#BookReview: Beloved by Toni Morrison

A Spoiler-free Overview:

It was the mid-1800s and the lone house on Bluestone Road, numbered 124, was haunted. Sethe, the mother who lived there with only her daughter, Denver, knew all too well who the ghost was: the eldest daughter whom she had killed eighteen years ago, and whose headstone bore a single word “Beloved”. It took the arrival of Paul D – a former slave from Sweet Home, the same plantation where Sethe had also escaped from – to finally banish the apparition. However, little did they know, a grown-up girl, in the flesh, would appear at their doorstep soon after, and she called herself Beloved. 

Personal Opinion:

Since Beloved won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, its plus column can obviously stretch for miles on end and no review can realistically capture all of its merits. Therefore, I’ll try my best to condense what I perceive to be the novel’s most prominent winning features!

+) Pro – Delicate Topics Handled Exceptionally: Beloved is a story about, among many other things, how former slaves cope with the deep-seated traumas that slavery wrought on them. Many of the characters actively repressed their traumatic past to get on with life, but Toni Morrison successfully captures both their coping mechanisms and the egregious impacts of slavery on the characters. 

+) Pro – Intimate Insights: Most of us are probably familiar with the consequences of slavery. But I would argue that seeing the sheer number alone (like on the eve of the Civil War, 4 million blacks were enslaved) may not drive the message home as well as providing intimate accounts of certain individuals’ lives. And this is exactly what Beloved did. Aside from helping us understand the psyche of Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs, the novel also touches upon the lives of other former slaves and even enslavers, thus also providing us with a bird’s-eye view of life at the time.

+) Pro – Heartbreakingly Beautiful Language, Full Stop: There is probably no arguing about this, for this is Toni Morrison we’re talking about, and her – at least what is widely considered her – magnum opus at that! The prose is lyrical and well-refined, and, most importantly, never generic. It’s this exact reason that I’ve put Sula on my TBR list, for, in my opinion, prose quality is half a book!

-) Con – An (Initially) Slow Plot: Now, this is only my humble opinion, and this is, I suppose, not even a demerit for many readers anyway, but I was initially put off reading Beloved beyond the second chapter due to its slow start. This type of novel is, unlike Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead – full of action and new happenings – has a slower timbre to it. No worries, for the pace picks up later on, but remember to have some extra patience to truly enjoy this masterpiece!

Overall, Beloved is undeniably a rewarding read, for both its exploration of difficult themes and heartachingly beautiful prose. It certainly warrants a reread (many rereads) to unpack the layers that I wasn’t privy to on my first read!