Beloved

Book Description

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

Customer Reviews:

An absolute must read (and read again).......2007-09-19

Here is a shockingly raw story that could only be told so completely by Toni Morrison's unique brand of lyricism. This book is more than a tutorial on the atrocities of slavery. It is a jagged look at the power of fear, intimidation, guilt, shame, and how we can be haunted mercilessly by our pasts. It is also a story of the redemptive power of love and forgiveness (beginning with onesself). The movie Beloved follows the story line, dialogue, and symbolism almost verbatim. It's a great visual to enhance this book that should be read again and again throughtout the years. I think the reader will be surprised by their burgeoning understanding of this powerful work.

NOT A STORY TO PASS ON . . ........2007-08-28

I read this book for the first time in 1999; I had to think about it prior to knowing how I felt about it. However, I have come to realize that this is a kind of African American Reference book, not only for understanding slavery, but for many cultural pitfalls that are indigneous to the Af-Am community. Therefore, if you don't know anything about the history of blacks as enslaved community, or if you don't wish to be provoked into thinking, don't attempt to read this or any of her earlier works. I came to the understanding that Morrison writes in a kind of double consciousness when I was reading the inane reviews of Paradise. One can't be taught to understand Morrison, nor can she be read superficially.

Ain't no sin but white people.......2007-07-23

Each whitepeople should be made to read this book until he vomits and cries. This is what whitepeople did to black people--they stole their souls, took color from their eyes. . .If this book doesn't break apart your heart and scar up your soul, you ain't human.

One of Those Never-to-be-Forgotten Works [7][31][T].......2007-07-15

Written about slavery and post-slavery travails and the impossibility to enjoy new-found freedom, the horrors experienced by the family of Baby Sugg - most particularly her daughter-in-law, Sethe, and her granddaughter, Denver - lead us to cry for each and their Beloved.

To anyone who has not read Morrison, I give one warning: her topics are very depressing. But, her writing style is not. Therefore, she manages to capture your attention in reading about horrible events and opens your mind to things which we ordinarily do not read about or learn: for instance, after majoring in American History, I learned for the first time in this book that black men would be punished by having a tack put into their mouth at which time their mouths became deformed, tongue dried to the point of needing weeks to repair, and became mentally humiliated to an unknown degree.

There is a bit of Stephen King in this book - an apparition with the single name of Beloved returns to the family. To avenge? Or, to love? Or by her love is she an avenger? In any event, this character speaks few words but influences Denver and Sethe immensely, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

One force which seems to wrestle sanely in the insanely cruel world of slavery is Paul D. After having experienced worse tortures, mental and physical, than most others, he maintains a balanced perspective. He is the ballast to Sethe's tumultuous inner conflict. Sethe, we learn, experiences a "Sophie's Choice" situation which others view with disdain, but which we learn to understand. Even though we may not agree to the same, we understand. Morrison explains to us why good people can perform bad acts. In most simplest terms, she writes their reason of being good people that do bad things is, " That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad that you couldn't like yourself anymore."

But, those who had been slaves sought to protect their young - those who would be born free or became free before their memories jelled - from having this white-man manifestation of hate for self.

Strong topic. Strong delivery. Unique writing style. Great novel. Deeply touching. Deeply depressing. Probably, one of those never-to-be-forgotten works which you will remember for years after you turned the last page.

Powerful on so many levels.......2007-07-12

_Beloved_ is my first Toni Morrison book. If this is any indication of her skill as a writer, I will certainly be reading more by her. Initially the book is confusing, unsettling and leaves the reader with many questions - this is intentional, as Morrison wants us to experience the dislocation and chaos that was the daily bread of a slave in the mid-nineteenth century. Stay with it; the struggle is richly rewarded.

_Beloved_ on the surface is the story of Seethe, a runaway slave, haunted by her dead daughter. As the story progresses, each character we encounter has a secret of their own that they are coming to terms with (or are trying to hide.) Gradually the questions raised in the first 50 pages are answered and order made of the chaos, as the rich interconnectedness of the characters becomes apparent, and their secrets are exposed.

Slavery plays a large role to be sure, as Morrison shows the scars the institution left on both African - Americans and whites. But _Beloved_ is also about forgiveness, leaving the past, and coming to terms with past wrongs. These themes are masterfully woven through the perspectives of a wide cast of characters, each wholly unique and human. I am also dumbstruck with Morrison's way with words - at times poignant and touching, elsewhere horrifying and shocking, reading this book was an emotional experience. Only a handful of authors can make that claim, in my opinion, and Morrison is one of them. I highly recommend this book.

Average customer rating:

Voice for the Voiceless - Noble (and Nobel) attempt
Okay
A Work of Art
She really is impressed with herself
Not the best portrayal of pre-Civil War America

Beloved (Plume Contemporary Fiction)
Toni Morrison
Manufacturer: Plume
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0452264464

Amazon.com

In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.

A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law.

Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilber

Amazon.com Audiobook Review

As with the ghost at its center, Beloved has taken many forms--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to Oprah Winfrey's decade-in-the-making movie to this challenging audiobook read by Lynn Whitfield. Whitfield, who won an Emmy Award playing the title role in The Josephine Baker Story, has a tough assignment as she guides us back and forth in time with Sethe, an escaped slave who's still shackled by memories of her murdered child. But, as we shift between Sethe's brutal plantation days and her haunted life immediately after the Civil War, we learn one secret after another until, finally, past and present are masterfully reconciled. (Running time: three hours, two cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs

Book Description

2 cassettes / 3 hours
Read by Lynn Whitfield

Beloved is also available Unabridged, read by the author, Toni Morrison

"An extraordinary novel." -The New York Times

Toni Morrison's magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel brings the unimaginable experience of slavery into our comprehension. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave, who has risked her life in order to wrench herself from living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad. 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.

Profoundly affecting, this is one of Toni Morrison's greatest novels - a dazzling and spellbinding achievement.

Customer Reviews:

Voice for the Voiceless - Noble (and Nobel) attempt.......2007-05-29

Beloved HAD to be written. The African-American tragedy is told here in a way that the slaves could not have articulated themselves - but here their souls cry out. True, Toni Morrison does not quite make this a total work of Art. The devices are too obvious as she fulfills this almost impossible task she has set herself. In this book you LIVE the destruction/denigration of life - in a way I cannot remember experiencing in any other book. The characters, especially Beloved, are symbols - and yet they are very real and quite fascinating too! These are vibrant, exciting people - and Morrison gives them a voice and makes them so real!

Okay.......2007-05-18

I read this book after reading The Known World and March so I had already had a good (better, actually) dose of reading about the inhumane conditions slaves lived under. This was a ho-hum book for me. I thought it was more work that it was worth and I wanted it over with and was glad when I finished it.

I was really struck by Morrison taking you inside the damaged spirit of some of the characters. You learn how they only let themselves love others a little as all things important to them will likely be taken away. You learn the significance of a star or a leaf to someone who has no joy in their life whatsoever. You come to understand why a mother would rather take the life of her child than subject it to a life of continuous degradation and misery.

A Work of Art.......2007-04-04

Get a peek of what is to come next in this novel without knowing you're seeing the future. Morrison's artistic lyrics are outstanding.

She really is impressed with herself.......2007-01-15

The only thing worse than reading _Beloved_ (read my review of the novel) is listening to Morrison read it. She goes so s - l - o - w - l - y, and seems more impressed with her book than the reader. Quite frankly this book doesn't really demand this close of a reading.

Although trite to say, the best compliment a writer can have is having someone else make the text come to life, and this audio book is interesting only as an historical artifact.

Not the best portrayal of pre-Civil War America.......2006-11-30

Beloved is one of the most famous novels by Toni Morrison, America's only female to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Set in the America before the Civil War, the story moves from the slave South to the non-slave North. Free the North is not, as this book depicts, for slaves could be captured and returned down South. The book is conglomeration of multiple themes and storylines. First and foremost is the story of Sethe, a black woman who used to be a slave. Second, the book focuses on her baby who died at birth, who goes by the name Beloved, and the reappearance of the baby as a ghost.

Third, the book examines slavery, racism, and the politics of inclusion and seclusion. In the South, Sethe is excluded from civil society in many ways by her color and the institution of slavery, but being a slave, is an integral part of society in general. In the North, she is not a slave per say, but instead she is excluded from society in general by the ways of white people and their benign racism. The storylines of this book also explore the physical punishments and practices used to enforce slavery at the personal level. Here is where this book stands out from others like it like Uncle Tom's Cabin or Huck Finn. This book could be described as doing for black literature on slavery as what Passion of the Christ did for movies based on the Bible. it is quite graphic with big servings of the natural thrown in. But I would not use this book as a study of slavery and the racism built into it. The text is very confusing and I, the reader, spent much time trying to understand the entity of Beloved, and its use in furthering the story. In fact, I would call this book a tragedy not about slavery and racism, but a tragedy set against the backdrop of slavery and racism. Overall, a difficult book to read and though not boring, is not on my list of great American works.

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Beloved

Manufacturer: RH Audio
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: 0739342274
Release Date: 2007-03-20

Book Description

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding audio transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook (Casebook in Contemporary Fiction)

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Morrison's best....a dramatic tale plagued by its past

Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook (Casebook in Contemporary Fiction)

Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0195107977

Book Description

With the continued expansion of the literary canon, multicultural works of modern literary fiction and autobiography have assumed an increasing importance for students and scholars of American literature. This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray. This casebook to Morrison's classic novel presents seven essays that represent the best in contemporary criticism of the book. In addition, the book includes a poem and an abolitionist's tract published after a slave named Margaret Garner killed her child to save her from slavery--the very incident Morrison fictionalizes in Beloved.

