Beloved

Rating:
Summary: Over Rated
Review: It is may be considered vain for a high school student to disagree with the Noble Prize for literature, but in this case I'll risk it. Belved by Toni Morrison was hard to follow and even harder to like. Toni Morrison accomplishes her objective of showing the reader the horrors of slavery but the rest of the story is often silly. The book takes place in Post Civil War rural Cincinnati. It deals with such themes as isotion, guilt, remorse, and the supernatural. Another defect to this book is that the superatural seems out of place in this book. The book starts ordinarily and then a ghost appers. In Beloved, Toni Morrison overdoes her story making her book slow and unenjoyable. But diffrent strokes, some may love this novel but Ill stick by my negative criticism.

Rating:
Summary: One word: painful
Review: Not the worst book I have ever read, but possibly the most disappointing. If this is a Pulitzer-winning novel, then you have to wonder what a Pulitzer's worth these days. It is nearly unreadable.

If you are really looking for reading this awful in your spare time, I would suggest a line-by-line read of the manual to a mainframe computer.

Rating:
Summary: Confusing Love
Review: Actually, I gave the book 3.5 stars because there were good points to this book. 'Beloved' is very confusing to read as it jumps around, however, it draws the reader in and is compelling. As the book slowly describes everyone, each situation merges with each other opening way for an epic novel.
Tantilizing and scary are ways to describe Morrison's intriguing outlook on the lives of slaves. It would have been nicer if not so many stories were twisted into one. When I read, I prefer to drift into a netherworld, not think about what I am reading.
This book is good but not spectacular like so many people think. 'Beloved' is a much better read than viewing of the film disaster, however.

Rating:
Summary: Not one of my most beloved books
Review: Having seen part of the movie on TV, but never able to catch the whole thing but wanting to, I had high expectations for this book. I eagerly checked it out of the library - only to be disappointed thoroughly. For the most part, this book was extremely boring and at times hard to understand. It took me several readings to finally get the ending, and even then I was puzzled. To put it bluntly, it was just too weird for my tastes. I certainly don't understand how this book could have possibly won a Nobel. And I certainly hated Sethe, who killed her child to spare her a life of slavery and racism. Don't get me wrong: I am not a racist and I believe that slavery was the darkest point in American society and history. But I can't believe a mother would actually kill her own baby due to slavery. Just one of the many things I can't believe or understamd about this book.

Rating:
Summary: Lovely, evocative, anguishing
Review: No review can do justice to this beautifully written and anguishing masterpiece--you simply must read it, or rather: taste it, feel its many-textured fabrics, let it work on you, wrench you, make you laugh and weep with despair. And laugh.

Reading it, I was reminded of the Hispanic legend of La Llorona, the ghostly Weeping Woman who dwells near bodies of water. Some version of her shows up in every time and place where the feminine is enslaved, used up and exiled. The land itself weeps Lloronic tears. So do haunted houses.

In our Get Over It society it is often asked: why must we continue to dwell on such terrible pasts--the Holocaust, slavery, or, as in this novel, whose unfolding story is its own and only "message," the genocidal times just after the Reconstruction that ought really to be called the Redestruction? (As though we ever really did dwell on them!)

Because to forget is to repeat the past. To forget that our racist, imperialist age of empires has infected us with a microbe of intolerance gives it the quiet in which it mushrooms into still more hatred, still more retaliation. When politicians start talking about ridding the world of evil, the one thing you can count on is that denial of the past has helped reawaken the plague....and that the only possible containments are the awareness of being its carriers (I speak as an Anglo-American whose country is fed with steady transfusions of incomprehensible injustice), the courage to differ--and the stories of those we have tried in vain to silence.

For the dead, too, speak in this novel. To contemplate how many of them stand behind it in the shadows of being is to sit, for a page or two at a time, within a hallowed space.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent and challenging book
Review: Beloved is an absolutely beautiful, haunting book, that can ravage the reader emotionally. By the end, however, the strength of the characters after facing extraordinary adversity is inspiring, exciting, and profound. The characters are complicated, realistic, and nuanced.

