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August 26, 2001
This weekend, I read Toni
This weekend, I read Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, the novel that, more than any other, is credited with winning her the Nobel Prize for Literature.
*** Spoilers follow *** Do not read if you intend to read the novel and haven't yet ***
Beloved, singularly, is a book about a young woman who flees from slavery in Kentucky in the late 1850s and, when threatened with recapture, kills one of her own children rather than let her be returned to slave life. It is a difficult novel, but a magical, enchanting, and deeply moving one. It does not have much of a plot; this is a novel about people, about life, about suffering, about courage, about tragedy.
It is hard to really describe what this novel is about without reading it. One is confronted with a jumble of emotions....curiosity, horror, admiration, sadness, longing, all the myriad aspects of the human condition. Dreams, thoughts, wishes, memories, roll together into a seamless whole, uniting the conscious and the subconscious. Memory is personified, and guilt is made real.
I have read many accounts of slavery and oppression, and none have moved me the way Beloved did.
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Posted by Tyrone at August 26, 2001 11:40 PM