Beloved

I recognize that this is an important work and powerfully written. I have really struggled with this book. I felt depressed, drained, and hopeless while reading it. I know that is part of it's importance -to convey the terrible life and trials slaves endured. I did not enjoy the book and I have no intention of revisiting it.

So painful, so, so painful :´(
I mean... reading N.K.Jemisin's Fifth Season was painful, but that's Fantasy. I don't know how much Beloved is based on truth, but I can believe everything in it happened, somewhere, to someone... the cruelty, the... ignorance, the hatred...
I find it so hard to believe anyone could hate another person so much!
And not because this other person did something horrible to them, but because... because it's impossible to deny the truth that this other person is a human being, another person.
Humiliation, dehumanizing, degrading, abuse... the ability to abuse another human being without any consequences... all that just to make the other human being less than human.

And I am thinking about bullying, and domestic abuse, and abusive relationships... I read several years ago a book of short stories on “domestic discipline” - the movement among USonian Christians that the husband should be “manly” and “spank” his wife to keep her good and obedient. In it was a story of a woman who happened upon a feminist meeting, and when her husband found out, he beat her and then he raped her, because he had “shamed him in public”. The author says that it's not abuse because he loves her, and I fail to see any love there at all. Just the same hatred and dehumanizing people.

It is just so disgusting!

An outstanding book! I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize. Largely written in a poetic style, Toni Morrison captures the tragedy that was a part of every black person's life. It was a harrowing read at times but informative. I hope to read more of the author's works.

Wow. What an emotional ride. This is a haunting tale of Construction Era Cincinnati and the lives of former slaves there.

It's been a long time since I've gotten choked up reading fiction, but in one page towards the end, all the intensity (and boy was it intense) culminated in one giant emotional punch. I was engrossed the whole way; Morrison has such a talent for narrative, dialect, magical realism, and complex but relatable characters. Her style is so inimitable, and I loved the way that psychological deluges were complimented with fairly straightforward dialogue, and how the past was revealed slowly through the story-telling of others, too painful to be directly recounted by thos who loved it. I loved it but wow. Need a palate cleanser after that one. Real heavy.

How have I gone so long without reading Toni Morrison? This book was so beautiful and ugly at the same time. The structure was all over the place and the writing so deep that it was hard to keep up sometimes, but it was worth it.

It's always hard to know what to say about a classic, what with so much having already been said. I already knew quite a bit about the book, so it felt slow to me at first, but as it went on, it got much better, haunting in more than one sense of the word.

(I don't think I took away much from this book....I've been thinking all these years—it's 2016 now—that I have never read this book, and I didn't write down anything in my notes about it.)