may just be a few snippets that you might have otherwise missed as it's not “about” Toni Morrison.
> [Morrison] Writing my first two books, The Bluest Eye and Sula, I had the anxiety of a new writer who needs to make sure every sentence is exactly the right one. Sometimes that produces a kind of precious, jeweled quality—a tightness, which I particularly wanted in Sula. Then after I finished Sula and was working on the third book, Song of Solomon, Bob said to me, You can loosen, open up. Your writing doesn’t have to be so contained; it can be wider. I’m not sure these were his exact words, but I know that the consequence of the remarks was that I did relax and begin to open up to possibilities. It was because I was able to open up to those possibilities that I began to think things like, What would happen if indeed I followed this strange notion or image or picture I had in my mind of this woman who had no navel . . . whereas normally I would have dismissed such an idea as recklessness. It was as if he had said, Be reckless in your imagination.
> [Gottlieb] I remember the discussion with Toni as she was beginning Song of Solomon, because although we always did some marginal cosmetic work on her manuscripts, obviously a writer of her powers and discrimination doesn’t need a lot of help with her prose. I think I served Toni best by encouraging her—helping to free her to be herself. The only other real help I gave to her was noneditorial: I encouraged her to stop editing and to write full-time, something I knew she wanted to do. As I remember it, I reassured her about her finances—but what I was really saying was, You’re not an editor who does some writing, you’re a writer—acknowledge it; there’s nothing to be scared of. We always understood each other—two editors, two lovers of reading, and exactly the same age.
[…]
> [Morrison] Writing for me is just a very sustained process of reading. The only difference is that writing a book might take three or four years, and I’m doing it. I never wrote a line until after I became an editor, and only then because I wanted to read something that I couldn’t find. That was the first book I wrote.
- Just finished the recent Ta-Nehisi Coates "Between the World and Me" and Toni Morrison's "Sula". Currently, I'm nearly finished with "The Feast of the Goat" by Mario Vargas Llosa.
- Pete Warden would like you to use public APIs: http://petewarden.com/2013/09/09/why-you-should-stop-piratin... . Also, the association of low ground with poverty is old. Toni Morrison riffed on it in Sula: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sula_(novel)
