Mark Stone's Reviews > Beloved
Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)
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I don't give books low marks lightly. If anything, I am prone to being carried away by the author's enthusaism and rate books more highly than they deserve. I am an aspiring author, myself, and that also leads me to be kind to the books.
That being said, I really hated this book.
I like fantasy and magical realism. I find the dreams and allegories that live just underneath the skin of the world we can more readily see and touch endlessly fascinating. I like my stories intense and emotional, and I like it when characters are so full of passion that it obscures their sense of the world around them.
That being said, I really hated this book.
I found Beloved incomprehensible to the point of absurdity. It's one thing to have a book that is full of magic and poetry or to have a character's passion overwhelm their ability to describe the world from time to time, but I also need to know what is going on. For the story to grab me, I need to know what the story is.
Did I mention that I really hated this book?
I know it's trendy to read Toni Morrison, but I recommend this book to absolutely no one. I found it a borderline insulting waste of my time.
That being said, I really hated this book.
I like fantasy and magical realism. I find the dreams and allegories that live just underneath the skin of the world we can more readily see and touch endlessly fascinating. I like my stories intense and emotional, and I like it when characters are so full of passion that it obscures their sense of the world around them.
That being said, I really hated this book.
I found Beloved incomprehensible to the point of absurdity. It's one thing to have a book that is full of magic and poetry or to have a character's passion overwhelm their ability to describe the world from time to time, but I also need to know what is going on. For the story to grab me, I need to know what the story is.
Did I mention that I really hated this book?
I know it's trendy to read Toni Morrison, but I recommend this book to absolutely no one. I found it a borderline insulting waste of my time.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
October 1, 2001
–
Finished Reading
July 31, 2007
– Shelved
Comments Showing 1-50 of 242 (242 new)

What I am trying to say is that I like to know what is happening around the characters - what they are perceiving, experiencing, and so on. Now, what is happening around the characters need not make any sense; it need not even be really happening. What I need to understand is the basic who, what, where, and when of the scene.
To mix my media, the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena is a good example of the way I like my trippiness. The series is full of strange scenes that seem at odds with the scenes surrounding them. A serious fan of the series who has watched it more often than I have explained these scenes, saying that they are often symbolic of the action and aren't really happening to the characters at all. Instead, they reflect something important about the real action, and are thus more true (and therefore, more worthy of portrayal than the actual action).
So, when a character transforms into a cow or two girls exchange personalities, these things aren't necessarily happening. While it isn't clear what is actually happening within the narrative, what I am watching is clear. I am watching a girl turn into a cow. I am watching a pair of roomates exchange personalities.
For a literary example, how about One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? In many ways the book is an extended allegory. The action we read is symbolic rather than actual. Perhaps it is symbolic of a family's experiences, perhaps it is an allegory for Latin American history, or perhaps I have no idea what the book is meant to mean. However, the scene where a baby is born with a pig's tail and is eaten by ants and the scene were a vicious general manages to shoot himself in the chest such that the bullet bypasses all his vital organs and deals no lasting damage whatsoever are both written very clearly. I may not know what the scenes mean, but I know what I am being presented with.
In Beloved, on the other hand, I often felt that I did not understand the action I was presented with. The narrative seemed to dissolve into nonsensical impressions.
I agree about what was fascinating, though. Those themes were powerful. I just didn't like how they were presented.




That being said, if you do NOT post a passage that you find "incomprehensible to the point of absurdity" or that "seem[s:] to dissolve into nonsensical impressions", I will consider you a tool & promise to boycott any writing you do attempt to publish in the future (although it sounds like I wouldn't be missing very much).
A final thing (& this might really be the litmus test I have been looking for): do you read/appreciate any 20th or 21st century poetry? If not, then I TOTALLY get why you wouldn't appreciate Morrison's language (which can be rather *poetically* ambiguous, but very productively so). Toni Morrison writes poetic novels in the vein of Woolf, Faulkner, Beckett, & Pynchon. All very difficult; all very worth the difficulty.
Anyhow,
BelovedLover

I did NOT want to read this book at first. I was assigned it in class. It was incredible though. I never wantedd to put it down.
It can get confusing, yes. But Morrison's use of "Stream of Consciousness" was wonderful in my opinion.
Although Beloved herself showed little emotion, Sethe's emotion was fervent. It also brings a great realization to just how horrific slavery was. We all know it was a bad thing, but to kill your own child because slavery is worse! That is incomprehensible.
It wasn't magic that brought Beloved back. African religion believes that the dead are reincarnated. They also believe that a soul can stay and haunt those that are still left in the family.
All this book needs is a little research and understanding of the authors style.
This was a great novel.
Toni Morrison may be a "trend," but all in good reason.


i feel that the writer has played with her own lucidity and expect the same with the readers; which is mighty bourgeoisie of her!
Why diminish the value of art and simplicity for something as abstract as this? Dont tell me people cannot understand the novel simply cause people cannot relate and feel the writer. What a load of expensive crap is this? we all can appreciate the gravity and Guernica and Manet's maximillian just fine without having to struggle through its confusion. But when a work of art is simple addressed to selected few who can 'understand' it, its in all earnest, a load of selfish haughtiness.


If the reader is frustrated and angry, the characters because he can't understand what is going on, it's because the characters are frustrated and angry that events like this can ever happen. The reader is forced to figure everything out because that's what the characters are doing: trying to figure this shit out.
Hope that helps. Beloved is a masterpiece.












What an awful comment. This OP has every right to dislike this book.

This book is certainly not for everyone, and you should enter it with caution, but I can honestly say that it is the best book I've ever read.

Sethe is just an extraordinary character, she goes through so much because of what slavery has done to her and thanks to this we understand what she is really feeling.
Beloved also gives the reader a chance to comprehend how slavery scars you for life, you cannot run away from it, no matter what.
Hence I think this book should be read carefully and should be analyzed too while reading it because a superficial read will not be the same due to all of the meanings it has





I didn't think it was anything very special and I struggle to see why she's a Nobel Laureate (but then I've only read this by her) but I certainly didn't find it "incomprehensible" at all. Facts were revealed piecemeal and not necessarily in chronological order but I think this technique, which is often cocked up and ruins a book, is actually done very very well in Beloved.

And you give this story a single star when it clearly meets all of your criteria?









that being said, i think that a lot of what compels beloved's popularity is not toni morrison's trendiness (on that point, i agree with you. i'm not really a toni morrison fan), but rather the fact that you don't really have to know "what's going on" in this book to get it.
you don't have to believe in ghosts, you just have to know that they're here, in this. you don't have to believe that "beloved" is only the "already-crawling baby girl".
i think that the exposure of the kind of racist, soutern ideology (still persistent, if in smaller ways) and the traumatized psyche of the characters is the most fascinating part of this novel, not the fantasy or the magic or the ghost stories: the struggle for some kind of escape from not only physical enslavement, but psychological enslavement by the past.