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 lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.Ĭombining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened.
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. But it also moves beyond its particulars, combining imagination and the vision of legend with the unassailable truths of history. Sethe’s struggle to keep Beloved from gaining possession of the present-and to throw off the long-dark legacy of the past-is at the center of this spellbinding novel. Sethe works at “beating back the past,” but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in her memory in Denver’s fear of the world outside the house in the sadness that consumes Baby Suggs in the arrival of Paul D, a fellow former slave and, most powerfully, in Beloved, whose childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who has now come from the “place over there” to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved. Set in post–Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has lost a husband and buried a child who has withstood savagery and not gone mad. Upon the original publication of Beloved in 1987, John Leonard wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “I can’t imagine American literature without it.” Nearly two decades later, The New York Times chose Beloved as the best American novel of the previous fifty years. The magnificent Pulitzer Prize–winning work that brought the wrenching experience of slavery into the literature of our time, enlarging our comprehension of America’s original sin.
0 kommentar(er)
