Beloved
By Toni Morrison
Publication Year: 1987
Type: Fiction
Genre: historical fiction, magical realism, horror
Read on 2020-08-16
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2020 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★☆
This book was painful, poetic, cinematic, chaotic, terrifying, elegiac. It took me two months to read, and I had to break it up with other less intense books. I’ve never read Toni Morrison before so I don’t know if she always writes like this or it was just this book which was so insanely ambitious. The intensity and totality of Morrison’s language is overwhelming, but it completely envelops you in the drama and horror of these characters’ stories. I have never read anything quite like it, no prose that is so saturated with layers upon layers of meaning and emotion. She blends the vernacular dialogue of her characters with elegiac descriptions of their inner worlds. In doing so she breathes so much dignity and humanity into fictionalized figures representing real people who had to struggle with the psychological, intergenerational trauma of being enslaved.
The book has a fairly minimal plot but unfolds like a psychological thriller mystery, as you discover the chilling past of Sethe who lives alone with her daughter in a house haunted by her dead baby, Beloved. The story of her life in enslavement by a “kindly” white couple at Sweet Home, the traumas of her life there, her escape and its aftermath are told non-chronologically, interspersed with the parallel story of Paul D’s life, as well as the present-day struggles of Sethe’s daughter Denver with a life in protected isolation.
This book definitely asks a lot more of its reader than most other literary books I’ve read. The reader cannot be a passive recipient of information reading Morrison’s writing - even to follow a simple sequence of events you have to wade through a fair bit of dense poetic prose and a lot of figurative language. But even though it took me a long time I really enjoyed the reading process and appreciate the magical realist and horror elements that were woven into the historical era. I think I struggled most with how intensely and intimately Morrison’s writing brings you to the characters’ pain and trauma. This books probably isn’t for everyone, but I am very excited to read more Toni Morrison (I have a copy of Tar Baby that I’ll read next).
Also I tried to watch the 90s movie (starring Oprah and Thandie Newton!) but it just really doesn’t work as a film.
