May 22

May 22 Beloved

Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.

Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Full Review

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

I’ve been looking forward to reading Beloved since I started my project of reading all of Toni Morrison’s fiction (in order) earlier this year. It’s “the big one” — the one that won the Pulitzer and led her to win the Nobel Prize. I was obviously not disappointed. Incredible.

While the story is wholly original and not meant to be a retelling, Beloved was inspired by the story of an escaped enslaved woman named Margaret Garner, who killed her 2-year-old daughter to spare her from capture when slave hunters eventually found them. In Beloved, the house of the main character, Sethe, is haunted by the actual ghost of the daughter she killed. The book overall is about what it means to be free, how slavery impacts identity and memory, the impacts of community, and whether it is safe to love even if it means getting hurt.

Morrison draws you in and forces you to not to look away like pretty much nobody else who has ever lived. This book is raw and scathing and pulses like the open wound it means to expose.

I’ve said this with pretty much every Morrison novel I’ve read so far, but I can’t imagine reading this one without listening along to the audiobook at the same time. Morrison herself reads it, and her narration style is just as unique and breathtaking as her writing. It adds a whole layer of experience and meaning. Please listen to it.