Customer Reviews

The Bluest Eye, A Novel (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was the most depressing book I ever read. I kept waiting for something good to happen, just one small thing that shows that there was some joy in the characters life.

I was so frustrated and disappointed at the end of the book, I vowed not to read another book from Oprah's book list.

I love this book. The book explains the truth about how many little girls feel about their looks and about themselves, in general. This book can make you laugh and cry. This book can also, make you very confused, but at the end there is no confusing the books point about life and how a few people can ruin someone's life by selfishness or lack of compassion. I had to give it a five.

When I started this novel I loved it- I loved the author's writing style. It flowed. Sometimes it felt almost like poetry. But I felt hugely let down by her about a quarter of the way through. Why? Well...

This novel contains 3 sex scenes, none of which make easy reading and one of which is the rape of an 11 yr old girl; it has one scene of a boy breaking a cat's back on purpose, and another of a girl poisoning a dog (followed by description of how the dog staggers about and dies a painful death).
In a novel of only around 160 pages long, I thought this cheap. It was voyeuristic. I'm not surprised that it was ignored for about 25 years. it is only in the new climate of political correctness that it has become esteemed.

One reviewer told me that this was the point, that Morrison shows us the gritty, nasty, unfairness of the world.
Well if you want to know how awful the world is, read a newspaper. This was cheap shock tactics. I only finished the novel because it was a set text on my course.

The MAX NOTES were a godsend, as they helped so much that I could write a successful essay without having to plough through this novel a second time.

Don't buy the book unless you want nightmares or like feeling sick.

The book is called "The Perfume" by Patrick Süskind. it's about a man in France in the 18th century. He is born without a bodysmell and with the best smellingsence in the world. After a childhood with problems he becoms a man who makes perfums. And his project becoms to extract the smell of human beings from young girls.