Beloved

Rating:
Summary: A good book that's hard to enjoy.
Review: Beloved is indeed a masterfully written novel--the composition is excellent, the prose is beautiful, and the characters are well-developed. However, the imagery and symbolism that is often used (and more often overused) is at times hard to stomach. The story, while very intriguing, is often hard to follow and is very often so gratuitously...well...I guess "disgusting" is a good word for it...that the reader is often tempted to skip chapters of redundant shock-imagery.

Nonetheless, it is still a good read. You might be thinking "How exactly can it be so good and so bad at the same time?" Well, I have found that many novels can be very taxing to the reader, and sort of gives you the sensation of being hit by a train. But after you read this sort of novel, you're quite glad you did. That's Beloved in a nutshell. Don't read this book if you want to be entertained. Read it if you want to be bruised, sickened and greatly disturbed.

Rating:
Summary: Great expectations...betrayed
Review: In certain circles, I have been silently (or not) awarded the status of spoiled literary ignoramus for expressing my opinion of this book. That said, literature is one of my passions, and I'm willing to risk ridicule again to warn those of you who may appreciate the heads-up.

I first read BELOVED as part of a literature class, and I was at first excited because I had never read anything by Toni Morrison before and had heard her books widely praised. Then I started reading it, and I thought it would never end.

I admit, it was the writing style that turned me off. There are many who laud Ms. Morrison's "ingenious" and "lyrical" prose, but I tend to find stream-of-conciousness writing confusing, annoying, and in many cases, as in this one, unnecessary. I find that it disrupts the story, and I like my stories to make sense. The effort involved in piecing together Morrison's story from the fragmented, dislocated chapters in which it is written is monumental. I usually don't stick around with books like that to find out if the end result was worth the effort, but with this one, I had no choice. Expecting nothing more, still I was sorely disappointed when I found that it was not. The story line has the potential for great power, but somewhere along the line it was mishandled and mangled beyond recognition.

Rating:
Summary: This is an excellent book. I have read it over 100 times!
Review: I love "Beloved" by Toni Morrison. This is one of the best books that I have ever read. Besides watching the movie, reading the book, and reading the "CliffNotes" to the book. I find this book to be one of the most powerful of our time.

I can understand why Oprah Winfrey, decided to make this book into a movie, because this book whispers volumes! I applaud the movie and I truly believe that it was beyond excellent -- it was phenomenal!

I love all of Toni Morrison's work, but whenever I read "Beloved" or watch the movie. I am overwhelmed by the quality of strength and overall creativity that it took to create such a fascinating piece of literature.

It is hard for me to put into words exactly how this book has changed my life. But I suppose that the unbending strength of Sethe and Denver's eventual acceptance of herself despite all that she endured allows me to focus on those things that are of good within my own life and to love, learn, and experience the challenges in life with courage.

Thank you Ms. Morrison you are totally awesome! I love everything that you write. What a wonderful inspiration you are to all women who desire to write and publish literary masterpieces who strive to keep on keeping on!

Rating:
Summary: Beloved!
Review: Set in post-Civil War Ohio, BELOVED focuses on the life of Sethe, a mother of three and a slave. Sethe decides to run away from her owners hoping to find a better life and future for her children, but when she is caught, she makes the decision that death must be better than the life of a slave. "Out of love" she tries to take the lives of her children, succeeding in only one. This decision comes back to haunt her as Beloved, the ghost of her baby daughter. In this novel, Sethe battles with guilt put on her conscience by Beloved and is willing to lose everything to regain the love of this lost child.

When I started reading this novel I soon realized that this was not going to be an easy one. Morrison's style of writing is quite difficult, she jumps back and forth in time without warning. However the flashbacks she uses represent the things that have helped to form the characters. I think that Morrison wrote this novel like a puzzle. Throughout the story, she would give bits and pieces of information to the reader and would leave it up to the reader to put those pieces in place. This style is at the same time the most frustrating, and the most rewarding part of the story. I constantly found myself flipping back and forth through the pages trying to make sense of what Morrison was trying to tell me. I have never read a book with this style of writing before so this made me stress and get frustrated a lot. But, when the pieces finally started to come together, I felt proud that I was able to do so. It's hard to judge Morrison's book. Judging it would have to depend on an individual's opinion. If I had to choose, I would likely not read another book by her again. Don't get me wrong, Beloved was a fantastic book. I just don't like to have to constantly keep flipping back and forth because it starts to get annoying. One positive thing about Morrison's style is that she was able to keep the reader in the book and always have her asking herself questions. The content of the book was excellent. Morrison described her characters well. I really got to know and understand the characters. Morrison's descriptions of her scenes really painted pictures in my mind. The story itself about how Sethe, the main character, killed her baby girl to protect her from the hardships of slavery was shocking. How can someone kill their own child in order to protect them from the undetermined future? Was Sethe a murderer or a hero? This and other bad memories of slavery were in Sethe's mind constantly. The quality of Beloved is based more on the reader's opinion then anything else and if one is not very good at "reading between the lines" this book is very confusing and requires a lot of re-reading.

