Bibliomusings: Paradise--Toni Morrison

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Paradise--Toni Morrison

Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 1997
Rating: 4/5
Pages: 352

"They shoot the white girl first."

I have yet to be disappointed in Toni Morrison. This novel centers around a town founded by freed slaves who were rejected in other towns, immersed in its own history and fully self-sufficient. But there is an underlying current of unease. The town has split into two factions of founder's descendants, and debates are raging. The children are different, moved by the civil rights movement and other signs of the times. Outside of town is an old convent, which has somehow become a boarding house for women hurt, lost, or rejected. They live together trying to create their own eden, a place where they can be who they are and heal. But the tension in the town only grows when faced with these brazen, strange women, and in the end misunderstanding erupts into horrible violence.

I can't say I truly understand what happens in the end. Like other Morrison books I've read, reality verges into something else, something religious and other-worldly, and I'm still mulling it over in my mind. Somehow this doesn't detract from the book, but adds to the overall feel.

Book-a-week #: 21
Date Read: 4/3/09
Challenge/s: TBR (Alt)

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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)