Beloved
1987
- african american history
- ohio
- history
- 19th century
- fiction
- reading level-grade 9
- reading level-grade 11
- reading level-grade 10
- reading level-grade 12
- 1000blackgirlbooks
The story
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. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldn
What it’s like
Dense, incantatory prose that moves between present-tense haunting and fractured memory, with a voice that loops back on itself like breath held too long. The atmosphere is a small house at the edge of a post-war Ohio town, rendered in close, sensory detail: the damp of a sunless cellar-like hush, the weight of a summer kitchen, the chill of a presence that arrives without warning. Its vibe is heavy, mournful and luminous at once, a slow-burning ghost story about grief that refuses to stay buried. It suits a quiet, unhurried reading stretch, a cold evening when you can give the sentences your full attention, or a second read that reveals new layers. Pacing is deliberately uneven: long, looping passages alternate with sudden jolts of memory and confrontation. Emotionally it is unflinching, following a mother's fierce, guilt-edged love and the slow, painful unsettling of a household that has been holding its breath for years. The intensity is high: the violence of slavery is recounted directly, including infanticide, whippings and sexual assault, and it lands with weight rather than spectacle, with dread more than gore. It is not gentle. It is for readers who want serious, literary fiction that confronts American history head-on and trusts language to carry the horror and the tenderness together.
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