Beloved by Toni Morrison

(Book Review)

Started: September 20, 2017
Finished: October 9, 2017

Why I Read This Book
If left to my own devices, I would never have read this book.  But this was a book we did for book club, so I went along with it.

Sabrina suggested it.

There was no denying it was Sabrina's turn to pick a book.  (Down and Out in Paris and London, A Passage to India, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Sun Also Rises, and Palace Walk had all been my choices. The Brothers Karamazov and Pale Fire had been Tom's.)   So Tom and I went along with this choice.

We've generally been trying to stick to the classics in this little bookclub of ours.  Beloved is the most recent book we've done so far, (first published in 1987) but it's become famous enough that it's arguable a modern classic.

The Review
I have mixed feelings about this book.

I'll start with the positives.
Before we started the book, Tom expressed the concern that this would just be another feel-bad novel about slavery.
But this book is so much more than this.  It's a ghost story, and Toni Morrison has succeeded at creating a very haunting atmosphere.

I'm reminded of  the review that the AVclub gave to the movie: 12 Years a Slave:

If there was any doubt that this is a horror movie, Hans Zimmer’s score pounds and roars with dread—the appropriate soundtrack for the madness of history.

The idea of slavery as a horror story is probably a more accurate description of Beloved.
The story of the book is told mostly in flashback.  Right from the beginning of the book, we hear the names of the former slaves that the main characters (Sethe and Paul D) once knew, but their gruesome fates are only hinted at.
The mystery hooks the reader right in, and helps to add to the eerie atmosphere of the ghost story.
Gradually, the novel gives us more and more hints, until we finally have the full awful picture of what happened at Sweet Home.

Now, to the negatives:
I didn't like Toni Morrison's writing style.  It was too poetic for me, and I had to struggle to keep focused.
Granted, this is more reflective of me and my limitations as a reader than it is of the book.  If you're the kind of person who likes a lot of poetic description in your novels, then you'll love this book.

Getting frustrated with one of the more poetic passages, I wrote down "Ugh, typical" in the margins next to this paragraph:

Denver was seeing it now and feeling it--through Beloved.  Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked. And the more fine points she made, the more detail she provided, the more Beloved liked it.  so she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her--and a heartbeat.  The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved's interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved. The dark quilt with two orange patches was there with them because Beloved wanted it near her when she slept. It was smelling like grass and feeling like hands--the unrested hands of busy women; dry, warm, prickly. Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, and how it was really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it: the quality of Amy's voice, her breath like burning wood.  The quick-change weather up in those hills--cool at night, hot in the day, sudden fog. How recklessly she behaved with this whitegirl--a recklessness born of desperation and encouraged by Amy's fugitive eyes and her tenderhearted mouth.

If you like that, there's plenty more where that came from. But I found this almost unreadable.  (To be perfectly honest, if this hadn't been a book club book, I think I would have given up on it.  But because we were doing it for bookclub, I struggled through out of a sense of obligation.)
In our book club, Tom and I hated the writing style, and Sabrina loved it.  So this obviously differs from person to person.

Other Notes and Random Thoughts
So, with apologies, I'm not really going to be able to do justice to this book.  Someone who actually likes it will have to do a better job at tackling it's themes.  (See, for example, here.)  I've got just a few more scattered thoughts, and then I'm just going to call it a day on this book.

* Parts of this book were harder to read than others.  At times, the story was told in a stream of consciousness type narrative.  Tom and I really hated this, Sabrina liked it.  But then other times the prose would return to something very normal and readable, that all 3 of us agreed we enjoyed.
I'm reminded somewhat of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner which also kind of did the same thing--alternated conventional easy-to-read story-telling with hard to follow stream of consciousness prose.

* We got some interesting discussion out of our bookclub on the issue of slavery.
Sabrina, being from India, confessed she didn't know much of the history of slavery.
Tom and I were both Americans.
Tom at one point made a comment in the discussion.  "In America, we study the history of slavery SO much." But then as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he caught himself and added, "Well, actually arguably we don't study it enough."
I think this sums up my view as well.  We talked about the slavery issue so much in my American history classes and yet, arguably, we never fully comprehend what really happened.
I think part of the problem is that we learn all of this history when we are so young.  So it gets filed away in our brains with all the other school facts we learn when we are young...the structure of the cell, and the chemical composition of water, and the history of slavery.
We don't often stop and think about the full horror of it.  Unless we are made to think about it, like when reading a novel like Beloved.
"Wow!" I thought to myself when I read this book.  "Doesn't it blow your mind to think about the fact that we actually had slaves in this country?  In America!  In the modern era!"

* When reading Beloved, I was reminded of Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley.
In Cambodia's Curse, Joel Brinkley argues that one of the problems facing Cambodia today is that most of the population is suffering from PTSD.
The people who lived through the Pol Pot years are suffering from PTSD for obvious reasons.
But also, Joel Brinkley says, their children are also suffering from PTSD.  Apparently psychologists are learning more about how PTSD can actually be passed down from parent to child.  Because the children were brought up by emotionally scarred parents, the children suffered an abnormal upbringing, and so picked up a lot of the emotional damage of their parents.
I thought about this in connection with Beloved.  Even though the book takes place among freed blacks after the end of slavery, Sethe and Paul D obviously seem to be still suffering from the trauma of what they experienced on the plantation.  And Sethe's child, Denver, seems to be inheriting some of the emotional trauma of her mother.
I suspect that this is not just me reading too much into the book--I think one of the themes of the book is supposed to be how hard it was for black people to form real communities after the trauma of slavery.

* I'm deliberately avoiding talking too much about the plot, because a lot of the interest in this book is created by the reader gradually figuring out what the plot is.
Unfortunately, I spoiled this somewhat for myself by reading the Foreword of the book.  The Foreword gives too much of the plot away.  (If you plan on reading this book, don't touch The Foreword until the end)

* That being said, one of the interesting things that I did learn from The Forward was that Toni Morrison had edited Angela Davis's autobiography.
I actually read Angela Davis's autobiography when I was in college.  (That was back in the 1990s, so I wasn't blogging at the time.  So no review on this blog.  But I have occasionally mentioned Angela Davis's biography--see here, here and here.)

Video review
Video review here and embedded below.



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