Customer Reviews:

Morrison's best....a dramatic tale plagued by its past.......1999-03-31

Toni Morrsion's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved, deals with the self-sacrifice of motherhood, the black experience in America, and an unescapable history which will haunt the bravest at heart. First, she creates an elaborate, detailed story for the reader and secondly, she spins the literary web together by alterating between past and present. Morrison does an extraordinary job in portaying the trials and tribulations of slavery shortly after the Civil War. Also, Toni's greatest aspect and technique of Beloved, is her use of the past ruling the present, this enables the reader to know more about the character than the character may know about themself. The theme of the novel which I found most intriguing was the aura of the book itself. The gothic tale conjured some of the most deep-rooted feelings from my soul. The book is definately a masterpiece of its time and history as well. And it feels extraordinary to have a piece of history in the palms of your hands.

Average customer rating:

"That woman is crazy, [but] ain't we all?"

Beloved (Everyman's Library)
Toni Morrison
Manufacturer: Everyman's Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0307264882
Release Date: 2006-10-17

Book Description

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. 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. 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.

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. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.

Combining 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.

Customer Reviews:

"That woman is crazy, [but] ain't we all?".......2007-09-15

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1988, Toni Morrison frees herself from the bonds of traditional narrative and establishes an independent style, just as her characters have freed themselves from the horrors of slavery and escaped from Kentucky to Ohio. Revealing the story of Sethe and her family as they survive the brutality of the farm, only to encounter torments even more punishing than whippings after they escape, Morrison presents scenes in a seemingly random order, each scene revealing some aspect of life for Sethe, her boys, her dead baby Beloved, and the new baby Denver, both in the past and in the present. Moving back and forth, around, and inside out through Sethe's recollections, she gradually reveals Sethe's story to the reader, its horror increasing as the reader makes the connections which turn disconnected scenes into a powerful and harrowing chronology.

As the novel opens, Sethe and Denver have lived in #124, a house in Ohio, for eighteen years, refusing to socialize and enjoying no company. When Paul D. Garner, one of the Sweet Home men and a friend of her long-missing husband, arrives on her doorstep and moves in, Sethe slowly reveals her long-buried nightmares, and the two share their stories of the events leading up to their escape. Most haunting to Sethe is the death of her young daughter Beloved, shortly after the escape from the farm, though the reader does not know for many pages the shocking manner of her death. When a ghostly figure who calls herself Beloved arrives at #124, shortly after Paul D., Morrison creates mystery and a heart-stoppingly tense atmosphere, when Beloved, too, moves in. As Beloved gradually takes over the household and seems to demand and then possess Sethe's soul, the sorrow which has burdened Sethe seems close to breaking her.

The sadism of some slave-owners, the devices used to torture, and the desperate measures some slaves took to protect themselves and their loved ones come fully alive here, the horrors growing as the reader gradually discovers the real source of Sethe's torment. By forcing the reader to make the connections, instead of spelling out details in a traditional narrative, Morrison strengthens the impact of the novel and its brutal revelations. Symbols of water, rain, snow, and ice connect the disparate scenes, and the use of shadows and the ghostly character of Beloved keep the reader on tenterhooks until the action is eventually resolved. A powerful, atmospheric, and shocking novel, Beloved is also a searing indictment of slavery and the damage it has done to the fabric of life, damage that cannot be repaired until it is fully recognized through novels such as this. Mary Whipple

Forgetting Futures: On Meaning, Trauma, and Identity

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Forgetting Futures: On Meaning, Trauma, and Identity
Petar Ramadanovic
Manufacturer: Lexington Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Forgetting Futures reignites the debate about the crisis of memory and the search to understand the relationship between past and present, remembering and forgetting. In "Forgetting" Petar Ramadanovic presents an elegant critique of the most significant concepts of memory, from Plato to Nietzsche, as he challenges the prevalent, Aristotelain understanding of memory as mere repeated presentation of the past in the present. In "Futures" Ramadanovic skillfully examines the power of traumatic memory in history. Through an analysis of Cathy Caruth and a ground breaking revisionist interpretation of Toni Morrison's "Beloved" he shows how the memory of the Holocaust and slavery has shaped American identity. This unique study of memory places trauma, identity, and race under the intellectual microscope resulting in a book of great use for literary and cultural studies scholars, and educated readers seeking to learn more about the relationship between history and memory.

Toni Morrison: Beloved (Columbia Critical Guides)

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Toni Morrison: Beloved (Columbia Critical Guides)

Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 023111527X

Book Description

With excerpts from interviews and reviews, an exploration of the historical documents and slave narrative traditions on which Morrison drew, and an insightful juxtaposition of psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches to the novel, this guide places Beloved in the contexts of Morrison's oeuvre and other works of African American literature. Chapters focus on the supernatural elements of the work, as well as the author's treatment of the physical self.

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Toni Morrison's Beloved (Monarch notes)
Eleanor Branch
Manufacturer: Barnes & Noble
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: 0760711283

York Notes on Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (York Notes Advanced)

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York Notes on Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (York Notes Advanced)
Laura Gray
Manufacturer: Longman
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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THE BLUEST EYE, BELOVED, JAZZ
Toni Morrison
Manufacturer: Quality Paperback Bookclub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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