Beloved

I made it through Toni Morrison's, Beloved. Whew, what a scary tale! It is a dense story with multiple layers: the historical tale of slavery, the story of a powerful, vengeful ghost with a sad, sad history, and the interesting human story of an extended family who lived through it all.The book opens with a poltergeist shaking the house. Add to that, the dread of the unfolding, brutal story of the characters' escape from slavery and it becomes a book that's both hard to read and hard to put down. In terms of mood, I was reminded occasionally of Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, which is quite eerie and is populated with characters that evaporate if you look at them too hard. But Housekeeping lacks the powerful storyline of Beloved which gives us a potent history lesson in slavery: how slaves were treated, what it took for them to get away, and what getting away meant.

The writing is dense and sometimes purposefully choppy. I got used to it after about 50 pages, but sections toward the end of the book required 2-3 readings just to make sense of the words. There are 3-4 chapters with stream-of-consciousness writing that hover between poetry and obscurity. Here is a sample:

Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile   her smiling face is the place for me     it is the face I lost   she is my face smiling at me   doing it at last    a hot thing   now we can join   a hot thing

Characterization is fabulous and in 3-D. You can see the characters clearly and understand what drives them. I did not guess how the story would unfold or how it would end, and so it kept me enthralled (while it scared me). I'm not big on scary or creepy books, but Beloved is an amazing book that is worth the effort of the reading.