Sula

Rating:
Summary: The last Oprah pick is another good one.
Review: When I first heard this would be the last Oprah pick I knew I had to read it. I am not the biggest fan of Toni Morrison but I was happy to have said I read this book.

Sula and Nel are childhood friends who grow up in a small town in Ohio and have a lot of things in common with each other. But each girl is different in there own ways. Sula is the meaner or the two and the more vocal where as Nel is the more quiet and laided back type.

As the years go by each girl makes a life for themselves. Nel decides to stay where she lives. She marrys and raises a family. Sula on the other hand goes and travels the country and is what people would call a rebel.

When Sula comes back she comes back and stirs up a lot of problems with the people in the town and makes herself to look to be a bad person. Nel on the other hand continues to live her life after what Sula has done to her.

The friendship in this book was wonderful and I loved how Toni Morrison put it all together and made such a wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: ooooohhh suuuula
Review: This is a generalization, but for most people, the movie scenes that cause us to cover our eyes are the same ones that make us inclined to keep watching the film. These same kind of passages are found continuously throughout Toni Morrison's Sula. Sula holds the same intensity and drama of a romance novel yet is written with the shocking talent of a Nobel Prize winning piece of literature. It is grotesquely beautiful and painfully honest, exploring the individual and mutual identity of two young black women growing up in the Midwest.
Morrison traces the lives of Sula and Nel , who are inseparable through childhood, barely able to distinguish themselves from each other. Their friendship is indestructible, until they suddenly take drastically different paths-Nel a path of small town domesticity, while Sula takes off to a wild life of college and city experiences. When Sula returns, they struggle to keep a friendship together despite their changed ways and lifestyles, deciding what is important to them-what is unforgivable and what can be overlooked.
This book is amazing, and worth reading simply for the beautiful writing, although the storyline does add to the appeal. It makes you question your own values-ideas of what is right and what is wrong, who is good and who is bad. It becomes clear through reading this that it is a fine line between these things, and that sometimes friendship is more important than morals.

Rating:
Summary: Twisted
Review: You can always depend on Ms. Morrison for unusual twists and turns. This novel was interesting, moreso for its poetic style than for the plot. You almost dreaded to know what would happen next. The ending was abrupt so say the least. I felt that there could have been much more to the story. Sula with a child maybe? Something. All in all still a decent book.

Rating:
Summary: Sula
Review: Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, SULA, her second book (THE BLUEST EYES 1st book). Uses many words to describe the many adventures two women have growing up together in the town of Medallion, Ohio in the 1900's. From childhood to adulthood separated at a young age, they go through crime and death as children and as adult's lead separate lives. Sula is a woman who tries to fight for her beliefs and Nel has chosen a life of love and glory.
As Gisele Toueg said "lyrical and gripping, SULA is a n honest look at the power of friendship amid a backdrop of family love, race and human condition." Sula moves away to go to college while Nel stays in medallion, Ohio, marries and has a child. When Sula comes back from college the bond between her and Nel never broke, as we can see here.
"Suddenly Nel stopped. Her eye twitched and burned a little. 'Sula', she whispered, gazing at the top of trees. 'Sula?' leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of overripe green things..."
Shadrack another character in this book played a large but laid back role. "At the edge of the porch, gathering the wisps of courage that were fast leaving her, she turned once more to look at him, to ask him...had he...?
He was smiling, a great smile, heavy with lust and time to come. He nodded his head as though answering a question, and said, in a pleasant conversational tone, a tone of cooled butter, 'Always'" Shadrack was a man who started national suicide day, he was a war veteran who lived in a shack.
"...The only black man who could curse white people and get away with it, who drank from the mouth of the bottle, who shouted and shook in the streets." This was Shadrack.
Toni Morrison uses her words like lyrical prose. Her descriptions are amazing. Toni has to be among one of the best writers out there

Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: POSSIBLE SPOILERS

This is the fourth book I've read from Toni Morrison (previous ones I've read were Paradise, Beloved, Song of Solomon). It's a great book about a story of two friends, Nel and Sula who go their separate ways after Nel's wedding and reunite after 10 years. I liked the book but I was a little disgusted on how Morrison likes to write about character's bodily functions in gory detail, which I deducted one star from the 5 star rating...hence the 4 star rating. Still, it's a good book.

Rating:
Summary: What a wonderful book!!
Review: I belong to a book club. This was one of the books selected. I was a bit skeptical at first. I can say that this was my favorite book that I have read in the club. We have read over 30 books so far and I am so glad someone picked this one. This is a treasure.

Rating:
Summary: Sula
Review: Toni Morrison's second novel, "Sula", is a wonderful piece of artwork that spans many decades, revealing the growth of the African-American society and the sentiments felt by those who have observed it.

"Sula" is like a duel novel, where we are told the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace. They are women separated by differing outlooks on life and then reunited when they feel middle age.

Nel is our flat character, the one who remains the same; she is the "sensible" one, where she stays in her hometown and does what every African-American woman is doing at the time, being subservient to the rest of society.

Sula, however, is our tragic figure, the one who goes out to receive an education, who betters herself and refuses to see the gates that whites and blacks have put up for her.

It is a moving and powerful story, where there are so many vivid moments that make you want to cringe, to vomit (e.g. Sula slicing her finger), but this only adds to the splendor and magic of this novel. Although this is definitely not an original idea, for Nella Larsen did it in her novel "Passing", Morrison is working with controversial subject matter, and it is amazing to see her succeed at it.

"Sula" is a mini-epic that is bound to move the reader at the power of friendship and the bonds that these women share, even through the trials and tribulations of mid-twentieth century life.

