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I've read Beloved, Paradise and Tar Baby. Her insight is astounding.
This book simply took me away. Toni Morrison is an insightful genius.
However, Morrison draws you in before you know it with intriguing, multidimensional characters tossed in an intricate and reflective plot (as she always does so well). It's a total escape -- I think of it as literary deep sea diving.
The beginning may be a little tough to penetrate. When I finished reading Love, I felt like I had accomplished something.
Love is my favorite TM novel so far, and one of my favorite novels of all.
The lyric sway of her speech, the slow, low cadence of the way she speaks make the stories come alive - and that's what I needed. Then I ordered her works on CD with her as the reader. For years, I tried to read Ton Morrison's works but couldn't get into the rythmn of the writing. As a white woman from a middle class background, I needed the alluring timbre of Ms. That did it. Now I have all her books on CD that she reads herself, and they are magical. Morrison's voice to captivate my heart into hearing her stories. Once that happened, her own magic became alive and my own life richer for having heard her tales.
Heed invites the young girl upstairs and hires her because she lets her talk. She shows how this emotion, and the need for it, can lead to the deepest forms of hatred. Betrayal is the lightning that cleaves and reveals it." Morrison is best known for Beloved, a novel on slavery in the American South. The girl was not at all what she had expected." She gives us women who are intimidating and afraid all at once, women who have been protecting themselves for so long that they don't know how to relate to one another anymore save for shows of forced strength. From awe at his good works to outrage at his sexual exploits to a final mystery surrounding his death, we are drawn into a world where friendships are sundered by marriage and marriages desecrated by lust.
The masterful portrayal of changing generations within an Africa-American family, particularly its women, is reprised in Love. Christine inhabits the world and the floor beneath Heed's, chopping chicken as diamond rings twinkle from each finger. We learn in Faulkneresque fashion about the women Cosey affected, through voices that oscillate between past and present, the gilded world of Cosey's Resort and the anger and bitterness of a community emptied after the last glamorous guests have left town. Morrison's language alternately turns on and soothes the reader, enrages and mystifies. Christine immediately dislikes her. Morrison's dense plot, spanning two generations and seen through the eyes of multiple characters, is alternately clouded and illuminated by L's stream-of-consciousness commentary, offered up in italicized blocks of prose poetry: "I'm the background--the movie music that comes along when the sweethearts see each other for the first time, or when the husband is walking the beachfront alone wondering if anybody saw him doing the bad thing he couldn't help." It is unclear whether "L" is dead or alive; she seems to hang in the air, timeless, speaking of the past and what unfolded in the halls of a hotel now rotting with neglect. She has been caring for Heed for years, this woman that married her grandfather and ruined her life. Written from multiple points of view, it alternates between a family's slave past and their post-Civil War present.
And women in the small town of Silk are still scratching at each other over him.Toni Morrison paints a disturbing, delicate, and erotic portrait of female friendship in Love, her eighth novel. She does not think of that anymore. Bill Cosey has been dead for 25 years. There was a time when the two girls shared laughs under beach blankets as best friends.
Junior shows up at the Cosey women's doorstep hungry, her long, bare legs encased in dirty black boots. Cosey took her as his wife. He led her to the ocean and let the water run over her body. His soft eyes stare out invitingly from the portrait above the bed, but his lips aren't talking. Her women are dark and powerful; warriors destroyed and re-built by their own making. They take turns telling how Bill Cosey brought a hotel and hope to a black community at mid-century, taking the citizens of Silk out of their bleak jobs at the cannery and offering them a glimpse into the world of well-dressed guests and parties by the sea. The joy of reading a work by Morrison lies in her ability to flesh out a character with a few, searing strokes: "Her eyes swept Junior's face, then examined her clothes.she had quickly positioned herself at the window to strike the right pose, give a certain impression. But she needn't have bothered.
Morrison said she wanted her characters to be observed by an "`I' not restricted by chronology or space-- or the frontier between life and not-life." In a novel already bursting at the seams, this element is a bit distracting, though the beauty of her prose justifies this overlay to her verbal quilt work. In the words of the author: "Love is the weather. Love is rich in poetic language, a complex painting of complicated women that critiques the way we define love and attacks racism and sexism along the way. Heed was eleven when Mr. Now in her eighties, her immobile hands cannot record her memories of her marriage, so she tells stories about "Papa" as Junior bathes her, envying the girl's young skin and her ability to feel. The shadowy, disembodied voice of "L" runs throughout the novel, at times providing insight into secrets buried in the breasts of the women of Love. This is Morrison writing about what she does best, though perhaps she has already done it better.
Thought it was a beautifully woven story of a friendship that develops between two women who once shared a bond with the same man.
Love, is somewhat of an ironic title, for what lies within its pages tests the very fibers of Love. This time the book's opening line seemed to sizzle with promise and layers of Morrison-style story-telling.Making my way through went well for a while but then I found myself re-reading sentences and flipping back to see what I might have missed, based on what was being read in the moment. Recently I began again, and made the trek through Morrison's most recent novel. Morrison, I come away with the feeling that her earlier works grab and hold and deliver in a way this book did not do for me.
Intent on more I unearthed Love and 'began again'. Let me begin by saying that I began reading Love years before I actually completed it. Had I had a whiff of that being the case, perhaps I would have been able to appreciate the goings-on in this work all the more. Paradise is genius, Morrison genius, personified. Now I realize Morrison's style is one of 'telling and revealing-in time', which makes reading her work all the more satisfying.
Still, having read several other books by Ms. And both works are certainly worth anyone's time who loves the art of writing and its potential for illumination beyond one's own life. The inspiration this time was due to having just read Tar Baby and being taken up [again] by Morrison's genius. As another reviewer wrote, Morrison's Love is still some of the best literary work out there. However, I found Love to be overly layered with characters and circumstances that looped, curled and frayed, leaving me frustrated at times and having to close the book and breathe before re-opening it and giving it another go.
I was intent on finishing this book this time and did so. And in response to someone's comments about Love and Paradise being similarly "disappointments" I disagree entirely. Throughout this novel, I laughed aloud, smiled, and though horrified at times, was also deeply touched by the love revealed.
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