Product Description

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.

It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5302 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.

There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus

From Library Journal
To commemorate Morrison's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Knopf here republishes her full canon of novels. This edition of The Bluest Eye (1970) contains a new afterword by the author. The boxed set also includes The Bluest Eye, along with Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), and Jazz (1992). If your originals are shot, the boxed set is an easy way to replace them all.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
With haunting poignancy Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison writes of the hardships of poor black America. Ruby Dee's reading of Morrison's first novel is masterful. The Bluest Eye is the tragic story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, who "each night without fail" prays for blue eyes, believing her ugly reality will be made beautiful through them. Pecola's life is read in an unhurried, emphatic style, which respects the somber strength of the book. Dialogue is abundant, and Dee lends great depth to characters with unique voices and skillfully handled dialect. Nothing of the poetic, contemplative nature of this book is lost in its abridgment. This is an outstanding production of a classic work. H.B.K. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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Customer Reviews

A Story Everyone Needs To Read!
This is my first Toni Morrison novel. At times difficult, at times you have to put the text down and think about what you have just read. A beautifully written story that really hits home and really makes you think. As a white man, reading this book at this time (a time when we are close to electing a black man as president), it made me realize how far we have come as a country; and yet it made me think about how far we have yet to go. This is an important "don't miss" novel. If at all possible try to read it in one or two sittings. Ms. Morrison has done a masterful job!

The Bluest Eye
I still remember the quote I heard that first fueled my desire to start reading The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. "If my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn't so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me-times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without `a thin di-I-ime to my name.' I looked forward to the delicious time when `my man' would leave me, when I would `hate to see that evening sun go down...' `cause then I would know `my man has left this town' Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother
s voice took all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet." Immediately, I was struck by the poetry of her writing. The way she personified misery with greens and blues and the set up of her oxymoron "sweet pain" was amazing to me. Toni Morrison's unique style and evocative imagery appeals to readers of all kinds.
Every sentence of the book portrays a new image. The first sentence of chapter one, "Autumn" and already readers are intrigued. Morrison writes, "Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel." The reader finds themselves pondering the unusual simile of nuns and lust, and the ironic juxtaposition of nuns and drunken men. The tone of the sentence helps to set up the over all mood of the passage.
Throughout her novel, Morrison utilizes similar stupefying creative language that allow her readers not only to imagine and create pictures, but allow them to feel, and evokes emotion. She uses several metaphors, for instance, the longing for blue eyes, by Pecola, an African American girl who is looked down upon because she is ugly. Pecola believes that blue eyes are the representation of the beauty associated with the white middle to upper class. Morrison also uses the growth marigolds to represent the health and growth of Pecola's baby. When the marigolds don't bloom, Pecola's baby does not live.
With her use of figurative language, Morrison appeals to her readers pathos. She describes Pecola's want for blue eyes, "It had occured to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights-if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different...Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time." The visual imagery of a young girl hoping, longing for a certain color of eyes makes the readers sympathize, and feel pity for her Pecola. They long with her, that someday, she may indeed get her blue with beauty eyes.
Readers are sure to fall in love with the writing of the novel, and have their hearts broken by the plot itself. Continuously interesting, and beautiful, The Bluest Eye draws readers in, consumes their emotions and is sure to evoke all kinds of emotions.

Powerful, masterful
Toni Morrison is a tremendous writer who really makes me think, and this book was no exception. The details of the story are absolutely tragic- a young girl is raped by her father and bears his baby, who dies. Meanwhile, she's so full of socially-created self-hatred that she wishes for blue eyes, which she comes to believe she's been given. The writing in this book is astonishing. Morrison has managed to produce something more than unmitigated sadness, even though so many details of the story are tremendously sad. This is a powerful book.