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Beloved: THE ICONIC PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NOVEL (Vintage Classics) by [Toni Morrison]

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Toni Morrison

Beloved: THE ICONIC PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NOVEL (Vintage Classics) New e. Edition, Kindle Edition

by Toni Morrison (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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'An American masterpiece' AS Byatt

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY BOOKER PRIZE WINNER BERNARDINE EVARISTO

Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home - the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, 'Beloved'.

A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece and best-known work.

Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison's best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work.

'The literary titian we must never stop learning from' Metro

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

ISBN-13

978-1784876432
Edition

New e.
Publisher

Vintage Digital
Publication date

4 September 2014
Language

English
File size

3755 KB
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Book Description

Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison's best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work. With a new introduction by Bernardine Evaristo. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination.
It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.
Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what shelost and for what was taken from her.
Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance.
In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel.
Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

"A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can't imagine American literature without it." --John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

"A triumph." --Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review

"Toni Morrison's finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent." --Chicago Sun-Times

"Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work." --The New York Times

"A masterpiece. . . . Magnificent. . . . Astounding. . . . Overpowering." --Newsweek

"Brilliant. . . . Resonates from past to present." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble." --People

"Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature." --New York Review of Books

"A work of genuine force. . . . Beautifully written." --The Washington Post

"There is something great in Beloved a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you." --The New Yorker

"A magnificent heroine . . . a glorious book." --The Baltimore Sun

"Superb. . . . A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . . . Exquisitely told." --Cosmopolitan

"Magical . . . rich, provocative, extremely satisfying." --Milwaukee Journal

"Beautifully written. . . . Powerful. . . . Toni Morrison has become one of America's finest novelists." --The Plain Dealer

"Stunning. . . A lasting achievement." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction. . . . One feels deep admiration." --USA Today

"Compelling . . . . Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out." --The Village Voice

"A book worth many rereadings." --Glamour

"In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Heart-wrenching . . . mesmerizing." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Shattering emotional power and impact." --New York Daily News

"A rich, mythical novel . . . a triumph." --St. Petersburg Times

"Powerful . . . voluptuous." --New York

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved" is a towering achievement. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00N3Q0SZK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Digital; New e. edition (4 September 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3755 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 369 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 075401391X

Best Sellers Rank: 7,891 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)

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Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.

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3 star		8%
2 star		3%
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Carol-Lynn Bond

Author is a Nobel Prize Winner

Reviewed in Australia on 27 August 2021

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Toni Morrison has written a book so profound and so affecting that it's almost impossible to describe. Suffice it to say that it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the best of literature. This book is riveting. It is currently the subject of study in university courses, and I'm studying it for my Bachelor of Arts degree.

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Nicholas Reid

Not quite my cuppa

Reviewed in Australia on 17 November 2015

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I confess I skimmed the last fifty pages. The technique is competently handled, but this kind of point of view game (an omniscient narrator who so closely adopts the points of view of the characters that the reader is often left somewhat in the dark) has its drawbacks. I didn't end up caring particularly about the story or the characters.

3 people found this helpful

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Jess

What a masterpiece

Reviewed in Australia on 30 January 2020

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Loved it. So gripping. Totally transported to a different time and society. A great way to start my NY resolution of reading 12 fiction books (at least... baby steps) in 2020.

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Constant Reader

Too Strange

Reviewed in Australia on 22 July 2020

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Couldn't stick with it . It copmpletely lost me , couldn't follow it at all .Too Strange

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Thalia

Just incredible

Reviewed in Australia on 10 March 2020

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Nothing I can say can do this book justice. This needs to be read by everyone, it is just so important.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Beloved

Reviewed in Australia on 21 June 2017

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This book is going to have a lasting impact on me. Powerful, terrifying, beautiful. I will read it again one day.

