Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Drama
Pages: 324
My first dance with Toni Morrison was everything but easy. Beloved is the novel that launched her into the immortal status that she possesses today, earning her the most distinctive awards, from the Pulitzer to the Nobel. It's also her most challenged book. The well-thinking often get offended when they have to read about the insane amount of pain they caused to the African-American people. And illustrate that pain Toni Morrison did. I have read beloved for the Back To The Classics Reading Challenge as my banned book, because I have wussed out of it many times in the past. I took my courage with both hands and dived into this very difficult, but strangely enthralling read.
The main problem I had with Beloved is that Toni Morrison seems to have enjoyed reminding me that English is not my first language. I had to read the plot summary from Wikipedia afterward to make sure I understood everything. So the plot goes approximatively like this. Sethe is an ex-slave who's trying to rebuild her life with her daughter Denver in...a haunted house. Their crib, 124 , is holding some kind of malevolent spirit that like to torture its inhabitants. That presence happens to take human form as a little girl, Sethe's murdered daughter, Beloved. While this is happening, another ex-slave named Paul D is trying to court Sethe and get her family to mingle with the world outside of 124. The arrival of Beloved in her physical form messed things up though. It brings Sethe back emotionally big time and it forces her to tell Paul D the real story behind Beloved's ghastly apparition. Paul D is so disgusted by what he hears that he lifts off. From then, things get really weird.
There are many stylistic choice that Morrison made that I don't understand. There is a stability of perspective for about two hundred pages and then it all goes away. Some chapters are directly about Sethe and Beloved and some other have that weird distant point of view on them. Morrison seems preoccupied with her POV family some times and some random chapters, she rather talk about the slave condition as a whole. This is really weird. I also struggled with her sentence structure, which was really poetic, but didn't quite held the story together. Imagery+plot in a sentence is a pretty cool feet to have, but when it's in most sentences of your novel, you're going to have a very confused reader. On a mechanical aspect, Beloved was somewhat of a nightmare and made me feel dumb. Not good.
But.
Being a talented writer, Toni Morrison included some interesting themes to juggle with. Beloved is basically a repressed memory for Sethe and her materialization is symbolic of the weight she presses on the family. Drama alters people, family and the very fabric of life in some circumstances. The very concept of ghost in literature (and especially in Beloved) also has to be taken within the perspective it's written from. Beloved is indeed a physical presence, but she also creates the distance in between Denver and her mother, by that weird bond she has with Sethe that goes way beyond physicality. Anyway. I finished Beloved last Monday with the weird impression that I was missing out on something evident. It's one of those books I'm not sure I want to read again, unless I have the proper time and dedication to give it. Slightly frustrating experience.
Banned Novel