I am shocked that so many people have complained about the plot, writing etc. This is a difficult read in many ways: it is highly symbolic, not entirely linear in timing, and emotionally difficult. But I think that any reasonably mature and skilled reader can handle it. In reponse to the person who complained about the racial depictions: there is one very important white character and that is the girl who helps Sethe in the forest after escaping. I suggest rereading it and thinking more about how symbolically and practically important that character is.

This book touches on many deeply moving subjects, race and slavery or course, but also familial tensions, romantic love, sexual passion, and (I think) most importantly, overcoming the weight of one's past and self acceptance.

I would recommend this to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Not for anyone who wants to read a book for its plot
Review: The plot of this book is only understandable if it is read symbolically. I am a Ph.D. with an undergraduate degree in English from a Southern University with a well-respected English department, and frankly, I didn't really "get" this book until I read the Cliff Notes and talked to folks with degrees in literature who had read the book. The book is only understandable if you read into the plot that Beloved is a representation of all slaves and of the burden and history of slavery. It is only on this level, for instance, that one can understand how Beloved insinuates herself between Sethe and Paul D, why Paul D becomes sexually involved with Beloved, and why, despite the fact that Paul D dislikes Beloved and does not enjoy sex with her, that she nevertheless opens his "tobacco tin" heart. It is also only on the symbolic level that I think most readers will be able to "suspend disbelief" and accept that Beloved returns to her mother from death. I very much enjoyed the "magic realism" of The House of the Spirits and Like Water for Chocolate, but in both of those books, the magic realism enhanced the plot; in Beloved, the magic realism is the plot.

I could go on with example after example of how the plot functions only if it is read symbolically. This is why I found the book frustrating, and why I am not convinced that it should be part of the canon of works that high school students should read. I read this book because my son had to read it during Spring Break and I thought that I could encourage him (he prefers Math, Physics and History, but is never sent home with material to read on those subjects during Spring Break). Unfortunately, I was almost as frustrated with the book as he was. Yes, I think I would enjoy it more on a second reading now that I understand that the book's plot doesn't really function without knowledge of the symbolism. If you want a real challenge, enjoy dense symbolism, and/or are interested in what high school students are being encouraged to read these days, read this book. If you want something that makes sense on a first reading, well, choose something else.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Review: This is the most powerful of all Morrison's books, it brings African American culture to life without painting it white for anyone's benefit, nor does it attempt to make readers of any creed or colour uncomfortable. It does not preach but opens a door. If the reader can susspend disbelief the enter Morrison's world they can only leave enriched by a greater understanding of the scars and culture of the African American coming to terms with the changes as slavery begins to come to an end. The characters are vivid, the storyline entrancing. Just one word of warning... don't watch the film!

Rating:
Summary: Read it again...
Review: If you've never read this book before, you should prepare to read it more than one time. If you have read it, read it again. Morrison's prose is so powerfully constructed, so poetic and gorgeous, that it deserves to be one of those books you wear the cover off of. One of the most difficult sections is the "middle passage" part-- I had no idea what was going on in there, but once I got it, boy did it make sense why Beloved was so angry.

This is a classic-- it should be taught with the other Southern books of the canon. It's definitely on my top 50 list of all time, and it's for the writing, for the plot, for the characters and for the creepy ghost story feeling it gave me in the end.

Rating:
Summary: Beloved, the unabridged audio edition
Review: This recorded edition has got to be one of the best ever made. To hear the author's prize-winning prose in her own voice (yes, Toni Morrison has a great voice, and is a wonderful actress) is a rare treat. Who better to know how a sentence should be read? The book is a masterpiece. I've listened to it twice, read it in print once, and every time, I get something new out of the experience.
A chilling ghost story, "not evil, just sad," as the novel's heroine says early on, is interwoven with an insider's shattering view of the slavery experience, and brilliantly carried off. All in all, a triumph, and one of my all-time favorite books.