Beloved

Toni Morrison, author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language, and their lyrical and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story, set in post-Civil War Ohio, of Sethe, a runaway slave who has risked death to escape a living death; who lost her husband and buried a son; who has endured the unthinkable and has not gone crazy: a woman with "eyes of iron and a spine to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the outskirts of town with her daughter Denver, her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, and a disturbing and fascinating intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe strives to "push back the past," but it is alive in all of them. That keeps Denver afraid to leave the house. It feeds the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolate center, where the self that was no self made its home." And for Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both torment and soothe her... in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his attitude. The women saw it and wanted to cry"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept... in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom... and, most powerfully, in the appearance of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless in their depths, whose doomed childhood belongs to the horrible logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "over there" to demand retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's fight to prevent Beloved from gaining full possession of her present and to rid herself of the long, dark legacy of her past is at the center of this deeply moving and surprising novel. But the intensity and resonance of its sentiments, and the audacity of its narrative, elevate it beyond its details to speak of our experience as an entire nation with a past of abhorrent and ennobling circumstances. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1988 for Beloved.

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Subjects

African American History, Ohio, History, 19th century, Fiction, Reading Level - Grade 9, Reading Level - Grade 11, Reading Level - Grade 10, Reading Level - Grade 12, 1000blackgirlbooks, African American Women, Infanticide, African Americans, Slavery, Slave Women, Race Relations, Continental African Descent Group, Modern Literature, Sklaverei, Psychische Verarbeitung, Fiction historical, Social Conditions, Schwarze, American Fiction (fictional works by an author), Ohio, fiction, African Americans, fiction, Slaves, fiction, Fiction, historical, Large Print Books, National Black Family Month, nyt:combined-print-and-e-book-fiction=2019-08-25, New York Times Bestseller, Fiction, historical, general, Crime, fiction, American literature, collectionID:EanesChallenge, Noires américaines, Romans, nouvelles, Femmes esclaves, Literary, Enslaved people, Women, collectionID:bannedbooks, African American women--fiction, Slave women--fiction, Infanticide--fiction, Ps3563.o8749 b4 2000, 813/.54, African Americans, Literary collections, Trials, litigationPlaces

Ohio, United StatesTimes

19th century, Until 1964Showing 10 featured editions. See all 107 editions?

Book details

Editing notes

Translation of: Beloved.