Rating:
Summary: Her Best
Review: This is Toni Morrison's best book, and I've read all of them. It's also the best book I've ever read about female friendship. Thanks Ms. Morrison for a book I've savored all my life.

Rating:
Summary: First Morrison I have read -- middling grade
Review: Sula has pluses and minuses. Let's start with some of the pluses: an interesting plot in an interesting setting. Some beautiful writing. The description of Sula's household growing up is colorful and engaging. Those are important things. I do have some other less flattering comments:

Morrison sometimes seems intentionally obscure to me, by heightening the difficulty for the reader, despite the fact that the plot events are often attention-grabbing. The central event of the book can almost be missed at first if one is not paying closeattention, for example. The exact source of Sula's antagonism towards her grandmother is also unclear. It strikes me at these times as very much a novel by the academic Morrison is.

SPOILER! I also found the group suicide which concludes the book's 1941 episode gratuitous, unnecessary and utterly unbelievable. I'm not sure why Morrison included this plot development -- what does it really add? -- but it's a serious plotting mistake. A mass suicide is too major an event to be included in passing -- either concentrate on it or don't include it.

It's worth mentioning that Sula, from 1973, is dated in its moral attitudes. Morrison documents a series of absolutely horrible events -- murders of children by their mothers, Sula's institutionalization of her grandmother, and lesser sins like adultery and fights -- with no reprimands. The only time she issues moral judgement is by placing scare quotes around "good" as in "the 'good women' ". The work reeks of an early-1970s radicals' moral permissiveness which strikes me as odd, reading it in 2003.

A more substantive aesthetic criticism is that the final scene, in 1965, just doesn't pack the punch it could have. A personal judgement.

So the novel has good and bad.

Rating:
Summary: Its a 10-Star book!!
Review: Sula was a re-read for me and it was awesome! It was like tasting your favorite ice-cream sundae all over again. Letting the familiar flavors and fragrances wash all over you while the taste sinks on your taste buds and remains there forever. Sula is like that sundae with loads of nuts and various toppings of regret, friendship, love, betrayal and above all redemption. What made this book even more better was the fact that all the loose ends that were left untied the last time I read it, were complete and made all sense to me this time round.

"Sula" is a world in itself. A world defined by loss and womanhood. A world that is not restricted to Bottom - it could be anywhere and could occur at anytime. This book spans between 1921-1965 taking readers to a journey in the lives of two girls, Sula Peace and Nel Wright as they become friends, share secrets and make their way into womanhood. What I liked about the book was its simplicity - yeah it was simple as would not be generally expected out of Morrison's' works.

This 174 page so-called novella shows readers what it is that friendship can sometimes do and sometimes cannot. Sula Peace is one character that is so enigmatic and rich - she leaves her hometown called Bottom (which has a funny yet moving significance in the book) only to return and add to the anger of the residents. Sula is a woman of a different sort. Growing up in a poor black mid-western town, she lives in a home where men often visit, but don't stay very long. Her grandmother and mother allow men to satisfy their respective sexual desires, but don't need them in their lives on a permanent basis.

Out of this environment, and through other events in her youth (including ten years in the outside world attending college and living in different parts of the country), Sula arrives back at home as an attractive woman who, like her mother and grandmother before her, "uses" a different man every night to satisfy inner urges but nothing else. There is no love for Sula. She has exercised her freedom and independence by becoming the ultimate "player", loving and leaving them all over town, married or not. She even loves and leaves her best friend's husband, destroying both marriage and friendship.

And with nary a care. Until one day when an older man, Ajax, comes calling. He is kind but not possessive. They are a perfect match. They enjoy each other's company, and they certainly enjoy their time together in bed, but they don't need each other. They are two free spirits who can love and stay with each other precisely because their partner could care less. That is, until Sula starts to care. When she sets the table for two, cleans house, makes the bed, and "expects" Ajax to show, well, that's the end of that.

love, love, love,
makes you do foolish things.
sit alone by the phone,
a phone that never rings.
hoping to hear you say
that you love me still,
knowing, knowing, you never will.

Some pretty nasty things happen to and around Sula on the way to her adulthood of free and open choice. In freely bedding any man she chooses, she becomes hated. She is the town pariah. A witch. Evil incarnate. In fact, the whole town measures their worth, their piety in direct contrast to Sula's evil. She is their yardstick. When she dies, when the yardstick goes away, they have no feedback loop, and fall into evil chaos themselves. Toni Morrison presents a clear view that evil makes us virtuous by comparison. In Sula, the entire town finds virtue by hating Sula.
Sula, was, until Ajax, the only woman in the town who could resist the standard operating procedure, the moral code: "You need a man". To achieve that level of freedom in her time, she had to become, in many respects, the epitome of evil. Sula has to make some awful choices or sacrifices to be the person she chooses to be, to live her life as she pleases. The young Sula mutilates her own finger with a knife to prove herself a worthy opponent. "If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I'll do to you?"

Sula has many layers - I feel that the book was written with much integrity and a lot of afterthought. Toni Morrison observes the racial issues with such strength and vigor that the portrayal of which in the book is breathtaking. We also meet characters from her earlier books such as Tar Baby and the Deweys - which do have their significance in the book - only that it is lost after a certain point. The central link though is a drunk lost war fellow called Shadrack who comes across very strongly celebrating "Suicide Day". Toni Morrison uses Sula to help the reader analyze the conditions that have created Afro-American life in America. The picture is not always appealing, but there are some clear issues available for deep empathy and discussion.