Rating:
Summary: Beloved - A Powerful Story Echoing Oppression Anywhere
Review: Having wanted to read this book for several years, I started reading Beloved in the early evening and didn't put it down until I finished. Throughout the book, I was trying to ascertain the purpose/message of Toni Morrison. Was the book meant to merely depict life and times of that era for a post-Civil war slave and to document slavery? Or were there messages of healing, hope and transcendence? These were the questions I kept asking myself throughout my reading. I have to admit I was disturbed by what I found.

Certainly the writing was excellent. It held my attention. It was rich with imagery, poetic passages and excellent characterization. Certain parts of the novel were, however, confusing, as the narrative goes back and forth in time. But this to me wasn't as disturbing as the rather one dimensional white characters, the lack of complexity in dealing with a consciousness of people (on both sides of the equation). So, that the white characters are easily hated and the black characters easily understood and acceptable.

It seems to me our country (and world) has a long history of oppression - whether of Indians, women, slaves, etc. To me, it would be up to writers to have vision for the future to show the way for some healing, a reframing of the old story of blame and a
movement beyond hatred and prejudice - and certainly to challenge readers with complex (more readily human) characters living in a world of predetermined (and unfair to a larger group than just this one) limitations and prejudice.

I got stuck feeling maybe I was being unfair to the depiction of a true story. But it seems to me that any individual or group thereof who have not developed self (whether through oppression or their own personal limitations of fear, etc.) will find a difficult path to walk. And, certainly many factions of oppressed people's stories have been forgotten, and I know Morrison wanted to make sure the reality, agony and despair were never forgotten from American history. I understand and commend this voice documenting the story.

Still, we can see abuse, beatings, rape and even shaming acts in families, schools, churches - everywhere. I found the questioning of Paul D. about Mr. Garner's calling the slaves of Sweet Home "real men," to be one of the signs of a person beginning to find a self. And, I found Sethe's running away to be the hopeful signs of a spirit aware on some level that life can be different.

Ok. I know. This was based on a true story but it seemed to me that the novel gave voice to blame and not to forgiveness or even better, to the personal growth, the evolution of soul (or even a nation, like ours has slowly with steps forward and back over time), development of self and increase of consciousness of a people. It is doesn't seem to help find a way beyond.

The characters to me seemed to get stuck in their denial of story, just as so many rape victims, abused children do. Paul D. kept his story in the tin in his heart until Beloved. And though his interaction with her was seen to be negative, I actually found the opening of that tin to be his salvation, as how can one go beyond a story until going through it?

And that seemed to be the justification of Sethe's killing of her daughter. She couldn't imagine a life better for her daughter. She didn't want her to have to live a life enslaved.
Now, I can logically understand this and I can forgive the character her moment of insanity. But if we said she had just had too much and snapped because of the pain in her life, then we would have to do the same for the many others in the world who had a very painful childhood and who chose destruction as a path, no matter what they called it - protection, the desire for that person not to do a certain thing or live a particular life.

I thought one of the truly wonderful parts in the book was when Paul D. went back to Sethe (after knowing about her killing her daughter). I also thought the community of women coming to help Denver and Sethe was another hopeful message. It seems to me
these two passages were very subtly played out but love and community seem to be a message of possible hope.

Overall, I found Beloved to be a beautifully written story that didn't have the courage to take on a message much beyond trusting your own color and to voice the suffering of slaves and the shameful behavior of the group of people in power in our society at that time.

To me, anger is certainly a necessary emotion to change a person or a group of individuals life and for the growth of a soul (or group of people) just awakening to personal power and a consciousness of self determination. I commend the book for helping echo that necessary first step but wasn't able to show possible alternatives beyond anger.

And, in fact, it seems many (people with a background of oppression such as slavery) have gotten stuck in the anger and are not able to take a step beyond towards a deeper healing and liberation from the past. In fact, the anger gets handed down from one generation to the next.

