Sula

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Summary: Beauty and Innocence in Morrison¿s Sula
Review: I really enjoyed this book, and was quite surprised to read something so intriguing for a college course. Toni Morrison has such a beautiful way of describing not only common-place occurrences, but horrible tragedies. The novel is honestly disturbing, but some readers may find it terrible amusing...which is perhaps what makes it such a disturbing piece of fiction. Every character in this novel has a unique story, and the reader is also made to feel that even from characters rarely discussed. The town setting, which the narrator admits is little more than a neighborhood, has a story of its own. The tale of "the Bottom" is actually sad more than anything else, but holds a haunting beauty. And the characters all seem to carry a certain innocence. Morrison allows everyone to retain a surprising child-like purity. This is most evident example of this is the "deweys" who despite growing older, remain "forty-eight inches tall", since they remained boys in mind. Sula is arguably the "hardest" or least emotional character throughout the story. However, the reader may gather by then end that she is simply practical, and perhaps the only character who always remains true. Death is a definite theme in this book, and the ways in which characters bite the dust are shocking and fantastical. Once again, however, it seems that Morrison uses death not as an end, but as a renewal or return to innocence. In death Morrison allows her characters enlightenment of sorts, that may also touch others who still live. All and all, Sula is a thought-provoking work with amazing imagery and a story that I think everyone who reads it could relate to.

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Summary: Sula: A Working Class Novel About the Search for Identity
Review: Toni Morrison's novel Sula is a moving story which explores the African American woman's search for identity. More specifically it is the tale of two black females, Nel and Sula, who grow up as best friends in a segregated Ohio town nicknamed the Bottom. Nel is reserved while Sula is impulsive and together their opposites compliment one another and fuse the two separate girls into one. Both girls find great comfort in their closeness and this unity becomes something which they both cling to while they are growing up. The girls find their identities in each other and therefore their friendship seems almost necessary for their survival in this world dominated by whites or males. As the girls stretch into womanhood they no longer look to one another for glimpses of their own identities but instead seek elsewhere. Nel turns to her husband Jude and when he leaves her she finds that she is without any real sense of herself. Her identity was merely an extension of his.

When Sula returns to the Bottom after years of being away, she realizes that the numerous lovers she has had and the many cities she has traveled to, have not filled the void within her. Sula unsuccessfully sought her identity in these things and when she attempted two more relationships with men back in the Bottom, the outcome for her was disastrous and caused the severance of her relationship with Nel. In the end both women are left alone in the world which isolated them, too stubborn now in their differences to see eye to eye.

Sula is considered a piece of "Working Class Literature" as it celebrates both the triumphs and tribulations in the lives of every day people. Morrison uses beautiful language as she paints the vivid scenes in her working class characters' lives but she never glamorizes either their successes or struggles. Morrison's voice is instead strong and real as she accurately depicts both the moments of intense pain and beauty in the lives of ordinary people.

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Summary: How do you know?
Review: Sula is a novel exploring the themes of identity, evil, love and loyalty in a black community called the "bottom". These themes are explored through the profound friendship between two young girls named Sula and Nel. Nel choses a traditional life consisting of being a mother,wife, and upstanding citizen. Sula, on the other hand, tries to forage her identity by leaving the "bottom".
When she returns to the community ten years later, it is as a woman who is almost the opposite of what the community values. She is not interested in conforming to societal norms and, instead, makes up her own rules.
How does one's individual identity effect the community identity? The reaction of the "bottom" and her friend Nel to the new Sula creates a moving and powerful novel which forces you to question your own morality. As Sula says near the end of the novel, "About who was good. How you know it was you?"(146).

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Summary: Sula: Myth with Reality
Review: Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison presents a work of art within her work of literature Sula, as she communicates a mythically charged but identifiable narrative of the lives of two black women struggling to come to terms with their identity, within a community struggling to come to terms with itself.
Set in a post-WWI underprivileged midwestern black community known simply as the Bottom, the story follows two friends, Sula and Nel, from childhood to old age and death. Sula, the impulsive, and Nel, the emotional one, can be seen as opposites who compliment one another as they grow into womanhood clinging to each other, making up for what the other lacks. Ironically, it is their differences which comforted one another as children which will eventually tear their friendship apart as adults, as their moral and lifestyle differences spark their departure from one another. Both Nel, a woman who chose to never leave the Bottom, marry, raise a family and become a pillar of the black community, and Sula, a woman who rejected the life Nel had embraced as she escaped to college and submerged herself in city life, are forced to face the consequences of their elected means as Sula's return to her birthplace clashes with Nel and the rest of the community, as she is viewed only as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Their personal struggles are complimented by the exertions which plague the working class community of the Bottom which is slowly deteriorating and threatened by white landowners who intend to take over the land for the construction of a golf course.
Sula is a novel which contains situations which may be viewed as fabled and sometimes disturbing, such as a mother's pouring of kerosene on her baby and burning him to death as well as the rampant sexual activity of women of all ages, but ultimately, Sula draws universal themes and questions for its readers to contend with. It addresses the confusing mysteries of human emotions and relationships, ultimately concluding that social conventions are inadequate as a foundation for living one's life, as life and lifestyle is unique to the individual, not to be lived for or in within the constraints of anyone else. The novel tempts the reader to apply the terms "good and evil," and "right and wrong" to the characters and question their true definitions.
Ultimately I found Sula to be an interesting and sometimes inspiring read which contains themes which are worth exploring. The language and highly detailed description is typical of Morrison and can be compared to some of her other works, such as Beloved. The combination of harsh reality and veiled mysticism works in harmony to create this raw, emotional charged work of literature.

