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Who is the oppressor. The way the story is laid out slowly - the details trickling like rain - forces the reader to frequently change her assessments of the characters and their motives. No character can be summed up so easily, all are complex and realistic portrayals of people who have experienced a great deal of pain and were warped by either excessive love or the complete absence of it. Morrison's insight into the complicated relationships of men & women as well as children & their parents is, as alwasys, nuanced and moving. Ultimately, Morrison leaves the reader with a better understanding of how we hurt each other and how when we really reach for it, we can find the ability to heal each other as well. Who is the victim.
Even the most seemingly vile character has a tender side that cannot be denied, just as even the most sympathetic character has traits that shock the reader. Absolutely phenomenal. Love is also another stellar example of Morrison's skill at creating structure. These aren't easy answers in life, nor are they in Morrison's work.
This book simply took me away. The beginning may be a little tough to penetrate.
Love is my favorite TM novel so far, and one of my favorite novels of all. Her insight is astounding.
However, Morrison draws you in before you know it with intriguing, multidimensional characters tossed in an intricate and reflective plot (as she always does so well). I've read Beloved, Paradise and Tar Baby.
Toni Morrison is an insightful genius. It's a total escape -- I think of it as literary deep sea diving.
When I finished reading Love, I felt like I had accomplished something.
Morrison's voice to captivate my heart into hearing her stories. Once that happened, her own magic became alive and my own life richer for having heard her tales. The lyric sway of her speech, the slow, low cadence of the way she speaks make the stories come alive - and that's what I needed. Now I have all her books on CD that she reads herself, and they are magical. Then I ordered her works on CD with her as the reader. For years, I tried to read Ton Morrison's works but couldn't get into the rythmn of the writing. That did it. As a white woman from a middle class background, I needed the alluring timbre of Ms.
We learn in Faulkneresque fashion about the women Cosey affected, through voices that oscillate between past and present, the gilded world of Cosey's Resort and the anger and bitterness of a community emptied after the last glamorous guests have left town. Christine immediately dislikes her. Betrayal is the lightning that cleaves and reveals it." Morrison is best known for Beloved, a novel on slavery in the American South. There was a time when the two girls shared laughs under beach blankets as best friends.
Heed invites the young girl upstairs and hires her because she lets her talk. Morrison's language alternately turns on and soothes the reader, enrages and mystifies. Cosey took her as his wife. But she needn't have bothered. Heed was eleven when Mr.
Written from multiple points of view, it alternates between a family's slave past and their post-Civil War present. Christine inhabits the world and the floor beneath Heed's, chopping chicken as diamond rings twinkle from each finger. She does not think of that anymore. He led her to the ocean and let the water run over her body. The joy of reading a work by Morrison lies in her ability to flesh out a character with a few, searing strokes: "Her eyes swept Junior's face, then examined her clothes.she had quickly positioned herself at the window to strike the right pose, give a certain impression. This is Morrison writing about what she does best, though perhaps she has already done it better.
And women in the small town of Silk are still scratching at each other over him.Toni Morrison paints a disturbing, delicate, and erotic portrait of female friendship in Love, her eighth novel. The shadowy, disembodied voice of "L" runs throughout the novel, at times providing insight into secrets buried in the breasts of the women of Love. Bill Cosey has been dead for 25 years. She has been caring for Heed for years, this woman that married her grandfather and ruined her life. In the words of the author: "Love is the weather.
From awe at his good works to outrage at his sexual exploits to a final mystery surrounding his death, we are drawn into a world where friendships are sundered by marriage and marriages desecrated by lust. Morrison's dense plot, spanning two generations and seen through the eyes of multiple characters, is alternately clouded and illuminated by L's stream-of-consciousness commentary, offered up in italicized blocks of prose poetry: "I'm the background--the movie music that comes along when the sweethearts see each other for the first time, or when the husband is walking the beachfront alone wondering if anybody saw him doing the bad thing he couldn't help." It is unclear whether "L" is dead or alive; she seems to hang in the air, timeless, speaking of the past and what unfolded in the halls of a hotel now rotting with neglect. Morrison said she wanted her characters to be observed by an "`I' not restricted by chronology or space-- or the frontier between life and not-life." In a novel already bursting at the seams, this element is a bit distracting, though the beauty of her prose justifies this overlay to her verbal quilt work. The girl was not at all what she had expected." She gives us women who are intimidating and afraid all at once, women who have been protecting themselves for so long that they don't know how to relate to one another anymore save for shows of forced strength. She shows how this emotion, and the need for it, can lead to the deepest forms of hatred. The masterful portrayal of changing generations within an Africa-American family, particularly its women, is reprised in Love. Now in her eighties, her immobile hands cannot record her memories of her marriage, so she tells stories about "Papa" as Junior bathes her, envying the girl's young skin and her ability to feel. They take turns telling how Bill Cosey brought a hotel and hope to a black community at mid-century, taking the citizens of Silk out of their bleak jobs at the cannery and offering them a glimpse into the world of well-dressed guests and parties by the sea.
Love is rich in poetic language, a complex painting of complicated women that critiques the way we define love and attacks racism and sexism along the way. His soft eyes stare out invitingly from the portrait above the bed, but his lips aren't talking. Junior shows up at the Cosey women's doorstep hungry, her long, bare legs encased in dirty black boots. Her women are dark and powerful; warriors destroyed and re-built by their own making.
Thought it was a beautifully woven story of a friendship that develops between two women who once shared a bond with the same man.
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