I picked up the Gloria Naylor's book, Bailey's Cafe, just out of the blue, remembering how much I'd loved her previously, but that got me thinking more about African American fiction, and that led me straight to Toni Morrison. I had a copy of Beloved on the shelf, picked up from the library sale, so I went there next, which was fun for the compare and contrast. While they are both late twentieth century writers, Morrison's treatment of fiction is more classical, Naylor's more contemporary, Beloved takes place around the time of the Civil War, not the second World War, like Bailey'sm and Beloved offers both physical and meta-physical explanations while Bailey's is entirely other-worldly. Morrison is tackling the subject of self and slavery while Naylor is tackling its contemporary realization in the form of modern subjugation.
Toni Morrison is an enjoyable writer, but Beloved is not really an enjoyable book, nor is it meant to be. It's about slavery, after all, and the destruction it perpetrated. The book's characters, mostly former salves, fight to rid themselves of the past, but to deny the past is to deny one's sense of self and without self there is no future. To have any hope of future together they must first return to face the past they have so carefully left behind to live in a tenuous today with a non-existent tomorrow. As readers we begin the story somewhat lost, because that is where our characters are, and the book becomes more clear to us as life and self becomes more clear to them. It is this battle with the past, both real and imagined, that makes up the book. It's a depressing subject at best, but a well written comment on slavery and self, and like Bailey's there is much, much more to be said, to be studied and parsed, but that's where I'll leave it for now.
Book 10 on my way to 52 in 2011
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