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Summary: Sula Peace: Good book or evil book?
Review: Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize winning novel "SULA" explores many themes. Most notably,it compels readers to ask questions about easy ideas between right and wrong. It is not clear whether the main character, Sula Peace, can be viewed as the antagonist or the protagonist. What is clear, however, is that Morrison's work allows readers to experience an entire community's search for identity and how to survive that search when everything works against them.
The story takes place in Ohio's fictional "Bottom" and centers around two different, yet similiar characters of Nel and Sula. When the two girls first meet, "they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had to set about something else to be." The story continues through their adult years, when after a ten year hiatus from the "Bottom," Sula returns to see Nel and her family after events that changed both their lives and identity. Both, they find, have seeked their own identity in differing ways. Sula has left the Bottom for the city, while Nel married and sought her own identity through marriage and the Bottom. The events that chronicle Sula's return have her seen as evil by the town folk, and ultimately, the story takes a turn that challenges race, gender, and friendship. The novel challenges readers with its many themes and the raw, emotionally real, yet subtle prose of Toni Morrison. The novel is a must read for Morrison fans and a book that allows readers to experience a world where anything can happen (in the sense of "magical realism") and the hard, rawness of it comes across as real and touching at the same time.

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Summary: Sula---The Woman That Everyone Has Mixed Feelings About
Review: Sula Peace is the woman that everyone is having mixed feelings about. Whether if readers think she is rotten to the core or she is a semi-hero. Sula is one of the women in literature that has everyone in an uproar.

Sula is centered around the main character, Sula. She is a woman that has an impulsive grandmother and a mother who loves to sleep with men. Sula is cursed with both of their qualities. Sula wanted to be like her friend, Nel, who has the good side that Sula desires. Sula watches her mother burn; Sula committs her mother to a deteroiating nursing home; she sleep with her best friend's husband. Sula is talked about in The Bottom because they see her as worst threat than her mother and grandmother because she possess both of their negative qualities.

Is Sula as bad readers think she is? Or does she represent the woman that makes mistakes? Is she trying to tell us that we judge too harshly on women, but more importantly, each other?

Sula represents women that break all the rules. At the end of the novel, some readers will see if Sula is the better woman inspite of the pain she caused because maybe she had a reason for it.

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Summary: Is Toni Morrison gunning for the black community?
Review: The book Sula is all too liberal in its character portrayals and the context in which it describes The Bottom, an underpriveleged African-American area, which the blacks of Medallion, Ohio were swindled into accepting from white landowners. Throughout the book, Morrison portrays The Bottom's characters as immoral lowlifes who have every tendency to committ heinous criminal acts in everyday situations. For example, a mother's pouring of kerosene on her baby and burning him to death. Also, the rampant sexual activity of women of all ages demoralizes black women as prostitutes. The entire style and prose of the work is something suitable for the new regime of social communism being paraded in our public schools, as if the author and leading teacher's unions conspired to create such a biased and controversial text for no reason other than to extend racial hatred and prolong social misgivings.

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Summary: Well... if you have nothing else to read
Review: I wouldn't recommend reading this book if you absolutely could avoid it. It's quite dull throughout most of it and isn't very entertaining. The message throughout the novel is obvious however and that is the part of the book that I did enjoy. This is not a book that I think men would enjoy at all -- if anything, it is a poor excuse for a feelgood strong woman novel.
Toni Morrison writes well -- her descriptions are detailed and somewhat interesting, but I almost struggled to get through this book.

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Summary: not as impressive as I expected
Review: I had high expectations for this book, because of the awards and the reviews. It did portray hardship, poverty, and discrimination in a quiet, resigned way, that was really effective. The community needing Sula, their pariah, was also subtlely explained.

But I felt that some extreme violent events in this book were not explained. They were shocking, but the book offered inadequate revelation or reason regarding why they occured. Like Eva killing her son Plum by dousing him with kerosene and setting fire to him while he was drunk in his bed.

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Summary: A powerful story of friendship...
Review: Another Toni Morrison under my belt and proud of it! I've always heard that her novels are difficult reads, but after completing (and enjoying) the two that I've read, I'm going to disagree with that statement. Toni has a way with words that make even the most mundane of statements seem eloquent and rhythmic.

Sula tells the story of a small black community called The Bottom located in Medallion, Ohio and its many colorful citizens. We have Shadrack, who, after returning from the war, has spent every January 3 celebrating a holiday of his own making, National Suicide Day. There is Eva Peace, the one-legged grandmother; Hannah, Eva's daughter, who shares her bed with her friends' and neighbors' husbands; and Sula, Hannah's daughter, who shares her mother's wild spirit and befriends her complete opposite, the calm and mature, Nel Wright. This novel tells mostly about the friendship of Sula and Nel and how their lives take different paths as they grow older. However, there is some very powerful writing with the background characters that shock and surprise the reader.

Sula is set in the early 1900s and spans 40 years or so. I truly enjoyed this novel and am very glad I read it. Granted, there are parts of this story that wax poetically and go totally over my head, but for the most part I understood what I was reading and was continually immersed in the lives of The Bottom citizens. After my second successful attempt at a Toni Morrison novel (the first being The Bluest Eye), I'd be more than happy to try another one. So far so good.