Beloved

I’m not sure how I feel about Beloved.  I don’t know if it can be chalked up to a busy week and only being able to grab the odd moment to read in, but I found the book so difficult to get into.  It’s a Pulitzer Prize winning book and Toni Morrison herself has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I feel as though it’s a book that I very much should have loved.  It’s miserable as hell too.  That’s usually a plus when it comes to great literature.  But something about this book just didn’t hit the spot for me.

The novel tells the based on a true story tale of Sethe, a slave who escapes her home after sending her children to live with their grandmother in another state.  She is later discovered by a posse and murders her infant daughter rather than allow the child to be recaptured.  As I mentioned earlier, this story’s based the real life tale of Margaret Garner.  Finding this out has, of course lead to some mad research on Wikipedia and her life was just fascinating as it was appalling.  After escaping from slavery across a frozen river, Garner killed her two year old daughter Mary (fathered by Garner’s owner Alfred Gaines) so that she wouldn’t be subjected to the same life.  Garner was never tried for murder, partially because the state of Ohio couldn’t decide whether to try her as a person or as property, and when she was returned to Gaines he moved her so frequently that she couldn’t be found to be arrested.  Only the bare bones of this story survive into Beloved.  In fact, in comparison to the truth, Morrison’s tale is actually quite cheerful.

Set 18 years after the baby-murdering events, Sethe is living as a free but albeit lonely woman with her surviving daughter, Denver and a lot of guilt. Her sons, unable to stand the ever present ghost of their sister have both run away and the pair are living a reclusive life. It’s at this point that fellow ex-slave Paul D shows up, seeming to make things better for a while until he is driven out of the house by the ghost of Sethe’s unnamed baby girl, known only as Beloved.  It’s an obscure novel, each chapter of part two is told from the point of view of a different character.  I don’t object to this method of story-telling, and other than Beloved’s adamant refusal to use punctuation (a serious pet hate of mine), the different character’s voices are all clear and distinct.  I particularly enjoyed the section narrated by Denver who, as the story progresses, is the only character whose motives remain clear and who actually shows some likely (if incredibly optimistic) character development.

As Sethe descends into what can only be described as madness, a community that hates her rallies around to save her.  There are even no repercussions when she attacks a white man.  Paul D, driven away by Beloved and the Sethe’s past returns to her when she explains that she killed her child through kindness.  Through all this former shut-in Denver sparks up the self-confidence to leave her mother’s house and become a part of the community.  Yes, the book’s about to be about coming to terms and doing what is necessary to move on, but I just don’t buy it.  It might just be me, but it seems like a wildly improbable happy ending to 18 years of utter misery.  I know it’s just a story, but it is a million miles away from Garner’s death from typhoid after watching her second daughter drown.

Next on the list is the first long book I’ve read since this blog began; Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.