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Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)

Toni Morrison

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Why we're reading this: author guest and book mentioned November 19, 2014
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last updated Jul 26, 2012 02:50PM

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Jan 22, 2011 B. P. Rinehart rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history-stuff, un-decade-african-descent, modernism-and-post-modernism-stuff

"Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
the corpse of mercy rots with him,
rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.

But, oh, the living look at you
with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,
whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark
to strike you like a leper’s claw.

You cannot stare that hatred down
or chain the fear that stalks the watches
and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;
cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,
the timeless will." - Middle Passage by Robert Hayden

T "Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
the corpse of mercy rots with him,
rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.

But, oh, the living look at you
with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,
whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark
to strike you like a leper’s claw.

You cannot stare that hatred down
or chain the fear that stalks the watches
and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;
cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,
the timeless will." - Middle Passage by Robert Hayden

This book lives up to its reputation. I have known about this book virtually my whole life, long before I thought to be a reader. This book and its author was very celebrated when I was born and the copy I was reading from is from a family member's. For this reason I feel like I am the last person in my family to read this book and I know I am among the last people on Goodreads to read this book. It is because of that, I will not spend this review talking a lot about the plot of the book or my feelings on the author like I did in my review of Song Of Solomon, but I want to talk about the language of the book. This seems to be something that is a specific trademark of Toni Morrison's work of this time.

Because of how famous this book is, I knew the whole plot of it years before I decided to read it. Because of its fame, many people have already discussed this book on the same grounds, "slavery is bad and makes everyone sad." I cannot hope to tread any better than my fellow Goodreads reviewers, but will touch a little bit on it here. I liked the use of memory in this novel (similar to the use of (view spoiler) in Song of Solomon). I liked how what was presently happening could be followed with a past memory. This is the crux of Beloved herself. The question of what she literally is, is secondary to what she represents which is the living(?) manifestation of memory. She seems to have the supernatural ability to bring out the repressed-memories of anyone she comes in contact with. The fact that she is surrounded by people who were formerly en-slaved means that these are some profoundly horrifying memories. The end of the book seems to all but confirm this.

What I really liked about this book was the use of language. I brought it up in my review of Song of Solomon, but it is done very well here as well. Morrison has a very clear command at the written interpretation of African-American Vernacular English. AAVE is something that non-African-Americans think they know, but simply cannot reinterpret. It is even harder to reproduce AAVE in the written word (which even certain black writers have a hard time writing-down). When reading the "dialect" poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar compared to the actual transcripts of folk songs or prose from the formerly enslaved it is clear that being able to write AAVE is a special skill. Toni Morrison masters it throughout this novel and she gets the time-period slang correct. Many people outside the African-American community confuse AAVE and black slang. AAVE contains certain grammar rules that have remained constant over approximately the last 200 years more or less. Slang is vocabulary that can change every year. It takes a skilled writer who can know this and demonstrate it correctly. This is one thing I continually appreciate about Morrison.

The use of southern gothic in the mid-west is another big theme here. If one doubts the influence of Faulkner on her writing, the latter-half of this book would more than convince. Of course the main literary influence is magical realism. The horrific absurdities of slavery and the supernatural occurrences that plague the ex-slaves during Reconstruction, are given the magical-realist treatment you expect to see in a Gabriel García Márquez book. It serves the narrative well, even when you started to know Morrison was playing-up the trope (during the chapters looking into the mental state of the characters).

I really liked and appreciate what this book did for the literary-canon. Because of time, I was not as devastated by it as the people who first read this book three years before I was born, but I understand its impact. I will still probably have a higher regard for Song of Solomon, but that is not to say that I do not realize why this book is the centerpiece of Ms. Morrison's work. ...more

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