Beloved is a novel about haunting; it is a novel about the human inability to move on from the past and how easily it can resurface. We may try to move on, but it never really leaves us. And when the past is painful and full of blood it echoes for an eternity. “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.” Enter Beloved, daughter of Sethe, a girl killed by her mother many years previous to escape the shackles of slavery. Was it murder? Was it mercy? Was it both?

This is probably my least favorite book I have ever read. I think I hate it even more because so many people like it so much. Unlike really trashy novels, people actually try to argue that this is a great book. But it definitely embodies all the things that make me hate books. It's heavy handed with its message, which ultimately ruins some pretty spectacular imagery. Its also just a giant pastiche of people who can actually write, which makes it just feel disjointed and annoying since it switche...

"BelovedYou are my sisterYou are my daughterYou are my face; you are meI have found you again; you have come back to meYou are my belovedYou are mineYou are mine" It's 6 o'clock in the morning and I have finished with one of the best books I have ever read in the course of my short life. I am sleepless and I need a moment to organize my thoughts, sort out my feelings. Come back to real life. But I can't. A part of me is still with Sethe and her daughters, Denver and Beloved at 124. A part of

124 — The House of the Baby GhostWho was Margaret Garner?Ms. Garner was a former slave, who murdered one of her kids, and tried the very same procedure with the remaining ones.After a failed escape, Margaret Garner was determined to end not even her own life, but also the ones of her beloved children.Yes!... She was desperate enough to commit infanticide, suicide, whatever ... embracing death as an open gate to freedom!...Ms. Garner showed no signs of insanity nor repentance.Those hedious acts s...

(Book 223 from 1001 books) - Beloved, Toni MorrisonBeloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War (1861–65), it is inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. Morrison had come across the story "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article published in the American Baptist and reproduced in The Black Book, a...

This was my second or third reading of Beloved, a book that broke my heart and remade it once again. The tree on Sethe's back is a map to both pain and redemption. I feel like I am going to quote nearly the entire book if I keep to copy out all of my notes. From the initial haunting of Beloved and her return - the tale of Sethe is the tale of the revolting violence and sexual underpinning of the institution of slavery. The stories from Sweet Home are all heartbreaking (particularly once Schoolte...

Beloved is the Great American Horror Novel. Sorry Stephen King: evil clowns and alcoholic would-be writers are pretty creepy, but they just got nothing on the terrifying specter of American slavery! I literally got chills -- physical chills -- over and over while reading this book. To me, great horror has the scary element (e.g., a ghost) and then, lurking behind it, something so vast and evil that trying to think about it can make you go insane. Beloved did that! It worked as horror! And then a...

The brutal truth, brilliantly written. A mother hanging from a tree, the vile debasement of a nursing mother, scars so deep from whipping that they make a design of a tree on a woman’s back, a bloodied dead baby, the ultimate symbol of how truly horrific slavery was. These are some of the images that I will remember long after reading this book. This was not an easy book to read and it’s not one I can say was enjoyable in the strictest sense of the word, but I can say that I appreciated every wo...

You who read me keep your repugnance and horror to yourself. I am here to tell you my story with an iron smile under my chin. The men without skin stole my milk so my mother punished them with my blood. You don’t understand, her love was too thick. I was the already crawling baby waiting to be loved. I am Beloved.Which kind of unimaginable atrocities can lead a mother to murder her own baby to spare it a certain life full of humiliation and wanton abuse? How much suffering can a human being unde...

Updated, August 2019: RIP, Toni Morrison Over the past 15 years, I’ve tried a couple of times to read Toni Morrison’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about murder, guilt, ghosts and the brutal, complex physical and psychological legacy of slavery.Something about the dense, poetic prose and the elliptical nature of the storytelling made it impenetrable. After a chapter or two, I’d give up, perplexed. And I’ve read William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf! This made Oprah’s Book Club? I’m so glad I

I am not worthy to review this brilliant, visceral, mysterious, and powerful book.The story is simple, but the telling is not - like watching a petal on the surface of turbulent water, unpredictably changing direction.I understand the individual words, but the sense and sentences are elusive, even as they are beautiful and sometimes ugly - like trying to decipher an unfamiliar dialect or make sense of a half-forgotten dream.I empathise with Paul D: “The feeling a large, silver fish had slipped f...

It's been a while since I last was online (according to this computer's calculations: thirteen days ago) & since then I have finished the monumentally loved "Beloved."The only way I can describe this sure classic is: "it's a mix between the most brilliant of Hawthorne (his Scarlet Letter bears plenty of similarities to Beloved since it too deals with a time of intense persecution in this country; the roles women played at such historical crossroads; the ghosts of the burdensome past making cameo...

This is the worst book that I have ever read. It epitomizes what elite academics love about literature: It is dark and nasty (which, to an academic, means realistic) and it is obscure and incoherent (to an academic, this means deep and profound). This is like the deliberately hideous painting that is called "art" by intellectuals: Common-sense individuals question its merit and are told it is complex, beautiful, and beyond the untrained understanding and crass sensibilities of the uneducated. I

A re-read and absolutely worth it - beautiful!

There are reasons why Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Beloved may be the biggest one. The structure is a ghost story about a woman who killed her own children rather than see them be dragged back from freedom to live a life of slavery, and how the guilt of that act comes back to haunt her. But the real payload here is a portrayal of the slave existence, how it seeps into every pore, affects every emotion, defines one’s world view, how one values education, how willing o...

RIP, Beloved Toni Morrison! You changed the way I read! Sometimes reality is too painful to address in plain, simple narrative. Sometimes truth has to be approached in circling movements, slowly getting to the heart of the matter through shifting, loosely linked stories that touch on the wound ever so lightly, without getting too close too fast. Sometimes I read to escape my reality, only to find myself in a universe endlessly more complicated, more painful, more difficult to understand and fo...

How I thought reading Beloved would go:How it actually went:I might be in denial still but it actually wasn't as gruesome or hard to stomach as I thought it would be. The first thirty pages were the worst ... then I got a really good feel for the story! Which turned out to be a pretty good story ... but not as good as Song of Solomon tbh.

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

This is one of those rare and beautiful books that begins as if it's written in a code you have to crack. You have the sense early on that you've missed some vital shred of information and it's these perceived black holes that engage your attention on an ever deepening level. As is the case in the best detective novels maddening clues needed to complete knowledge are scattered deftly at every turn. The past is a constant illuminating presence in every present moment. Beloved exploits brilliantly...

The reasons that other people hated this book are reasons I liked it to be honest. I like this kind of writing and I understood what Morrison was trying to go for. I obviously haven't experienced anything as traumatic as the characters but I think the book does a good job capturing the sensation of certain types of guilt, isolation, dissociation, and intrusive thoughts/memories. I get why people may have had trouble following along, I did too at first but I feel like if you read the book through...