Beloved

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Summary: A Beloved Book In My Mind
Review: I think this book is wonderful and it you haven't read it you should. I had to read it for a class assignment but I'm glad that I did. This book is great for anyone who wants to learn about African-American slave culture or anyone who just wants a good book to read. It shows the injustices and though choices slaves were confronted with everyday. The book makes you thankful for all the blessings you have in your life. So next time you're bored and need something to do before you reach for the TV remote, reach for Beloved.

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Summary: Ugly truths, beautiful words
Review: This is an intensely difficult book. Not just in its writing, but in the story it tells. At the same time, it's so hard to put down that I found myself up late at night just waiting to see what would happen. Morrison pulls no punches here, from the evils of slavery (and they are depicted in this book as I have never seen them before... with a spare, unflinching look that maks you feel that you are down in the mud and blood with them), to the confusion and turmoil of the post-Civil War years. At its heart is Sethe, and the secret that she carries. (It would be more fair actually to call it guilt, it's only a secret to the readers... not to most of the characters.) This book will wear you down, but not in a bad way. The depictions of the horrors are bloodcurdling. This book also is so densely written, and so full of images, and stories and visions that its also hard to put it down with your first reading and say, "Wasn't that pleasant?" and go on and never botehr with it again. Beloved sticks in your mind like a popcorn kernel between your teeth, and it won't come loose until you work at it some more. This book may have taken a while to read, but even longer to process, and THAT is the sign of a great book, and even better author. Highly recommended.

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Summary: Great book, if you can get it!
Review: ...Although I loved this book, and furthermore love Toni Morrison as a writer, I will even admit to not having cracked all of the meaning of this immensely complex and textured novel. By the same token, not knowing every spice that a great steak was seasoned with does not mean I can't appreciate the steak. You seem to have missed the most central point in the novel, Beloved is not simply Sethe's child, she is slavery personified. Beloved is as you put it "annoying," but really annoying is flagrant understatement. You were right to negatively react to Beloved. She is kniving, greedy, selfish, and yes even "revolting." And every one of those words, and worse, could just as easily describe slavery. It is actually slavery, not Beloved that comes back to haunt Sethe, and it is only once Sethe learns to value herself, to reverse the devaluation that was a result of slavery ("you your best thing") that Sethe can let go of Beloved and of slavery. You question Sethe launching into her life story, but it is the only story she knows, the one that is branded--literally and figuratively--on her. A life of subjugation has left her with nothing but that subjugation. It is her inability to move past that story--of reliving and fearing it--that speaks even today to the black condition. It was the evil she knew, and the psychological basis for some enslaved Africans, even upon emancipation, remaining with their masters often becoming sharecroppers. It was not because slavery was in any form or fashion humane or kind to those whom it enslaved. It was all that they knew. Years of maltreatment, of being told what to do, when to do it, and where, left many slaves hopelessly lost. Sethe hated Sweet Home, hated Schoolteacher, but despite her efforts otherwise, both seemed to always control her, always haunt her.

That Sethe would lose control of her bladder when confronted by this pervasive and evil apparition is, in effect, a mild reaction. I assume that you have no historical understanding of slavery in the United States. I can especially assume so from your description of "black" slavery as "noteworthy." Slavery, although, not often acknowledged, haunts the United States just as Beloved haunts Sethe. The Americans fought and died over this "ghost," and this "ghost" still plays into so much of how race is viewed in this country. And although, again, often not acknowledged, slavery was the birth of black people in this country, and still factors into how we view ourselves and approach this world. On the surface, slavery provides free labor, but enslavement meant much more. It was to deny them their family, their history, any sense of self-worth, independence, or community, to ensure that they would remain enslaved. Enslavement does not just trap a body: it holds the mind and the spirit captive, as well, long after emancipation. "Beloved" captures that on so many levels. I would suggest that you read a book on slavery. "Africans in America" by Charles Johnson and "From Slavery to Freedom" by John Hope Franklin are primers on African American history or for a more specific look at slavery "Slavery and Social Death" or "Rituals of Blood" both by Orlando Patterson. Further, the mysticism you criticize is also an acknowledged part of African American culture. The power of dreams and insults to ancestors, while not as strongly believed in as it once was, is still a central and integral part of black history. This book could have instructed you, if you had allowed it to do so. Instead, you bought into some sort of hype as to what this book was: Pulitzer prize winning, yes, written by a Nobel Prize winning author, most assuredly, but an easy text to read, one you can skim, or even read once and still understand, most definitely not. More than that, it is a statement on the enslavement of not just this one woman, or even simply of black people, but the racial enslavement of this country for nearly 500 years, from the moment the first African set foot on this continent...

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Summary: great book from a great writer
Review: This is the third Toni Morrison novel I've read, and so far, it's the best. I've read Paradise and The Bluest Eye...but I've fallen in love with Beloved. Usually, I read through a book quickly...more quickly if the author hasn't captured my imagination. With Beloved, I find myself slowing down, reading a chapter at a time, savoring the beautiful language and the intricate way Ms. Morrison uses language to show us the lives and desires of each character. More than being a chronical of slavery and its aftermath, Beloved gives us the heart and mind of those who experienced it and what they did to survive. This is truly an amazing book.

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Summary: Don't Read This
Review: Worst book ever written. Extremely confusing.

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Summary: Wanting to Remember and Needing to Forget
Review: At the center of this novel is a house that is infused with the memory of what is too painful to be remembered and what is so important that it cannot be forgot. Sethe and Paul D are people who have both survived slavery though at a heavy cost. Both had to flee their homes and everything that was familiar because "home" is not completely "sweet" as its name wishes to make it but then again it is not all sour. Both have been raped. Now, together, they are trying to find a way to look to the future. Paul D is constantly pressing to this end in his naturally patriarchal way, but he is stopped in his progression to make a home by a spiritual invocation that is nothing less than a living memory: Beloved. The make-shift idealistic home is not a proper enclosure for memories that are so terribly large. Lost somewhere in the middle is Denver who has been raised on the retelling of these memories. Through her a process of recreation takes place that elevates the memories of her mother to a present time through oral storytelling. Beloved subjects all the characters to a trial that forces them to look at the past that they alternately avoid and wallow in.

The true power of this novel is created in the skilful way it is constructed by Morrison. Never fully in the past, never fully in the present and never looking through just a single pair of eyes. The reader is shifted constantly through time and perspective in a way that makes you feel you are really experiencing the chaos and painfully disordered lives of the characters. You may feel at first what a lovely thing it is that this baby has returned to her mother to create a second chance for them all, but she turns out to be a troubled presence though not an entirely sinister one. The community that rises together to expel her do not have bad intentions, but their intentions are not pure. This is the deep complexity of the novel because the characters are trapped in these paradoxes of aspects to their past and identity that are not all good and not all bad, but work against each other to make existence a painful thing to live with. Somehow, through this, the characters are expected to construct a life for themselves that doesn't let itself be clogged by the onslaught of a difficult past. This is the message for the present day readers who find it so easy to forget and need to find a way to live with a painful awareness of what really happened in our history.

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Summary: Unique Style
Review: I have never read a book like this before, but then again, I haven't read a whole lot of fiction.. I found Morrison's style very unique and refreshing.. Some of the passages were dreamlike, like listening to a beautiful song or reading a beautiful poem.. Terrific imagery.. Sometimes, however, I felt lost in her verbeage, a similar feeling that occurs in me when I read Joyce. Some of this can be attributed to her technique of jumping around in time, pieceing together the lives of the characterics and their relationships with one another.. Aside from her style, I found the concept of killing your own children in order to save them very compelling.. A disturbing, animal-like act, yet at the same time I was convinced of the act's incredibly human compassion.. Something I believe Morrison accomplished with her unique gifts. Although I find the topic of race generally boring, I found the story line to be legitimate and tender.. I felt great compassion for the characters in the novel.. I felt Morrison did a great job in revealing to the reader little intricacies about the character's lives and their importance.. i.e. The use of butter on one's mouth to help take away the slave's physical pain after having their mouths locked up with steel traps.. I realize that Beloved's spirit physically coming back should probably be interpreted as metaphor, but I had a hard time taking the story very seriously once I realized who the girl they met on the way home from the carnival actually was.. (I remember a scene near the end of the book where a group of women from the neighborhood had decided to confront Beloved's spirit in the flesh..) But that's just a personal thing, for I will never claim to be a critic.. Overall, an excellent and important work, very refreshing.. I recommend it highly..

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Summary: Do NOT see the movie, the book is a masterpiece.
Review: You can get the summary of this book elsewhere. Suffice it to say that "Beloved" is the literary masterpiece of the late 20th century. It didn't win the Pulitzer and Morrison didn't win the Nobel for nothing. Beloved must be read several times, use the cliff notes if you have to. It is worth it. The magical lyricism that Morrison uses to create Sethe's story is amazing. How can she write like this?, you wonder. Simply astounding.

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Summary: Mesmerizing!
Review: Toni Morrison explores the depths of maternal love in 'Beloved', and in doing so creates a stunning and unique literary work, fully deserving of the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes it won. After escaping slavery and reestablishing herself in Ohio with her children, Sethe is thrown into a murderous rage when attempts at recapture are made, and kills her eldest child--the only way to ensure her daughter's freedom. The child then returns--as spirit and as full grown woman--to reclaim her mother's love. More than a ghost story, Beloved is a novel about unconditional love, family ties, the enduring scars of slavery, and the strength of a people, when joined as a community, to abolish any form of evil. But it is the writing that makes this novel so special, evoking another time, reading like poetry, and allowing the story to unfold almost like a mystery. Sure, it's no easy read, but it's highly enjoyable and definitely worth it in the end.

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Summary: Spin Right Round
Review: The author of this slammin novel weaves a complex circular narrative that unconventionally does not relay events linearly or chronologically. Instead, its readers are compelled to read proactively, for Morrison invites us to participate in the unfolding of the drama.

Beset with convolution, the novel's form resembles that of a circle or a spiral ellipse, in that Sethe collects, omits, and repeats fragments of -herstory- . While in some instances, circular imagery conventionally represents wholeness and continuity, other times they signify stagnation and vacuity, which are inescapable and oppressive.

Its more subtle themes draw upon the nature of nostalgia and the phenomenon of rememory, which may be defined as the condition of recalling, reviving, reliving, reinterpreting, reshaping, re-evaluating again and again past experiences, impressions, thoughts, feelings, and facts.

Love, loss, revenge, misery, and redemption all make their presence known, and because we too must deal with these issues ad nauseam, in my opinion, Beloved is a fulfilling read, and something worth a second, even third, run-through.