Rating: 
Summary: A Shocking Socioeconomic Prescription!
Review: In reading Toni Morrison's striking novel Tar Baby, I came to characterize Jadine as a cultural orphan. The two often times conflicting worlds of white and black juxtapose along the lines of social, cultural and political demarcation. In the midst of such duality exists the character of Jadine, who symbolizes a contemporaneous example of the black female in a post-Civil Rights moment. Jadine is a woman who is educated, elevated and moneyed and in sharp contrast to the perceived notions of what it means to be black and female in a time of vast social and political change.Jadine is a woman trying to escape the stigma associated with her class position. Her family has money, but finds it hard to truly identify with them. She has no allegiance to African-American cities; she had received an education at the Sorbonne and was afforded the kind of lifestyle that is alien to many African-American women of her time. Jadine finds herself torn between the black world and the white world, fitting into neither. She equates her position as a black female in the culture through two dogs copulating in a street in Baltimore, Maryland. She is in a working-class situation and does not enjoy it - especially since she witnessed the "other side of the tracks," figuratively speaking, and saw life through the rose-colored lenses of the white world. Jadine is part of a new generation - one that did not grow up in a segregated society. The culture she is in and the lifestyle she inherited is predominately white - her upbringing, her education and her outlook. African-American culture is a hybrid culture, leading one to wonder why Jadine would be viewed as a cultural orphan, but there are political reasons, which determine why we rally under the flag of race or gender or sexual preference, etc. There is a change in the culture and Jadine is reflective of such change in a culture that has always been hybrid since its very beginnings. Toni Morrison, through the characterization of Jadine in the novel of Tar Baby is trying to redefine the parameters and scope of the term "culture" and gerrymander its boundaries.
Rating:
Summary: Revealing, Redemptive, Raw
Review: In Tar Baby, Morrison explores the various relationshipsAfrican Americans find ourselves engaged in at any given point intime. Tar Baby scrutinizes our relationship to the oppressor and toeach other, parent to child, child to parent, man to woman. In our relationship to the oppessor the novel implies that we are forever wanting and forever in service to. Wanting of acceptance, at times at any cost, while serving him diligently, completely. The desire for acceptance is symbolized, in this reader's opinion, by the novel's title. Was the Jadine character, at her worst, a white woman in black skin? Is her acculturation likened to having poured, like tar, a black coating over the ideals, notions, and behaviors of white women? Is that what happened to Jadine's "ancient properties"? Ondine and Sydny are passive yet powerful characters having lived their lives in servitude to the Streets and Jadine, whose absent "ancient properties" and connection to self, left her confused, unsure of what to make of her of her own people. Like all of Morrison's novels, Tar Baby is filled with symbolism, lending itself to interpretation base on the reader's life experience. Its messages are raw and intense, its characters as knowable as a long time friend. A great group reading novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Role-Reversals
Review: In Tar Baby, Valerian Street, a wealthy white candy mogul, suffers some devastating role reversals. This situation has nothing to do with "political correctness" but rather the truth of the fact that no one can mastermind and counterfeit a reality forever. Valerian cannot grow Pennsylvania plants in L'Isle de Chevaliers any more than he can recreate the racial, economic, and sexual hierarchy that existed there. This point is not "a rip-off from real life" as one amazon.com reviewer described it. Nor is it, to my mind, her most profound. I agree that _Beloved_ soars higher. I think the "trick" to reading Morrison is reading at your own level. I read many of her books as a young teenager and enjoyed them merely for their plots. I liked them because the people were fascinating and the suspense was real. Morrison hadn't won the Nobel or been championed by Oprah Winfrey, so I didn't have her reputation to contend with. And I didn't feel that my intelligence or sophistication depended on understanding her every word. So if I couldn't understand something, I moved on with the story. Now that I am in college, and an English major, I understand much more of Morrison's art as I re-read the novels of my adolescence. However, if I don't understand the significance of some image or passage, I let it go. Then I talk to someone about it. One cannot read Morrison's academic and artistic novels any other way. Although it doesn't have to be drudgery, Morrison's books are meant to be "studied" (which is just a fancy way of saying "discussed"). If you are intimidated by the Morrison mystique, I recommend leaving one's ego at the door when entering Morrison's world. Then, I recommend talking to someone more familiar with Morrison's work before you cast her books aside.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Read
Review: Morrison draws us into the lives of her characters and has the reader wanting to know what is going to happen to them next. Her characters are not exceptional people with exceptional lives. We get to peak in on their lives for only a short period. However, it is a time that proves to be disruptive to the order of things in all their lives. The book illustrates how fragile and tentative are our own life stories. A single incident can quickly change the order of our lives.
