Introduction
Beloved, written by Toni Morrison, was published in September of 1987, by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. When choosing what books to read for this month, my mind immediately went to The Hate U Give, but I knew I needed three more, so I began to think about what else I had on my bookshelf. My mom recently lent me Beloved because it was a book she enjoyed, and when I asked for her opinion, she stood by her recommendation, and I’m glad she did.
If you haven’t read Beloved yet, I would recommend it, but I do have to input a trigger warning here for violence and sexual assault. This book is a heavy one, and I would recommend being in a good state of mind before reading it. I do not discuss these in detail in my review, but Morrison does not hold back in her book, so please proceed with caution. If you choose not to read the novel before this review, know that the Plot section will remain spoiler free, but my Thoughts section will not. If you’re okay with this, then go ahead and enjoy this review!
Plot
Beloved is set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873 after the end of the American Civil War. Sethe, a former slave, and her daughter, Denver, live alone in a house haunted by the ghosts of painful memories. Secrets and incomplete threads of the past weave together as mysterious visitors replace the ghosts that used to haunt the women. But as guilt and fear tear them apart, forgiveness and community support may finally heal them.
This story is told primarily in third person perspective with the focus switching throughout almost every character we’re introduced to, and the writing style and structure varies throughout to reflect each character and their state of mind. This book is written in three parts, with the first part taking up sixty percent of the length and the final two parts having an even split.
Thoughts
Toni Morrison is a blunt author. She doesn’t leave much to the imagination with her writing style. She says exactly what she means, and she is unapologetically frank in her word choices. As blunt as her words are though, they don’t give much of anything away, and Morrison seems to be a master of “show, don’t tell.” Up until the ending of this book, my mind was riddled with questions that got answered slowly via the dialogue and flashbacks sprinkled throughout the story. Reading this book brought new meaning to the proverb “good things come to those who wait.” The patient and attentive reader will get most of their questions answered, but some are left for reader interpretation. She hides symbolism in dreams and shadows, and she uses colorful metaphors to paint pictures in our minds both beautiful and brutal. Morrison uses parallelism - one of my favorite literary methods - to highlight the most crucial parts of her story, which I enjoyed, and thought was interesting, and it made otherwise ordinary words and phrases feel powerful, ominous, hopeful, and dangerous.
As clear as her writing is, the story was incredibly hard for me to follow. I usually take note of particularly powerful themes and plot points, but I took things a step farther with this one and wrote down the questions I had. There were many - some chapters left me with more questions than answers - and I tended to answer them to the best of my ability as I went along. In complete transparency, this book took me a month and a half to read. Not because it was bad - quite the opposite, I greatly enjoyed this book - but because it requires so much focus. Going from Percy Jackson - a children’s series with an easy to follow and clear-cut writing style - to Beloved was a huge shift, even with The Hate U Give as a buffer. I had to be incredibly focused whenever I decided to read this, and I had so much going on that I just wasn’t able to do that as often as I wanted to.
This book is told in third person - with only a few chapters in part two of the book being told from first person perspective. There is little to no warning for when the perspective changes, and it’s something you have to get accustomed to in order to understand the story. It forces you to use context clues to figure out who is speaking, who they are speaking to, what they are speaking about, and the significance of it all. In those few chapters of first-person perspective, it truly feels like a train of thought. Sometimes it seems to have a direction before it simply begins going in circles, and sometimes there’s no apparent direction to it at all. This is what I mean when I say if you aren’t committed to reading it, you’ll get lost.
The themes in this book include race, guilt, slavery, freedom, family, community, and love. In short, this book is not one for the faint of heart. Morrison explored what it means to be truly and honestly free, and what it feels like to be able to love without restraint. Paul D and Sethe worry about loving too much and what that does to a person, especially when the object of their affection is taken from them. What does it feel like to plan for a future when the very concept is foreign to you? Morrison also explores fear and guilt in relation to Beloved. Fear from Paul D; guilt from Sethe for murdering Beloved; and a sense of belonging from Denver, who often only has Beloved for company. Slavery is a focal point in this novel, and it influences all aspects of it; the flashbacks to Sweet Home, Sethe’s escape, her reaction to seeing white strangers approach her house, it’s all connected.
One of the most intriguing parts of this book for me was when we get the chapters of “I am Beloved and she is mine…” because they seemed to me to be from Beloved’s perspective. It felt like she was trying to tell her story, but it was jumbled, messy, and - for me - introduced more questions than answers. I still am not entirely sure what to make of this, and I will be reading the comments to see others’ interpretations of it. It did feel malicious to me, and by the end of the book it seems that Beloved returned for a reason beyond getting to know the mother that attempted to save her by killing her. Alternatively, a chapter in Paul D’s perspective clarifies quite a bit and answers so many of my questions. I believe these answers came from Paul D intentionally as he was the only living character in this story - aside from Denver - who was at Sweet Home with Sethe, and Sethe herself was too far gone by this point to give us answers.
My favorite quotes from this book, one comes from Baby Suggs, “‘You gotta love it.’” She was saying that to live life, you have to do more than just live it, you have to find something about it to love. The other comes from a conversation between Paul D and Stamp Paid, “‘How much is a [person] supposed to take?’ ‘All he can.’” I won’t pretend to sit here and have an ounce of an idea of what these men went through, but this quote is absolutely a testament to their strength and resilience. Both of these quotes demonstrate a different kind of strength, and I think that’s why they both stood out to me.
This book is an incredibly difficult one for me to rate. I love the themes it explored, and the plot line was interesting, but the way it told the story was a huge shift for me. It was by no means a bad way to go about it, I actually found it very intriguing, it was just something that was new to me. With all of that in mind, I would personally have to rate this a 9/10.
I regrettably did not have time to watch the 1998 movie adaptation starring Oprah Winfrey as Sethe, so I am not able to compare it to the book at the time of posting this review. However, if I am able to find some time to watch it, I will gladly come back and make an edit to this post with my thoughts.
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