Beloved by Toni Morrison

 

Title:  Beloved

Author:  Toni Morrison, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers - introduction

Narrated by:  Toni Morrison, Karen Murray

Publisher: Random House Audio

Length: Approximately 12 hours and 33 minutes

Source: Purchased from Audible

What is the saddest book you’ve ever read?  I would rate this as one of mine.

Sethe was born into slavery but was able to escape with her children to Ohio.  When her former master finds her and her children, she makes a decision that will haunt her forever.  Now a ghost haunts her home.  When a girl appears with the name Beloved, the only word carved on the tombstone of her baby, is this girl the ghost of her child or an imposter?

My thoughts on this novel:

·       This was the January read for the Back to the Classics Book Club at the Kewaunee Public Library.  Only two of us braved the cold, but we had a good discussion on this complex book.  I selected this book as I’ve been too scared to read I on my own as I knew it involved the death of a baby.

·       Toni Morrison won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature, but this is only the second book of hers that I’ve read.  I really wish we would have studied her when I was in college.

·       This was a deep book that I keep thinking about.  It was written in a very unique way with a variety of narrators and a variety of time periods.

·       I really liked the intro and the ending.  The ending basically said that terrible things happen and are then forgotten.  They need to be remembered so we don’t repeat the terrible things in our history.

·       I was disturbed to find out in the intro that this book was based on a true story.

·       I listened to this book on audiobook.  It was very interesting.  I liked also having a physical copy of the book to read along with it.  I also stopped and looked up chapter summaries on SparkNotes as recommended by a book club member. It did help me to understand what I was reading.

·       This was a very sad novel describing the horrors of slavery.  It was so horrifying that you would kill your own child rather than have them be a slave.  Sexual abuse was used to control the women and it didn’t just break the women, it broke the men as well to see their wives, mothers, and sisters treated this way.

·       Schoolteacher talks about Sethe like she is an animal.  He compares her to a horse and says that you can’t beat a horse too much or you wreck it.  His nephew and others had stolen Sethe’s milk and then whipped her.  She does not want her children to go back to this kind of life.  Other people do not understand this.

·       The house is haunted, and no one will go inside due to what has happened to her.

Overall, Beloved by Toni Morrison was a haunting novel about a terrible part of our history.