Beloved
Toni Morrison's Beloved was a difficult book to read. Not only
does it deal with the painful and uncomfortable subject of slavery
(always interesting to find yourself cast as the ultimate evil), this is
non-linear story-telling taken to an extreme.
This book wanders. The narrative is slippery. It slides from person to person. From present to past to deeper past and back. Keeping track of whose point of view your in takes work. Piecing together the timeline takes more. It's the sort of book where you find yourself flipping back to make sure you didn't miss a page, re-reading a passage to check if that really just happened. The language flows and, like a poem, you get caught up in it, half-forgetting that there's a plot and characters driving this story because the prose is so beautiful. It tricks you into reading and then stabs you in the heart.
Because I had to keep backtracking and pausing, this book took me a lot longer to read than the 275 pages would imply. But it was definitely worth it.
This book wanders. The narrative is slippery. It slides from person to person. From present to past to deeper past and back. Keeping track of whose point of view your in takes work. Piecing together the timeline takes more. It's the sort of book where you find yourself flipping back to make sure you didn't miss a page, re-reading a passage to check if that really just happened. The language flows and, like a poem, you get caught up in it, half-forgetting that there's a plot and characters driving this story because the prose is so beautiful. It tricks you into reading and then stabs you in the heart.
Because I had to keep backtracking and pausing, this book took me a lot longer to read than the 275 pages would imply. But it was definitely worth it.
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