Toni Morrison?

i haven't read paradise. song of solomon is one of my favorite books ever. beloved is obviously great. i liked the bluest eye too, not quite as much. i think she hadn't quite found the balance in that of her magic-realist dreaminess and her very blunt symbolism.

i always think it's funny when i see her lumped in with touchy-feely p.c. writers or whatever, because her books are raw and angry and violent and not very touchy-feely at all.

(and if it needs saying, she's really a hell of a writer.)

read Song of Solomon and the Bluest Eye in college and remember them being good. Kinda don't care about this kind of writing anymore though.

So this is why I Love Books is dying--all the books threads get started over here.

Beloved is rather icky in places; in places she seems to lose her hold on the main character. There's a good James Wood essay out there.

Song of Solomon, however, deserves every accolade.

Kinda don't care about this kind of writing anymore though.

just curious which kind of writing it is. i more or less think of her as a magic realist, but i guess you could say she's a modernist revamping of african-american folkloric tradition or something too.

I was referring to afrocentric magical realism

(fwiw its worth I don't really care about Gabriel Garcia Marquez anymore either)

i more or less think of her as a magic realist, but i guess you could say she's a modernist revamping of african-american folkloric tradition or something too.

I agree, with a heavy Faulkner influence.

i always think it's funny when i see her lumped in with touchy-feely p.c. writers or whatever, because her books are raw and angry and violent and not very touchy-feely at all.

absolutely OTM. i've read most of her books and her two most recent, "Paradise" and "Love" are undoubtedly the best. i actually liked "Beloved" least of the one's i've read but i still thought it good. "Jazz" has her most breathtakingly beautiful writing but the style is pretty much all there is to the book - it's still great even though it's sort of confused (or just confusing). "Song of Solomon" is her best yarn. "Love" is her greatest but "Paradise" trumps it for me because it's insane as well as great.

here's the ILB thread i started just after i finished "Love".

Toni Morrison

Please please please read "love" if you haven't done so. It's stunning.

i always think it's funny when i see her lumped in with touchy-feely p.c. writers or whatever, because her books are raw and angry and violent and not very touchy-feely at all.

"Jazz" begins with a spurned wife mutilating the corpse of her husband's teenage lover while it rests in an open casket at a funeral.

Marquez is heavily influenced by Faulkner by himself.

"she's a modernist revamping of african-american folkloric tradition or something too:
folkloric and feminist.

i think Lydia Jorge is very similiar to Morisson in her style, and is also a great writer, also in the tradition of the legendary Elsa Morante

Surmounter, re: Paradise, who do you think the white girl is?

answer with *SPOILERS* if need be.

omgosh, i can't even begin to remember who she is! tell me!

so i have to get Love huh? haha the title is enough =)

well, it would be great to sit down and read. maybe she should be my mandatory train book next time i go upstate...

i don't know who it is.

"They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time."

is the first line but morrison doesn't specifically mention any of the girls being white, you just assume they're all black girls, you forget about the first line. it's genius.

Love is a great train read. an 800+ page epic that somehow manages to be exactly 200 pages long. it has a heartbreaking ending.

TONI MORRISON: Well, my point was to flag raise and then to erase it, and to have the reader believe--finally--after you know everything about these women, their interior lives, their past, their behavior, that the one piece of information you don't know, which is the race, may not, in fact, matter. And when you do know it, what do you know?

"so i have to get Love huh? "

all you need is love

jha! i totally forgot that about the first line. very strange. altho are you sure there are no other references to a white girl later on??

i'd love to read my paper on this now ;-)

don't read the reviews. "A Mercy" is an absolute masterpiece. no way did i think it possible that she would write a better book then her last two but i think she may have.

I don't get the uncritical enthusiasm for Beloved. Details are fuzzy -- it's been years -- but the spookiness foists a lot of portent on a narrative that's at times rickety. I'm more of a Bluest Eye-Song of Solomon fan anyway.

So the new one's worth reading then?

TONI MORRISON: Well, my point was to flag raise and then to erase it, and to have the reader believe--finally--after you know everything about these women, their interior lives, their past, their behavior, that the one piece of information you don't know, which is the race, may not, in fact, matter. And when you do know it, what do you know?

A++++

Sula is best.

RIP

Suddenly realizing that 100% of the contemporary fiction (where 'contemporary' = 'written within the last two centuries') I've read in like the past two years has been hers and Octavia Butler's. She was so good.

RIP to a cultural giant. So grateful for the work she left us with.

“If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very very serious problem” - Toni Morrison

pic.twitter.com/3MTn8MoelG

— George M Johnson (@IamGMJohnson) August 6, 2019

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/toni-morrison-and-what-our-mothers-couldnt-say

Reading a few old pieces and watching lots of clips:

It was good to reread this slowly last night & sit with the incomprehensible weight and power of what Toni Morrison did for this country all on her own, with the force of her artistry and genius. We were lucky to be able to read her, and we still are https://t.co/KznOj5ctTI

— Jia Tolentino (@jiatolentino) August 7, 2019

I need to read Tar Baby. Sula's the one that needs more boosting.

In her most recent collection, she included an essay on "Melanctha" that's essential for understanding how an intermittently great writer like Gertrude Stein exploits Africanisms.

Sula was my favorite iirc. I remember it being very memorable and feel like I should revisit it.

a quick read too

I was re-reading Beloved (not literally) when I heard the news and I've not really made sense of it. One's relationship with writers is somehow more complicated than musicians and it's easier to sum up what you think (and respond, almost instantly). I was having the same reaction to Beloved I did the first time around - a mix of horror and fear with complete admiration for the architecture of it. Along with everything else (the things I can't really name and don't feel qualified to name) she was an astonishing stylist: when I read her, I constantly ask myself how. She was a giant.

I must read Sula and Solomon.

I read all of her books after college when I relied on the library for books and needed to stay intellectually engaged while I worked at my atrocious jobs. She was always there for me in that regard and it probably saved my sanity in ways I don't even realize.

I wrote a bit about her on Tuesday.

Because I am an idiot, I only finally got around to reading Beloved earlier this year and it was one of the great reading experiences of my life, wish I had done it 20 years ago. Nothing in the world like it.

Sula's the one that needs more boosting.

Echoing that.