Product Description

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3968 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-08
• Released on: 2004-06-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
“A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

“A triumph.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review

“Toni Morrison’s finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work.” —The New York Times

“A masterpiece. . . . Magnificent. . . . Astounding. . . . Overpowering.” —Newsweek

“Brilliant. . . . Resonates from past to present.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble.” —People

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” —New York Review of Books

“A work of genuine force. . . . Beautifully written.” —The Washington Post

“There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you.” —The New Yorker

“A magnificent heroine . . . a glorious book.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Superb. . . . A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . . . Exquisitely told.” —Cosmopolitan

“Magical . . . rich, provocative, extremely satisfying.” —Milwaukee Journal

“Beautifully written. . . . Powerful. . . . Toni Morrison has become one of America’s finest novelists.” —The Plain Dealer

“Stunning. . . A lasting achievement.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary ...

Review
“A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

“A triumph.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review

“Toni Morrison’s finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work.” —The New York Times

“A masterpiece. . . . Magnificent. . . . Astounding. . . . Overpowering.” —Newsweek

“Brilliant. . . . Resonates from past to present.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble.” —People

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” —New York Review of Books

“A work of genuine force. . . . Beautifully written.” —The Washington Post

“There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you.” —The New Yorker

“A magnificent heroine . . . a glorious book.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Superb. . . . A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . . . Exquisitely told.” —Cosmopolitan

“Magical . . . rich, provocative, extremely satisfying.” —Milwaukee Journal

“Beautifully written. . . . Powerful. . . . Toni Morrison has become one of America’s finest novelists.” —The Plain Dealer

“Stunning. . . A lasting achievement.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction. . . . One feels deep admiration.” —USA Today

“Compelling . . . . Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out.” —The Village Voice

“A book worth many rereadings.” —Glamour

“In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Heart-wrenching . . . mesmerizing.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Shattering emotional power and impact.” —New York Daily News

“A rich, mythical novel . . . a triumph.” —St. Petersburg Times

“Powerful . . . voluptuous.” —New York

From the Inside Flap
Toni Morrison's magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel--first published in 1987--brought the unimaginable experience of slavery into the literature of our time and into our comprehension. Set in post-Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked her life in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved.

Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in her memory; in Denver's fear of the world outside the house; in the sadness that consumes Baby Suggs; in the arrival of Paul D, a fellow former slave; and, most powerfully, in Beloved, whose childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining possession of her present--and to throw off the long-dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this spellbinding novel. But it also moves beyond its particulars, combining imagination and the vision of legend with the unassailable truths of history.
Upon the original publication of Beloved, John Leonard wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "I can't imagine American literature without it." In fact, more than a decade later, it remains a preeminent novel of our time, speaking with timeless clarity and power to our experience as a nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance.


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

It was a struggle...
Well I'd like to start off by saying that the prose in this novel is absolutely stunning. Morrison writes with beautiful and poetic language. That aside, I struggled through this book despite the magnificent writing. Firstly, I just want to note that DO NOT ATTEMPT to read this book if you have never read the Bible. Literally every other page is a literary picture of a Bibical image; whether it be the Four Horsemen, Snakes, Sword and Shield, or the Flood. This imagery was very vivid but it becomes so bogged down in symbolism and imagery that it is impossible to evade confusion. One chapter (not labeled chapters although) in particular has a conversation at the end without quotations or names and takes you about 5 rereads to understand it. I read this for International Baccalaureate Advanced Lit Studies (Higher level lit) and even my teacher noted that it will take several rereads to understand the novel. I can see how this is ok for a Lit class but not someone who is reading it for fun; it is definitely not a casual, "hey I need something to read!" book. No casual reader should struggle to basically read a rewritten version of the Bible; avoid this book unless you are planning to attack it, ripping out every little sentence with an image or motif and noting the mood and tone.

Bedazzled
Having read the book as one of many for my American Literature studies, it left me absolutely confused and caught in the cobwebs of a shadowy, almost unfathomable plot. It simply made NO SENSE for me at all. How much ability of clairvoyance and anticipation does Morrison expect? How much can an author expect a reader at all? More, than an intermediate reader like me can take, I'd like to state.
...
Of course, as a Pulitzer winning book, it must have been a feast for critics, but it was an agony for me.
...
There might be readers who are apt to shed light beyond the ever-so-tightly-woven interactions of the characters, but me, as a not-so-profound knower of Morrisons works, her intention to make people think and act doesn't work out, as BELOVED, rather than makes one act, leaves one bedazzled and confused.

Just b/c it's about slavery doesn't mean it's a great book!
This is a book about a woman who killed one of her children to keep them from being a slave. (Why did she kill that particular child and not the others?) Later the child comes back, fully living in adult form because of how much they loved each other, or something like that. Get out of here. That's so ridiculous I can't even suspend my disbelief. The mother and the revived ghost-daughter end up being co-dependent and obsessed with each other, and some other drama ensues. The grammar is purposely very poor and some of the chapters were done entirely in poems with a lot of symbolism that didn't really fit into the story, and seemed to be there just because of how it sounded.

There were some good parts to the book, like some of the characters and the talking about the past, but I really think this book is highly overrated, and I'm someone who loves to read; classics, modern books, junk books, you name it. I'm going to be very controversial and say that whatever judges decide books are "great" have a bias: if a black person writes about slavery, the book is automatically considered a classic, just because of the subject matter. (And maybe it's like this with other historic horrors too.) Well I'm sorry, but I still think a book needs to be well-written, regardless of the subject matter. To Kill A Mockingbird was an excellent book about racism, and Amy Tan writes a lot of great books about the lives of Chinese immigrants. These books are about heavy subjects, but the writers actually took the effort and told a real story with a strong plot. I'm sure there are also great books about slavery and that I will find them, but this a mediocre book that just happens to be about slavery.