Rating:
Summary: Beloved
Review: Slavery remains a sore subject. No family likes to air dysfunction in public let alone takes responsibility for any harm down to its family members and certainly no country, especially one taunting that all men are created equal, likes to acknowledge its hypocritical history. No one wants to slice open the American apple pie and find maggots. Back in high school, sitting comfortably in my suburban northeastern classroom, the history books emphasized the triumph of the North not only winning the Civil War, but also freeing the slaves from a life of imprisonment. Good had triumphed, the country made whole again, and everyone lived happily ever after. There was no contemplation of the hardships suffered by the newly freed men, women, and children, who after having been "owned," were tossed into society, given no or little resources and greeted with a great deal of animosity, for while Lincoln's leadership eliminated slavery it did not abolish the racist belief system of our country that sadly continues to this day. Morrison's Beloved, a rich, lyrical tale, dares to pressure the reader to face the forgotten and ignored reality of those post-war slaves.
The former slaves of Sweet Home, Sethe and Paul D., deal quite differently with their physical freedom from slavery but both remain equally haunted by the pain, humiliation and abuse they have endured. Memories of the horrific dehumanizing mistreatment-brutal beatings, rape, imprisonment and murder-flood them each and every day, even twenty years of living slavery-free. By alternating the point-of-views within the chapters, including the ghost, Beloved, the story's core, the frightening truth of the soul annihilation of the slaves is masterfully unveiled by Morrison's pen. Morrison shows how the unspeakable abuse haunts the slave survivors. By the book's end the past has conquered Sethe and the story center's of infanticide while living in freedom from slavery has been logically rendered as the most loving gesture of protection Sethe could have given her eldest daughter. Because as Baby Suggs had told her, "No bad luck but white people. They don't know when to stop."
Unfortunately, while beautifully rendered, the narrative line becomes more and more jagged as the main narrator, Sethe, loses her sense of reality. The traumatic memories heighten the pitch of the story. This is a complex, tragic story based on the horrid reality of our country's history. Why make it any harder for the reader to face the atrocities and devastation that attacked a people long after their birth right of freedom was legally declared? Morrison's story reveals how unbelievably resilient the human spirit is and how cruel our white ancestors were. However, as a literary work, the piece falls a tad short by making the reader plow through the frequent narrative time changes and at times, an unreliable narrator. While the story's integrity is maintained by Sethe losing her mind, the actual story time becomes fuzzy, creating a parallel process for the reader perhaps, but at the same time unnecessarily clouding the clarity of the narrative. This reader became confused and had to re-read passages to regain her footing, asking: Are these delusions of Sethe in the story's present? Or traumatic memories? For instance, Sethe is headed for the Clearing where Baby Suggs preached and Sethe is remembering Baby Suggs just prior to her death laying in bed in her room at 124 and obsessing about colors. Within the same paragraph the story jumps to the past within the past to Sethe's arrival with Denver to Baby Suggs' home. This literary masterpiece is not as fully realized as it could have been because these flashbacks within flashbacks push the reader away from an already difficult topic. The abrupt time shifts mar this masterpiece by disengaging the reader from the story's natural progression. Dialogue is never transcribed literally because it would bog down the narrative, nor should the process of remembering be literally transcribed because it confuses the narrative line and in Morrison's case, unnecessarily tarnishes a profound literary work. Despite this minor flaw, the novel haunts the reader long after the final word is read.

Rating:
Summary: Beloved, Powerful Still
Review: Thirteen years can age a novel and literary tastes in ways that lessen a story's power. That is not the case with "Beloved," which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Renowned author, Toni Morrison, writes powerfully affecting prose about slavery and its aftermath, drawing you in and holding you from first to last page. This novel is aging well, and deserves ever more readers.

The tale revolves around Sethe, all she has felt and witnessed and does not want to remember. These "rememories" come out piecemeal during the early years of the Reconstruction era, when Sethe and those who slaved together at Sweet Home farm are freed, dead or missing. "To Sethe," writes Morrison, "the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay." Supressed memory, too painful to retrieve whole, is forced to the surface bit by bit, by circumstances that keep the story flowing.

Sethe escapes Sweet Home before the end of slavery and gives birth to her daughter, Denver, en route to the home of her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, in Cinicinnati, Ohio. Loneliness pervades the lives of Sethe and Denver, after Baby Suggs's death, until two people show up unexpectedly to unravel their self-imposed isolation. First Paul D, a former slave from Sweet Home arrives and captures Sethe's affections. Later the eponymous Beloved, a mysterious young woman who befriends Denver and comes to dominate the household.

As the details of the past acrue for both Sethe and the reader, we come to understand the full measure of pain and burden that has shaped this woman and those she loves. Her heart, body and soul, formed in the cauldron of slavery, are permanently scarred, and drive her to the terrible deed at the center of the story.

