欧宝娱乐

I'll confess that, though I'm an adoring Morrison fan, I've avoided three novels (this one, Jazz, Tar Baby) because of the less-than-stellar things I've heard about them. (Not to mention I found Love tedious.) Well, I went in as a skeptic and I came out a believer.

The first sentence, quoted again and again here on GR, really deserves another show: "They shot the white girl first." It's so perfect, so emblematic of Morrison's ability to write both elegant, haunting, ornate sentences, and--just as skillfully--these jarring, monstrous and clipped phrases that seem so easily comprehensible, but end up being so much more. Not only is it a fantastic opening to a fantastic opening chapter (the scene, revisited at the end of the novel, is horrifying and thrilling at once), it also forces the reader into an uncomfortable whodunnit exercise of trying to figure out which one is the "white" one for the rest of the novel (an ultimately futile exercise, which makes it worthwhile rather than trite, and very fitting for Morrison's oeuvre). The writing, of course, is on the whole impeccable. I suppose I was more engrossed with certain "parts" of the novel than others (Ruby, Mavis, Lone, Consolata), but Morrison really only has a bad sentence once in a blue moon.

Everything that Morrison does well is here: trauma, gendered violence, faith, genealogy, (critiques of) history, racism, racialization (and how we map it onto bodies--this really peaks in the Patricia section), &co&co. Unlike Love, though, this didn't strike me as a novel that sounded like some hack trying to write a Morrison novel. It genuinely worked through these nuanced topics in ways that I don't think her other novels have (not for better or worse, just differently). I'm frankly still a bit stunned by it. I think I'll have to return to this review. It's no Beloved or Sula, but then--what is? Just a phenomenal story, an experimental way of handling it, and a beautiful way of telling behind it all.