Bibliomusings: Beloved--Toni Morrison

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Beloved--Toni Morrison

Year Published: 1987
Pages: 288
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 4/5

"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children."

Thus begins Beloved, an amazing story of strength, courage, perserverence, and desperation. Set in Ohio in the late 1800s and revolving around the family of an escaped slave, Sethe, it is a haunting tale of the effects of slavery. "Beloved" refers to the headstone of the grave of one of the children she lost after Sethe's escape, and the ghost of said child haunts the house Sethe occupies with her other daughter, Denver. When a fellow slave of the plantation from which Sethe fled appears on her doorstep, he and the ghost face-off, which sets off a series of events and forces Sethe to confront the horrors and secrets of her past.

This is a beautifully written tale of beauty and horror. The characters are haunted by their past, by the grievances they have suffered and by their responses to their treatment, as much as 124 is haunted by Beloved. Whether or not the ghost is "real" becomes secondary; the character's pasts are true and haunting enough.

Book-a-Week # 2
Challenge/s: Decades, A-Z, New Classics

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Great Quotes

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." (Atticus, To Kill a Mockingbird; Harper Lee)

"But maybe the last part of the symphony was the music she loved the best--glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way. Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen." (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers)

"Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." (The Road; Cormac McCarthy)

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Douglas Adams)

"I ought not to have listened to her," he confided to me one day. "One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace. This tale of claws, which disturbed me so much, should only have filled my heart with tenderness and pity."

And he continued his confidences: "The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little strategems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her..." (The Little Prince; Anton de Saint-Exupery)

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. (Betting on the Muse; Charles Bukowski)

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. (Tom Robbins)

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears. (The Prophet; Kahlil Gibran)

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. (C.S. Lewis)

"For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who--one word--love." (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers)