Paradise

Rating:
Summary: Not Impressed !
Review: I've read all of T. Morrison's books, many more than once and all for pleasure. Generally, I've been pleased and felt rewarded by these experiences. However, Paradise was a major disappointment. Given the warnings that the book was complex, I actually read each page, highlighted key passages and kept notes on each character. This did not help prepare me for the final chapter. I am left feeling "all dressed-up with no place to go!". This is not one that I would recommend for pleasure. No, I will not re-read. That should not be necessary for a pleasure-based text. Advice: Wait for the paperback version........

Rating:
Summary: Somebody should have shot me first
Review: I tried, I really tried to get into this book, I even read some chapters over. I read slowly, but to no avail. It was like a manic depressive nightmare with not a very good plot. I agree that Toni Morrison does have a way with words but what about the rest that goes with a good read. But that is why there are so many good books out there for us, to keep us looking for a good read and we all read differently. Thank god for that.

Rating:
Summary: this is a bad book
Review: I couldn't even get half way through this book
when I was reading it I felt completely
. confused so i finally got so frusterated and
mailed the book back to the publisher.
I have no intentions of buying one of Toni
Morrisons books again. On Oprah's Book Club
they kepts refering to going back and reading
the book several times. Any book that the 1st
chapter and the book has to be re-read several
times isn't worth my time. I sure hope Oprah
doesn't pick her books again, cause I won't be
reading them.

Rating:
Summary: Mythic and beautiful
Review: I have enjoyed several of Ms. Morrison's books, and am pleased to add Paradise to the list. Morrison is a complicated author, you must engage your brain to read her work. The novel was hard to follow in the begining, but eventually the light bulb came on, and at the end of the story I was sorrry to leave, and felt I had learned something.

I really believe that anyone that had trouble with this novel should give up their pride, and try joining a reading group and/or using a dictionary and bible while reading the book. Morrison always presents her readers with a tumultuous batch of characters whose conflicts are explored from different angles, but are not resolved. I always feel like reading one of her books is like being sung to by your grandmother. You may not always understand the words, but everytime you hear the song you catch more of its story, and it begins to mean something to you.

I recommend that some one who had trouble with this book try reading Morrison's The Bluest Eye in order to get familiar with her style. It too is not chronological, but it is easier to follow.

Paradise is a rich and enlightening allegorical exploration of the meaning of paraidise and what it includes and/or excludes. We are introduced to a fascinating multigenerational cast of characters. Each has his or her own point of view, and we are allowed to experience that point of view first hand. The reader learns about the benifits and costs of exclusivity, and what drives people to that exclusivity.

I highly recommended this and all Toni Morrison's work.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing! Tired from all those complex subplots.
Review: Toni Morrison is such a talented and articulate writer, I was expecting much more than this turned out to be. It was exhausting trying to keep up with all those complex and troubled individuals. This was a disappointing and frustrating reading experience.

Rating:
Summary: Truly Paradise
Review: Paradise may not have been the easiest book to read, but it was truly worth while. As a student in high school I felt accomplished when I finished Paradise, just as I felt when I finished Light in August and Catch-22. Paradise pulled me in and never let go. I was enchanted by the history and depth that Morrison provided for each character. I think, having read all her novels, that Paradise is the best of Morrison's work.

To the people who find this book to diffucult to read for entertainment. Why read if you are going to read books that aren't challenging? You are just wasting your time. Reading should increase your understanding of the world around you and take you to places you will never be able to see.

Rating:
Summary: The long road to paradise
Review: Getting into the flow of Toni Morrison's latest novel, Paradise, is like finding one's way to a river in an unfamiliar and densely wooded wilderness--without a map. It takes persistence--there are only feeder streams to follow and the sound of rushing water in the distance. It takes patience. You lose your way. On more than one occasion you consider abandoning your quest. At last you reach the river. With relief you enter the rushing water. You give yourself over to the currents, and as the beauty and spectacle of the river and surrounding landscape unfold before you, you congratulate yourself for not having turned back too soon.

Paradise is the story (history really) of the people of Ruby, Oklahoma--pop. 360, an insular and isolated African-American town founded and populated by the racially pure descendants of African slaves. The main narrative takes place mostly in the 1960's and 70's but returns frequently to the events from the 1800's onward that led the founding of Ruby. Paradise is a utopian novel--nobody in Ruby has ever died there--and Ms. Morrison uses the device to explore once again a favored theme--the consequences and aftermath of slavery. Paradise is also the story of the women of The Convent, a former Catholic foster home outside of Ruby that has become a refuge and second home for five women seeking escape from the despair, abuse, and emptiness of their former lives.

Ruby and the Convent are on a collision course whose climax is revealed in the novel's opening chapter--with the attack and murder of the unarmed Convent women by a group of Ruby's leading and formerly law-abiding citizens. In the subsequent retracing of events preceding the attack, Ms. Morrison avoids orderly chronology, choosing instead to rove forwards and backwards in time, telling the story from many characters' points of view.

This novel is no 'continuous uninterrupted vision' (John Gardener's definition of a successful novel) and the reader must work to get to where the many narrative tributaries gather the momentum to sweep the reader to the novel's end. However, the questions raised in the novel's first chapter--the 'Why' and 'How' of the murders--should sustain most readers until that point is reached. From there, Paradise is difficult to put down, and the novel's conclusion redeems the effort invested.

Ms. Morrison is a master symbolist, and early on one senses allegory at work: Ruby as the promised land that a latter-day Abraham leads his people to from persecution, exclusion, and drift. It's perhaps not coincidence that Paradise has nearly as dizzying number of characters in the novel as one finds in the Old Testament.

Though biblical allusions abound in Paradise, Ms. Morrison's ambitions go much further, and Ruby may perhaps be best understood as a study of black-American utopia whose citizens are free to build a dream unhindered by many of the compromises that African-Americans make to survive, much less flourish, in a white man's world. However, as with most utopian novels, the very principles upon which the utopia is founded invariably contain the seeds of its ultimate destruction, its fall from paradise. Paradise then, is about what happens when outcasts become insiders, suggesting real-life parallels such as Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the Islamic fundamentalists' treatment of non-Islamics, not to mention Christianity's long history of persecution. The people of Ruby build a dream and a town where once was none; in the process they heal their bodies but not their hearts. The persecuted become persecutors, the once ostracized are now the new excluders.

Ms. Morrison's prose is lush, colorful, and tightly woven as broadloom; so tight that at times there is little breathing room between the lines. She is at her most lyrical and moving when she writes simply. A quarter way through the book I began wishing for a genealogical tree from which I could arrange the bits of history and anecdote about Ruby's nine founding families, their innumerable descendants, not to mention the family histories of the Convent women. Given the number of characters and events populating Paradise, Ms. Morrison's predilection for not identifying speakers by name for many pages adds to the struggle of getting one's bearings.

For those already familiar with landscapes of Toni Morrison novels, the journey and struggle to get situated and comfortable in her narrative vision is expected--anticipated even, as many look forward to the challenge of the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. For those unfamiliar with Ms. Morrison's work, Paradise is rich, complex and thought-provoking novel, perhaps her best yet, and well worth the initial work and sore feet to reach its depths.

Rating:
Summary: Can the Nobel Prize be withdrawn?
Review: I was assigned "Paradise" for a class at Colgate University. I wonder now if the professor had read the book prior to putting it on the sylabus. Who can follow a story that has no sort of time while following characters that necessarily lack development, just by the sheer number included? The reader cannot care what happens to the citizens of Ruby. The only reason I give it a three is because of the rich use of language. However, it is not strong enough to overcome the multitude of faults. I have lost all faith in Oprah. I read for pleasure, and in this work I found none.

Rating:
Summary: Paradise.  Hah !  
Review:

Well I guess it's finally out. Not only am I a slug, but a low-browed one at that.Paradise. Hah! More like Purgatory, if you ask me (and I take it as given that you have !End of Story)"Meat and potatoes ! "I say -- nay, declare -- in proud stentorian, stegosaurian, terms (only slightly revealing a quaint quaylism-at-the-core). Meat and potatos, and what I was offered was a jumble of vegetables which wanted cooking (and me with no can of Sterno to my name). Sure -- "The energy we have to spend puzzling out the various pieces and getting them into some kind of satisfactory narrative shape keeps our focus on the realistic plane of the novel and allows that allegorical machinery to operate more or less hidden from view. "(New Yorker).Sure -- That's just what I want, to expend my precious vital energy to build myself a book which arrives at "some kind" of "satisfactory narrative shape"and at the same time hope to keep my focus on a "realistic plane" . . . No, I'm sorry, I can't go on (I think I'd shoot myself !)Keep it simple (or at least intelligible).I've got to agree with the prof who wrote -- :Confusion reigns in Paradise Morrison's new novel begins, "They shoot the white girl first." After that opening statement, it's all downhill. E.B. White once equated fine writing with clarity and simplicity. If indeed these two qualities are the mark of exemplary writing, Morrison's Paradise fails terribly. This tale is twisted and convoluted. There are no turns of phrase that strike this reader (a university literature professor) as exemplary and extraordinary. My thoughts, as I read this work, were thus: (1)if it had been written by a newcomer, it likely would not have been published and (2) Ms. Morrison has probably reached the stage in a literary career when awards and accolades intimidate editors and most reviewers from offering an honest appraisal. In short, confusion reigns in Paradise and, unless you have ample time to waste, it is a book best left on the shelf."Of course, I may be speaking somewhat prematurely, since I managed to force myself only one-third of the way thru the book before I gratefully set it aside.

The most interesting feature about the book is the enormously varied readers' reactions.There's a how-dee-doo. Could this be presaging a fundamental breakdown in society ? Hmmmm.... Aw . . . too much effort to figure it out, and the data looks kinda iffy to quantify anyway.This said, I give Paradise a "2" (great opening;down the tubes after page 2, tho)D.G. (Gary) Foulke "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence . . ." Carl Sagan
"Les grandes personnes sont décidément bien bizarres, se dit le petit prince." -- Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

Rating:
Summary: Truly wonderful
Review: After reading Paradise, I now know why more than a few have thought so bad of it. I can see how people would find it boring or difficult or not worth it simply because those were my exact sentiments at the end of Jazz. Since then, for various reasons (including the persistence of some good friends) I've gone back and read all of Morrison's books and in the process have learned to read. Beloved, Song of Solomon, Sula; these are works that have a simple requirement of the reader - to relax, trust, and enjoy the language, the people within. Enjoy each page. In the great works, morsels of truth are scattered along, not concentrated in the end. While some authors give you that token in the last paragraph so you can say "Ah," Morrison asks you to gather as you read. And if you weren't gathering all along there'd rarely be anything for you at the end. Her novels have taught me not only to read each other, but to read the works of so many others great ones, who (whether or not they sew up the book with That Satisfying Ending) have always reserved their best hidden in various passages, waiting for the patient and perceptive to discover, quite often in the 2nd, 3rd or 5th reading. Of all her books, I think Paradise would be the most inappropriate for someone looking for a traditionally satisfying read. And since I'd really hate for more people to close the book disappointed (those things are expensive, aren't they?) I'd recommend Song of Solomon first, then Sula, then Beloved, and then Paradise, a truly wonderful experience, and quite possibly her best.