In "Beloved," Morrison has created a North American version of the mystical realism style for which South American writers are acclaimed. The physical world is animated, ghosts are real, and nature is a character, particularly through the eyes and hearts of Paul D and Baby Suggs. Morrison weaves a rich metaphysical world that recalls Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient," particularly in the way she captures a haunted mind, roving different parts of its past, all the while suffering physically in the present. In syntax and rhythms that are never heavy handed, we enter a world full of folk wisdom, and an abiding and fulfilling intimacy with nature.

Many know of the horrors of slavery--including branding, whipping, seperation of families, rape--a world where, as Morrison puts it, even a rooster has more selfhood than a black man. This story dryly chronicles those horrors, and shows us how intrinsically Sethe's and Paul D's ability to survive and love are shaped by their emotional and physical scars.

This heart-wrenching tale should be read by all Americans, not because it would be good for them to understand this piece of our history better, but because of Morrison's unforgettable characters and powerfully poetic prose.

Rating:
Summary: I LOVED BELOVED!!!
Review: Toni Morrison, you award writing Master! I sure hope that the students in that University where you teach recognize that they are blessed to be fortunate enough to be before a genius as their instructor. Your book "Beloved" explored the world that only one who may have been caught-up in a situation could demonstrate. In essence, write what you know. If Blacks do not tell the story from their perspective, then who? Many have complained that your story was too complicated, too multi-faceted and too redundant. I am sorry that they are too limited to enjoy good literature. But, not all are fortunate enough to have the intellect to enjoy the higher levels of our social existence. To them, I wish luck in working toward a greater understanding of life. To you, I wish that you continue to provide the world with products of the human experience. I cannot wait to read your next book entitled, "Paradise".

Rating:
Summary: Beloved is a great book.
Review: I wouldn't try to make complete sense of it though. It is a moving, emotional experience. There is a lot of magical, and mystical experiences in the book which intrude on the book if you are looking for a basic comprehensive narrative. Just let the book and the experience wash over you and forget about telling someone else the plot. Just accept it for the great book it is and you will feel more comfortable.

Rating:
Summary: Read thoroughly, then repeat
Review: To read a book like Beloved is bewildering, for it requires immersion into an institution so depraved, so removed from the human experience that the main character's actions seem terrifyingly fantastic, as do their supernatural consequences. But Morrison doesn't expect us to fully understand the story, at least not in a single reading, only to experience it and to feel the same frustration and terror her characters feel. She doesn't attempt to explain or unravel slavery; what Morrison does is merely show it to us, not from the circumspect historical perspective, but from the perplexed individual experience. Admittedly, the structure of the novel is dreadfully confusing, but Morrison is making a statement here: See if you, any of you, can get your bearings in this world where the ultimate expression of love is murder.
To further complicate things, Morrison doesn't prepare us for anything, particularly the elements of magical realism. Instead, she delves right into a ghost story. But realize that the supernatural is not only accepted as realistic in the African tradition from which these characters were uprooted, it is welcomed. Baby Suggs holy remarks that having a ghost is nothing extraordinary. She tells Sethe to be glad the spirit is that of an infant's and not a full-grown man.
I must concede that even with the advantage of first reading this novel in college, with the added wisdom of my professor, Beloved was still a bear of a book to read. Shifts in voice and point-of-view baffled me, particularly the section in which the voices of the three women merge. The story does not offer itself up easily, but neither does the subject of slavery itself. Neither is linear, at least not to the individual memory, which moves in and out and often overlaps or reinvents itself. This is what Morrison calls rememory.
In spite of the difficulties, Beloved is a story that every literate person should undertake. Morrison's lyrical prose is nearly reason enough to recommend it, but for the student of literature, especially, the book should be teased apart and combed for the multiple layers of meaning. I've personally looked at the symbolism of trees in the story and felt I only scratched the surface of what Morrison so masterfully weaves into this relatively short book.
The basic plot was borrowed from the true story of Margaret Garner, and though it is certainly the unique female chronicle of slavery, of having children "rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized" (23), the book is also a painful examination of the male slave's experience, as seen primarily through the character Paul D's eyes. In many ways, the stripping away of hardwearing manhood is even more poignant than the demoralization of women. A rooster named Mister, which walks about freely on the plantation, mocks at the male slaves, who, though sexually depraved, manage to refrain from raping Sethe, the only woman among them. For me, this section of the book was the most painful to read. In another section, Paul D. says to Sethe: "A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside" (69). Who but Morrison could say so much with so little?
Beloved is a horrendous, beautiful book too intricate to absorb in an isolated reading. It's one for the collection, to take in slowly. Don't give up on this deservedly acclaimed work of art.