Beloved

What an amazing book!

Slavery is one of those topics that you think you know something about until you read a book like this, which addresses it without pity or scandal or feeling sorry for itself.

This approach makes the book incredible for telling it the way it is with no reproach, no condemnation, no hatred for white people, the Klu Klux Klan, or anything else.

Read any other book on slavery and you’ll get recriminations in droves for every ounce of unacceptable treatment as though the writer wants to be acknowledged for what went on in the past. To be reimbursed for their inherited suffering.

My hat goes off to Toni Morrison for helping me understand the horrificness of slavery by writing about it in a natural and unconfined way.

She lets you into the lives of the characters and their relationships and rarely gets haughty or bitter because of how unfairly they are treated. It’s an incredible job of unbiased literature when she had everything to be biased about.

Some of the writing style is rambling, incoherent and almost surreal in places like in a dreamworld or distant planet. Yet somehow direct and vivid.

This book was published in 1987, two years after Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy in 1985. The bleak and marauding writing style is eerily similar and you could be forgiven for penciling Beloved into the horror genre in a few places. It’s certainly brutal.

But it’s also friendly and loving and full of atonement and forgiveness and other emotions that we are capable of feeling under sustained stress and duress.

I loved this book for the picture it paints of something I knew little about: man’s atrocity against fellow man. Now I know more...

This is thoroughly recommended and makes me want to explore other works by Toni Morrison.