Beloved

In 1988 Toni Morrison's novel Beloved won the Pulitzer Prise for Fiction and is on Hannah's book list for an American Literature class at Baylor.  So when we saw the paperback for sale in a book barn after picking blueberries in Michigan, I paid the 4 dollars then in need of a story to captivate me during a migraine I began to read it, from the beginning, not looking at the back cover for hints of what I was in store for.  


After the first chapter I did not want to go forward nor did I want to put the story down.  Its poetic writing and convincing language took me in even as the pictures it painted were on a canvas of something I did not wanted to see.  The story was the story of a woman, and those in her family, both one generation older than her and one generation younger and it moved abruptly from past to present (post Civil War) and back again with most of the pages anchored in Cincinnati,  Ohio. There is not a whole lot of romance in this love story but the love is thick.


I have to agree with those that praised the extraordinary talent expressed in this novel. It took you right back to where you could taste, see and feel what was going on, to places i did not want to be, nor did i want anyone to have to experience, but to know that many did have lives like those in this story gives me much to think about.   Near the end of the book, a minor character makes on observation that I feel does a good job at summing up the story.  "The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind.  And if it did not stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.  Slave life; free life-everyday was a test and a trial."

this novel was indeed a trial for me to read.


Beloved
Toni Morrison
275 pages paperback
1988