About this title: Sethe, an escaped slave, kills her own daughter Beloved with a handsaw to prevent her from being claimed as a slave in this stunningly rendered story. Beloved returns to her mother as a ghost 20 years later.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Plume Books
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780452280625ISBN:0452280621
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Slight fanning of front cover. Minor chipping on corners of spine. No creases. Text is clean and bright. Binding is tight. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 275 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Plume Books
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780452264465ISBN:0452264464
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Cover has slight corner curls, spine uncreased; text lightly tanned. Plume Contemporary Fiction. read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Plume
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780452264465ISBN:0452264464
Description: Acceptable in Not Issued jacket. Solid copy. Highlighting and writing within the text. Name written inside cover. Cover has shelfwear. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Plume Books
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780452261365ISBN:0452261368
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. COVER IS VERY WORN FROM USE, PEN MARK / CREASES. PAGES CLEAN, BINDING GOOD, TAPE ON BINDER, NO WRIITING IN BOOK. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Plume Contemporary Fiction. Audience: General/trade. 1988 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION. COVER IS VERY WORN FROM USE, PEN MARK / CREASES. PAGES CLEAN, BINDING GOOD, TAPE ON BINDER, NO WRIITING IN BOOK. TITLE-Beloved (Plume Contemporary Fiction). dimensions (in inches): 0.90 x 7.80 x 5.00. f-Morrison, Toni, Plume Books, ... read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet, E Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780451161390ISBN:0451161394
Description: Good. 0451161394 Mass market paperback, previously read used book in good condition, varying degrees of shelf wear, some spine creases, m..._ read more
"This was the best book that I have ever read. The passion, the beauty and the emotions, just encapsulates the reader page after page. Morrison seamlessly combines Pain with Joy, History with Fiction, and Disgust with Beauty. I cant say that everyone should read this book, because it is defiantly a 'mature' book, but for those who are mature enough to handle it, they should read it. Most certainly every mother should read it. An Amazing book!"
"An excellent, though difficcult, read. Certainly one of the best books on slavery and segregation: portrays the black psychological experience so well that I, a white man, almost felt black myselk. The prose is fantastically delightful; the structure of the story is as crafty as ever, oscilatting back and forth between past and present, reality and surrealism; and it's rich in symbolism and it's complex underlying theme is enlightening."
"Beloved is a book that is often found on reading lists for high school students. I read it because our book club felt it was a classic that should be read. It was a difficult book to read because you were never sure what was real. It was a story that needed to be told about slavery, but the use of the supernatural made it hard to understand. The book club agreed that it was good that we read it but would not suggest it to our friends."
"How did Sethe's baby die? As soon as the novel opens we know she and her daughter Denver are haunted by a ghost and that this ghost is the disturbed though not unkind spirit of Sethe's first daughter, who died when she was still a baby. Morrison uses a wandering third-person narrator-not quite omniscient, but freely moving among her characters-throughout the novel and yet it takes about halfway for this central mystery to get solved. And when it does, Morrison gives it an elusive treatment. We are placed in the point of view of the four horsemen (points to her for not lingering too heavily on this mordant, prophetic symbol, in a scene that is maybe the novel's second most apocalyptic) that have come to round Sethe and her children up to return them to the plantation they've escaped.
We don't know any of these men, and so we cannot feel relaxed in their viewpoints. We're learning them at the moment we read the scene, while they themselves are trying to figure out what it is they're seeing. They don't know the characters' names like we do, they have no idea who these people are, and so all the action and detail-Sethe shut up in a shed slitting one daughter's throat and trying to crack another's skull open on a wall-seems displaced. That is, because of this withdrawn POV Morrison dips into for one chapter, we have to work so hard to piece together what is going on, which in turns makes us both removed from the scene and also weirdly voyeuristic with it.
It's such incredible control over such incredible violence. A lesser writer would have kept us in Sethe's POV, or gone as omniscient as the constructs of the narrative would allow. Morrison's choice is right on. We're complicit, somehow, in both the violence of the scene and the self-interests of the slaveowners."
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