Beloved

"Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief."





A baby girl dies in the most horrifying circusmstances which makes one think about the implications of slavery and the effect it can have on otherwise normal people. That baby girl's tombsone says one word: "Beloved". The ghost of the baby girl is the past coming back to ask questions, not really ready to be satisfied by the answers.

The novel is set in Post Civil War America, and looks at the lives of freed African American slaves. Sethe, the mother of the baby girl, has escaped slavery but not the memory of the terrible times past. She lives with her children and mother-in-law in the house haunted by the baby girl. The story moves forward as a man she knows from her past arrives after 18 years. They try to talk about the past and try to forget it at the same time. There are memories of various farms where they spent their lives and the similarities and differences in their "white" owners. At one point, a character says from her experience "that there is no bad luck in the world but white-people." Different characters at different times seem to move towards this conclusion, some against their better knowledge. What is unravelled as the book goes on is the picture of slavery from an author who does not hold back anything. No soft language and insinuations here; things are laid bare as they happened. This reminded me of a other favorite book of mine: "The god of small things" by Arundhati Roy and the word that comes to mind about both works is "unflinching".

This is a beautifully written novel examining slavery, freedom, the past and the present, the crimes and the victims and coming to terms with it all.

Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer prize for this one in 1987 and she was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. "Beloved" was also named the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years by the New York Times from a survey of important authors and critics.