Beloved (Toni Morrison)

This novel flows like water, the pages being a shuffling waterfall between your open hands. Or rubber bands. See, I read my books at the gym and in order for this one to stay open I had to use two rubber bands, one pressing pages to the front cover and one the back. I then merely have to slip a new page, carefully, out and place it under the other rubber band. Good motivator for me on the elliptical machine when the book is this good.

Sigh. I love Morrison. Her poetic style and use of detail, especially about characters. One detail that encapsulates that person more than paragraphs of explanation. I love the way she makes skipping from person to person and from past to present okay--it makes sense, aiding the story and easily followed. I love how she has the talent to make a character that should be reprehensible, for their actions or their position, sympathetic and brave. It's a three-punch combo in my opinion. Not everyone, I know, feels the same. I recently chatted with a friend, a very intelligent friend, who felt this novel was a long and arduous slog. "At least I know more about slavery," she said. But I suppose we are all attracted to story-telling styles that suit our own thought processes and Morrison conveys the way I think and see the world around me, in stops and starts and looping backs and retellings with vivid drops of color splattered about. Morrison could be writing inside of my head--except I'm not black, was never a slave, have never been a mother, have never lost a child, etc and etc.

Ah the story. The story centers on the character of Sethe, a former slave that escaped her master to settle in Ohio with her husband's mother, a husband that never showed up as planned. That could never be cataloged as still living or mercifully dead. Sethe is above all a mother of four--one home, two taken off, and one dead yet haunting the house with the red, sad anger of a two-year old soul taken too soon. Through the interactions with her remaining daughter, Denver, and a long lost blast-from-the-past friend, Paul D, Sethe revisits all the pain that made her who she is and that explains, if not condones, all she has done. Morrison will leave you with vivid descriptions after the covers close--a quilt with two orange squares of color, how blood can feel oily as it slides through your fingers, and the metaphor of Paul D's heart: a rusted over tobacco tin, better kept closed, because love is a danger. If you love something, make it a small thing, like sunshine or the shadow under a tree, because loving something big is giving the world leverage to break you in yet another way.