Beloved (Paperback)

by Toni Morrison (Author) "124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom..." (more)
Key Phrases: men without skin, white stairs, baby ghost, Baby Suggs, Sweet Home, Lady Jones (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.

A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law.

Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Mixed with the lyric beauty of the writing, the fury in Morrison's (Song of Solomonp latest book is almost palpable. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this haunting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath traces the life of a young woman, Sethe, who has kept a terrible memory at bay only by shutting down part of her mind. Juxtaposed with searing descriptions of brutality, gradually revealed in flashbacks, are equally harrowing scenes in which fantasy takes flesh, a device Morrison handles with consummate skill. The narrative concerns Sethe's former life as a slave on Sweet Home Farm, her escape with her children to what seems a safe haven and the tragic events that ensue. The death of Sethe's infant daughter Beloved is the incident on which the plot hinges, and it is obvious to the reader that the sensuous young woman who mysteriously appears one day is Beloved's spirit, come back to claim Sethe's love. Sethe's surviving daughter, Denver, immediately grasps the significance of Beloved's return and so does Paul Dno period after D, another escapee from Sweet Home; but Sethe herself resists comprehension, and, as a result, a certain loss of tension affects the latter part of the narrative. But this is a small flaw in a novel full of insights, both piercing and tender, with distinctive, memorable characters, flowing prose that conveys speech patterns with musical intensity and a brilliantly conceived story. As a record of white brutality mitigated by rare acts of decency and compassion, and as a testament to the courageous lives of a tormented people, this novel is a milestone in the chronicling of the black experience in America. It is Morrison writing at the height of her considerable powers, and it should not be missed. BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Plume (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452280621
• ISBN-13: 978-0452280625
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (572 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #54,321 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars not a story to pass on..., July 26, 2000

By	"mollybloomer" (Hollister, California USA) - See all my reviews

You will not only find this novel difficult to put down, you will find it difficult to put out of your head. I have had wonderful--often heated and wildly divergent--discussions of this novel in both my Lit. classes and my bookclub. I would urge anyone who reads this book to seek out other readers to discuss it with--you will probably be surprised at their interpretation of symbols or events in the story. While Morrison depicts the devestating repercussions of slavery, the story is not completely bleak, and it gets even better with every re-reading. Even without discussion, the prose is challenging but rewarding, and the story is unforgettable. Put this novel on your "must read" list.

47 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Power of One Mother's Love, July 27, 2000

By A Customer

What kind of mother would deliberately cause the destruction of her own beloved child? This is the question Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner (and probably the greatest woman novelist of the twentieth century), Toni Morrison, explores in her rich, densely-layered novel, Beloved.

Set after the end of the Civil War, when slaves were freed by emancipation, but still victims of random acts of violence, the book also serves as a metaphor for the legacy of slavery and asks the chillingly relevant question: Why is the leading cause of death among young, African-American men murder by another black?

Beloved's protagonist is Sethe, an escaped slave and mother of four. Her joy at successfully escaping her former master while pregnant and giving birth before finally finding refuge at her spiritually-nourishing mother-in-law's home, vanishes a mere twenty-eight days later.

The sight of a cruel white slave owner's hat sends Sethe and her children running to a woodshed where she is forced to confront demons no loving mother should ever have to face.

Sethe's demons do not disappear when she emerges from the woodshed, however, and settles down in a small Ohio town. Instead, they remain to both haunt her and help her to understand the violence that occurred so many years previously.

Morrison, as skillful a storyteller as ever lived, spins a gorgeously heartbreaking tale in Beloved, and one whose plot is impossible to predict. With a mastery of language given to only a few, this extraordinarily talented author weaves subplot upon subplot and brings each exquisitely created character to life.

There is Paul D, another slave who escaped from the same plantation as did Sethe but who has not seen Sethe for more than a decade when he once again encounters her and the two of them contemplate what they hope will finally be a bright future for both.

There is Denver, Sethe's daughter, a troubled and isolated teenager whose life encompasses little more than her immediate surroundings and whose social interactions have dwindled down to embrace only her mother and the ghost of her long-dead sister.

And then, there is Beloved, the centerpiece of this exquisitely wirtten, lyrically beautiful book.

While Sethe appears to embrace a logic that says, "Before the while man destroys you, let me do it," Morrison, herself, tells us that it is time for us to look beyond the past and move on.

Today, more than twenty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, African Americans are, in many ways, worse off than they were before. The question plaguing most black Americans seems to be whether to cast their lot with the whites of the community or to separate, turn inward and seek their own redemption...alone.

In Beloved, Morrison uses the character of Ella, one of the leaders of her small Ohio community, to metaphorically explore this issue. "Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn't like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present...Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past was something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out. Slave life; freed life; every day was a test and trial. Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem. 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,' and nobody needed more; nobody needed a grown up evil sitting at the table with a grudge. As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place, shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such--Ella respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other foot. She didn't mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this was an invasion."

Beloved is first and foremost a brilliantly crafted and mesmerizing story, faultlessly told by one of the world's most gifted storytellers. It is a story of ghosts--those that haunt Sethe and those that haunt all of us. Beloved is not magic realism, nor does it contain elements of magic realism. Magic realism, by its very nature, requires that the fantastic be accepted as mundane by those experiencing it. There is certainly nothing mundane about Morrison's ghost and her acceptance by Sethe.

Although most of the novel's characters ostracize Sethe and blame her for her past, Morrison, herself, does not. Instead, she wisely extends a vision of harmony to the black community that exhorts them to let go of their past, no matter how painful, and move ahead.

Beloved and Sethe must, eventually, come to terms with the past and with each other, just as the community must come to terms with itself.

In the end, Beloved's protagonists decide on different paths to follow, some of which are quite surprising, although always heart-rending.

Morrison, however, remains true to the vision she created in Beloved: those who cannot let go of the past will ultimately self-destruct; those who can respect its lessons and mourn its loss but not feel indebted to right its wrongs, will find themselves endowed with unexpected, joyous freedom.

87 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of Morrison's finest books, May 22, 2000

By	M. H. Bayliss "book queen" - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

As a a high school English teacher, I've reread this book about 8 times and have taught it over the years to many students. Although it's certainly a complex novel, it's basic storyline is not hard to follow -- just the narrative style which shifts voices quite a bit. One thing that helps when reading anything by Morrison, but especially Beloved, is to remember that she herself is a classicist. Do yourself a favor and read the Medea myth -- you will suddenly understand 100 times more than you would if you skip it. I would also recommend NOT watching the movie, particularly if you are looking for explanations. Parts were well done, but the book is so rich that it seems mean to lower the dignity of the prose by showing private scenes. It's an incredibly rich and lyric novel with strains of Morrison's rendition of a kind of Magic Realism style. Don't expect everything to be realistic: there are ghosts and half painted characters that cross our normal boundaries of time. Expect to be disoriented at the beginning, but the plot clears up as you go and then you can go back and re-read the opening chapters. A great work of literature which yields more after every reading.