2 people found this helpful

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susan

Beautiful

Reviewed in Australia on 18 September 2020

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Extraordinary

One person found this helpful

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Bryn Griffith

The close connection between love and guilt

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 November 2019

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This is an extremely powerful and, at times, troubling book. At the heart of the story is the returning spirit of a young woman who was murdered by her black slave mother in order to prevent her from ending up in the clutches of a slave owner. The relationship between mother and child is extremely conflicted; power rests with the returning child, I felt, because of the mother's guilt.
Around this central theme are a number of close family members and slaves with common histories. All of the characters are portrayed with powerfully emotional lives that really made me, a white male in his 60s, get some sense of the tortured lives imposed on such individuals. I can only imagine the impact of this book on those with an African American heritage.
The book is not an easy read as the story is told in a non-linear fashion and through the eyes of multiple characters. This keeps the reader of their toes, but makes the story ultimately a more involving read.
I can understand why this is considered a classic.

24 people found this helpful

Reader

Well worth sticking with it.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 September 2019

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Beloved by Toni Morrison 1931 - 2019. Book one in the Toni Morrison trilogy.

Admittedly It took me a bit of time to get into this book. Though once I got the gist of the lingo and the "tongue" in my head, it was a joy to read and difficult to put the book down.

The book is set in Cincinnati 1873 and the story is based Seethe, who is a runaway slave, trying to get herself, her children, friend's and husband to his mother's a free slave, where Seethe's cannat least raise her children in a free society and can offer sanctuary.

The story highlights the brutality of the slave in order to give luxury, lust and riches to the white man.
What sacrifices, especially a slave mother would do to protect her children and highlight the discrimination and lynching even after slavery was abolished.

In this story, we follow Seethe, a slave, wife and a mother of four children battle to get all to the safety of her mother in law named Baby Suggs - freed by her owner Mr Garner and paid for by her Son, Halle, Seethe husband.
Living on a farm called sweet home, the owners Mr and Mrs Garner are kind and reasonable to the slave's they have. Until things change and another master comes to the farm with strict and brutal tactics, a plan is made by the slaves to escape to freedom.

The escape doesn't go to plan to everyone. Whitemen are patrolling to capture runaways. When Seethe see's them at Baby Suggs house and knows that no place is a safe and free place, she takes action to keep her babies safe and free from the pain and trauma a slave life brings, though when her baby dies, Seethe is haunted for the rest of her life.

When Paul D, a fellow companion (slave) from sweet home tracks down Seethe many years later, he manages to banish the haunting, though Seethe free in body, is not free in spirit and mind and is still haunted by her past. However, Beloved turns up and Seethe, it seems, is able to put her demons to rest after the pain of bringing them to the surface.

I loved the story, the writing style and use of language and description.

Reaching the end of the story, you do wonder if Beloved was everyone's haunting, a life lesson and a mutual understanding of the sacrifices made by Seethe. As Beloved seemed to open everyone's eye's, open up painful memories that still enslave Seethe and shackle her to the experience of being a slave. Or was Beloved plotting something else to punish Seethe further for allowing her to justify Seethe's actions. It's a very thought provoking story!

Toni Morrison has also written

The Bluest Eye
Sula
Song of Solomon
Tar Baby
Beloved #1
Jazz #2
Paradise #3
Love
A Mercy
Home
God Help the Child

17 people found this helpful

Vigilantius

A profound pleasure to read such a truly great modern novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 September 2014

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What a pleasure to read a great modern novel.

The American Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Beloved, her fifth book, was inspired by a true story about a slave-mother in the mid-nineteenth century (called Sethe in the novel), who escaped across the river Ohio to the free city of Cincinnati, just before the Civil War.

There are four principal voices, about whom we learn as much from how they talk as what they say. There is a shocking central narrative, which darts back and forth in time like the unfolding of a shared trauma in group psychoanalytic sessions. The African-Americans who tell the story are profoundly instinctive and generally terrified of 'whitepeople', who are usually seen as non-human.

Other characters are also brought to life, such as the slave-owner, 'Schoolteacher', or the old-timer and ex-slave, 'Stamp Paid'. Though she is not the pivotal character in the story, Sethe's daughter Denver became (for me) the anchor, as the most sympathetic and rounded person, who eventually frees herself from mental subjugation.

