Word: morrisonism
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...Morrison's supple prose makes such desperation palpable. Beloved is full of vivid images, freshly rendered. Here is the runaway slave facing the Ohio River, which stands between her and liberation: "Sethe was looking at one mile of dark water, which would have to be split with one oar in a useless boat against a current dedicated to the Mississippi hundreds of miles away." Here are Sethe, Denver and Beloved enjoying a rare moment of pleasurable abandon on a frozen lake: "Their skirts flew like wings and their skin turned pewter in the cold and dying light...
...flesh-and-blood presence of Beloved roils the novel's intense, realistic surface. This young woman may not actually be Sethe's reincarnated daughter, but no other explanation of her identity is provided. Her symbolic significance is confusing; she seems to represent both Sethe's guilt and redemption. And Morrison's attempt to make this strange figure come to life strains unsuccessfully toward the rhapsodic: "I will never leave you again/ Don't ever leave me again/ You will never leave me again...
...implausibilities in Beloved may matter less than the fact that Sethe believes them. Uneducated, her heritage and culture reduced to a few shreds of memory, she sees no distinction between the supernatural and the equally surreal facts of her own life. Morrison's heroine is hard to understand, and to forget...
...Toni Morrison' s Beloved evokes the violent desperation of a slave struggling for freedom. -- A brilliant novel by Britain' s Ian McEwan...
SENIOR EDITORS: Charles P. Alexander, Martha Duffy, William F. Ewald, Jose M. Ferrer III, Russ Hoyle, Walter Isaacson, Stefan Kanfer, James Kelly, Donald Morrison, Christopher Porterfield, George M. Taber, Robert T. Zintl...