Capsule review of "Beloved", until I run out of time

[ghostjmf]

Or "reviews of stuff I read over 30 years ago, some of it, without rereading now"

Yes, I know it won a Pulitzer. Dunno what it was up against that year (I should look it up) but I'd say its one of Morrison's worst books. I've read most of them.


Because:


The narrator is unbelievably inarticulate & mentally almost unformed, except for terror. You are to believe this because she is an escaped slave, & her whole life has been terror. Family, friends, lover are disappeared, presumed killed, all around her.


But I don't believe it, because there are several if not many memoirs of real people who lived this experience (Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, a few less famous) & came out of it neither inarticulate nor mentally unformed. Smart people are, well, smarter than that. They'll educate themself & form themself anyway they can. That the narrator of Beloved is therefore "not that smart" I can accept, except its not that fun reading through the viewpoint of someone not-that-smart, especially when they're created by an author who is very smart. I just don't believe it.


Morrison early in her career established some concepts she goes back to at various times. One is that men brought up without fathers because their families were broken up by slaveholders in future generations pass on the concept of "no obligation, no responsibility" to their male children for their children's own families. She established this in "The Bluest Eye", in which it is more relatable because her heroine there is a very intelligent & likable child. Who I remember as being abused by her father; she'd have been better off if he really had disappeared 1st.


I don't buy this "its a carried tradition" business because there are plenty of families, all colors & cultures, without fathers, where the kids don't grow up to be child-rapers, etc.


Morrison has one book, I should check which, in which a grandson who gets addicted to heroin is killed by his grandmother. As I remember she drowns him. Maya Angelou, in one of her memoirs, writes about her brother being addicted heroin, & their grandmother locking him up to kick the habit cold-turkey (not the best medical advice, it turns out, but for him it worked) & welcoming him down to breakfast with some great pancakes (or whatever) when he was finally sober.


For years, I got Morrison's fictional characters mixed up with Angelou's real ones because, well, Morrison's were so much more dramatic. And chilling. And awful.


I started reading Morrison because she comes from Lorraine, Ohio, not far from where I grew up. Maybe in some way I thought I would get insight into the African American community of Lorraine, Ohio. Or, as it turns out, maybe not.


More later maybe.

[danielh41]

In a 2006 poll of literary critics and authors conducted by the New York Times, Beloved came out number one in the list of the top works of American fiction of the last 25 years. I only know this because I just read Underworld by Don DeLillo, and on the cover of that book, it says that Underworld finished second to Beloved in that poll.

Underworld was really good, but I wonder if I thought that only because of my love of baseball (a certain baseball hit by Bobby Thompson in 1951 figures prominently in the novel).

[Bob Juch]

In a 2006 poll of literary critics and authors conducted by the New York Times, Beloved came out number one in the list of the top works of American fiction of the last 25 years. I only know this because I just read Underworld by Don DeLillo, and on the cover of that book, it says that Underworld finished second to Beloved in that poll.

Underworld was really good, but I wonder if I thought that only because of my love of baseball (a certain baseball hit by Bobby Thompson in 1951 figures prominently in the novel).

The best part was Jackie Gleason throwing up on Frank Sinatra's shoes. I didn't buy the political views in the book.

[danielh41]

The best part was Jackie Gleason throwing up on Frank Sinatra's shoes. I didn't buy the political views in the book.

Well, of course you didn't...