Reading Beloved

I just hit the 100-page mark in Toni Morrison's, Beloved. Had I written this post last night where I left off at page 86, I would have started out with something like, "What a creepy book." In fact, I went up to bed last night hoping not to have ghost-mares. But today the sun was out and the ghosts were at peace as I read daughter, Denver's, heart-warming - or as heart warming as this book is going to get - telling of her own birth story in a boat on the Ohio River.

I'm not the first to say that this book is not at all what you expect from a story of run-away slaves. Not at all. There is a ghost who haunts the house that our heroes live in. They are mostly okay with the ghost, even though it does things like put baby hand prints into birthday cakes. It's certainly a convenient way for three women to live alone without anyone bothering them.

It took a bit of work to get the hang of Morrison's writing style. It's rough. You have to chew on sentences, climb through them. Me, I prefer to chew on the whole book, not a sentence. (That, by the way, is kind-of how she writes.) She moves from past to present without a lot of notice - the reader has to take care to not get tripped up. Morrison's style is quite a contrast to the smooth flowing prose in the last two books I read, Eugenide's, Middlesex and Ishiguro's, Never Let Me Go. Both of these weave the past and present fairly seamlessly. But although both of those tales take on difficult topics, nothing can compare to the outright horror the characters in Beloved have lived through. Rough prose makes sense in that context.

The book is a short 300+ pages long - it reads quickly once you get the hang of it. The good news is that I didn't have any ghost-mares last night, so I can read this as late in the evening as I choose to. Morrison has me hooked wondering why all of this ghost-business is happening and where this tale is going.

By the way, I still plan to write up my thoughts on Never Let Me Go at some point. That book has not yet let me go, and I'm not quite ready to commit my thoughts to the blog entry.