Rating: 
Summary: a different Morrison
Review: Morrison moved outside of the Ohio setting in her novel Tar Baby. She plays on familiar themes of love and identity and sets most of the action in the Caribbean. This is not Morrison's best work in my opinion. It is an interesting novel, but one I didn't have to work so hard to understand. Her reference to the Tar Baby story and its connection to the novel were well paired. I think that this is a wonderful book, an easy read, but having read her previous works, I was a touch disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Glad I read it:)
Review: My H.S. Advanced Composition class forced me to read this book, which i normally would not read. I read "Beloved" first, and loved that, so i decided to try "Tar Baby" next. The book was overall a great story, one that kept me interested throughout.....however, i was a bit confused on some aspects. Toni Morrison is very deep...but kudos for her, this was a wonderful depiction of relationships on all aspects.
Rating:
Summary: Passion
Review: Name the big Black romance novels. I dare you. Name them all. Ok, five, name five romance novels centralized around Black characters, in love, loving, making love, living well, being well that doesn't have four women as successful best friends?
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Toni Morrison is not easy. Do not mistake her ever for easy, do not mistake her subject matters for simple to pierce or to understand. I agree with the previous reviewer, people expect books to be like TV. And they aren't. Good books anyway. Books that are literature. This book is literature.
Hopefully more will come along, more romance that mean something, that say something about culture, about color, about power and the abuses.
Son is all of the projected racial fears and Jadine is the homogenized Black America wants Black people to be/to become. Grateful and still on some level serving in the kitchen (Sydney and his wife). Black people are required to be so much within this world, this America. Savage, erudite, butler, maid/cook and yet all of the characters here in the book, that are White, are one form (rich) here. White is a decision to be, to be a thing, rich, poor, bohemian, angry, depressed, rebllious, vane, but all that is shiftable, malleable. Black however is static from White perception and being Black from the inside out? That's birth from a dead womb.
Rating:
Summary: Passion
Review: Name the big Black romance novels. I dare you. Name them all. Ok, five, name five romance novels centralized around Black characters, in love, loving, making love, living well, being well that doesn't have four women as successful best friends?
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Toni Morrison is not easy. Do not mistake her ever for easy, do not mistake her subject matters for simple to pierce or to understand. I agree with the previous reviewer, people expect books to be like TV. And they aren't. Good books anyway. Books that are literature. This book is literature.
Hopefully more will come along, more romance that mean something, that say something about culture, about color, about power and the abuses.
Son is all of the projected racial fears and Jadine is the homogenized Black America wants Black people to be/to become. Grateful and still on some level serving in the kitchen (Sydney and his wife). Black people are required to be so much within this world, this America. Savage, erudite, butler, maid/cook and yet all of the characters here in the book, that are White, are one form (rich) here. White is a decision to be, to be a thing, rich, poor, bohemian, angry, depressed, rebllious, vane, but all that is shiftable, malleable. Black however is static from White perception and being Black from the inside out? That's birth from a dead womb.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Nothing can be more torturous than reading some of these reviews! Tar Baby is an amazing book - excellently written! I feel that most people are looking for a quick and easy read, which Tar Baby is not. This book puts the reader into the minds of the characters - not merely superficial thoughts, but deep (and sometimes controversial) feelings.
Rating: 
Summary: Long
Review: OK, I didn't understand all of this novel, but I liked it. Being a 46 year old while male I probably never will undestand it all. How ever, I can report that the character studies of Valerian Street and his wife ("The principal beauty of Maine") are some of the most devistatingly accurate upper class character studies I've ever read, and very funny in a vitriolic way. This is my introduction to Toni Morrison, and I plan to read more.
|