Ghosts are flesh and blood entities in Beloved. Sethe's daughter (called Beloved) reappears after many years, despite having been killed when an infant by her mother, who did not want her baby to be captured by a vicious slave-owner. This incident led to Sethe and her family being shunned by their community. As in South Africa under apartheid, oppression can lead not to solidarity amongst the oppressed but to fierce mutual suspicion. This feels more realistic than the somewhat simplistic characterisations in the Oscar-winning film, 12 Years A Slave.

Occasionally the novel can be obscure. But this minor fault is massively outweighed by the imaginative writing which brings to life the hemmed-in and yet freely-roaming mindsets of the central characters.

57 people found this helpful

Mrs. M. J. Murray

A haunting read on many levels

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2020

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The writing is just beautiful, so musical and evocative. Something of a ghost story and set against the previous slave history of the characters. As someone trying to educate herself in the light of recent events I found this book extremely enlightening. Gone With The Wind it ain’t. But the treatment of slaves by some of their masters beggars belief, which is not to say it’s untrue, but these people must be psychotic to treat another human being like this. One white character berated another for whipping his dog beyond endurance but whipping a slave doesn’t seem to fit into his code. As a white British reader I was horrified at the treatment of the women as sex objects but the slave men relieved themselves by using cows which was unjudged by the author. Arguably the white owners used the slave women no better. The detail of this was unknown to me so it’s important we hear people’s history. But the story is just beautiful and I loved it. It’s also worth remarking that not all the whites are villains, some do heroic work. However the author takes the view that they were still slave owners, and those that weren’t seem to be viewed as virtue signalling do gooders. In light of the early black experience in America I suppose such a cynical viewpoint is only to be expected.

5 people found this helpful

R. A. Walker

A compelling story but not a masterpiece

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 February 2020

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I read this book because it was listed in a recent television programme as “one of the most influential books of the 20th century”, and on its back cover as “… an American masterpiece”.

Sadly, and despite Toni Morrison’s undoubted pedigree – for she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 - I do agree with either of these epithets. Some might argue that as a [relatively] elderly white man I would be incapable of empathising with the book, but my criticisms are nothing to do with a lack of empathy but are more a feeling that the book is not worthy of being considered as a masterpiece, as the writing is often unconvincing and confusing and the narrative frequently distracts from the powerful underlying story.

The book, which was inspired by a true story, recounts the life of Sethe, who lived as a slave in Ohio in the second half of the 19th century; escaped via a desperate journey across the Ohio river; and came to live with her Grandmother Baby Suggs and her daughter Denver in a house called “124” in the free city of Cincinnati. The eponymous Beloved is the baby daughter whom Sethe killed because she didn’t want her to be taken away from her into a life of slavery; which led to Sethe being jailed (along with the baby Denver) and to her family being ostracised by their black community.

The book’s most impressive passages describe in compelling detail the impecunious day-to-day horrific and oppressed existence of black slaves in middle America in the 19th century; their terror of white people, who consider them to be unhuman; and the widespread racism then prevalent in the country, even after the American Civil War. The latter, of course, still has echoes in modern USA.

Although the dialogue is written in the vernacular, it is credible and easily understood despite (or perhaps because of) the absence of grammar, syntax and so forth.

The story is told from various perspectives, sometimes from that of the [third person] author and sometimes from those of Sethe, Baby Suggs, Denver and other characters. This, coupled with the frequent time shifts and the fact that these are not described or signposted, meant that I often found myself wishing that the narrative had been written in a more straightforward manner.

One thing in particular that I actively disliked was the reappearance in number 124 of Beloved as a young woman, who becomes the dominant personality in the household, first as a silent presence and then as the seducer of Paul D, the itinerant black man who had become Sethe’s lover. For several chapters I was unsure whether this character was someone with the same name as Sethe’s murdered daughter, or (as it transpires) was a supernatural reincarnation of her. I found this plot device rather tedious and unhelpful.

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Beloved: THE ICONIC PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NOVEL (Vintage Classics) New e. Edition, Kindle Edition

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About the Author

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Toni Morrison

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