Reading the 20th Century discussion

Unaccountable, but we don't yet have a thread for Toni Morrison who leapt straight into my list of favourite authors with her brutally brilliant Beloved.

I've read Sula and am now reading Jazz and am struck all over again at the immense lyricism of Morrison's writing, even when the content is horrific.

Jazz, oh so cleverly, takes on the improvised air of the music, switching between voices and narration style, but never loses sight of its direction. It's also a vibrant portrait of 1920s Harlem and a community struggling to find an identity and dignity in the wake of slavery, WW1, and the combined tolls of racism and misogyny. Sounds hard-hitting and it is - but it's also glorious.

Who else is a Morrison fan here, what have you read or plan to read?

Very excited to see this thread! Morrison has become my top favorite--I can't imagine anyone better.

I've read Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Sula, and this non-fiction of hers, which is incredible: The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations.

I'm hoping to read Paradise soon, but have been very tempted by Jazz, and now even more with your description, RC. Glorious is the best word to describe her writing!

I've been meaning to try The Source...I liked Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination very much, particularly her comments on writers like Willa Cather.

Ooh thanks, Alwynne, Playing in the Dark sounds fascinating. Is The Source the same book as Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations? I've been meaning to get to the latter ever since I missed it on NetGalley.

I’m also a enthusiastic fan of Toni Morrison. I’ve read Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy, God Help the Child, Tar Baby, and Home.

As much as I love them all, The Bluest Eye is my favorite. Not so much because of the story, which is devastating, but because it changed the way I see the world, and the couple of teenagers that read it on my suggestion said it changed the way they see the world as well.

I also saw the documentary Pieces I Am, it is a wonderful look at Morrison’s life and work. In the film Toni Morrison shares what inspired her to write Beloved and relates what it was that showed her how to start that outstanding and important novel, that story gave me chills.

It wasn’t until I saw that film that I learned that Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise are considered a trilogy by Morrison.

This isn’t about Morrison so feel free to delete it, or I can.
Can anyone add to the Favorite Author thread? I didn’t see the brilliant José Saramago in the list.

Yes, anyone can create a favourite author thread WndyJW

WndyJW wrote: "It wasn’t until I saw that film that I learned that Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise are considered a trilogy by Morrison."

And I didn't know that till you mentioned it in another group, Wendy. There's something a bit disparaging that critics have refused to see the books as a trilogy despite Morrison herself considering them that way - though scholars are now, I hear, recognising the books as a sequence. And they're noted that way in some editions on here now.

WndyJW wrote: "I didn’t see the brilliant José Saramago in the list."

We did a group read of Saramago's Blindness, and then some of us went on to read the sequel as well, thread here:

www.goodreads.com/topic/show/21696515...

They were the first books of his I'd read and I definitely want to read more.

WndyJW wrote: "I’m also a enthusiastic fan of Toni Morrison. I’ve read Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy, [book:God Help the..."

I saw the documentary, Wendy, and think I know the part you're talking about. I'm picturing a dock off the back of her house and getting a chill just remembering.

I'm interested in others' thoughts about the trilogy, because I have been planning to read Paradise before Jazz. I heard, and now I can't remember whether it was from Morrison or somewhere else, that it was more a thematic trilogy, and that the reading order wasn't necessarily important.

Kathleen wrote: "WndyJW wrote: "I’m also a enthusiastic fan of Toni Morrison. I’ve read Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy, [bo..."

I read that she was exploring ideas around memory, story and history in relation to notions of truth and truth-telling. But there is also a chronological order, in that they move forward in time coming close to modern times. She talks a little about the other links here:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...

That Paris Review interview will be something to savor--thanks, Alwynne.

I'm moving toward reading Jazz first. I planned on reading Paradise at the beginning of the year, and have it for a challenge. But honoring and enjoying what Morrison was trying to do is more important!

Kathleen wrote: "That Paris Review interview will be something to savor--thanks, Alwynne.

I'm moving toward reading Jazz first. I planned on reading Paradise at the beginning of the year, and have it for a challen..."

I read out of order too, 'Beloved' followed by 'Paradise' haven't attempted 'Jazz' yet!

I've just finished Jazz, and another 5-stars - my review is here, no spoilers: www.goodreads.com/review/show/4268642715

As Alwynne mentions above, the trilogy works chronologically in terms of the 'now' of each book (Jazz is set in 1920s Harlem) but the storytelling shifts through memories and flashbacks as we can't understand the characters in the present without understanding their histories. Just dazzling.

I haven’t read Jazz or Paradise. I reread Beloved last year. I will read them soon since they are being discussed here.

I hope everyone gets a chance to see the documentary. I’m glad you saw it, Kathleen. When it ended I wanted to stay in my seat and watch it all over again.

Kathleen wrote: "That Paris Review interview will be something to savor--thanks, Alwynne.

I'm moving toward reading Jazz first. I planned on reading Paradise at the beginning of the year, and have it for a challen..."

: )

I have just started Song of Solomon. This will be my first Toni Morrison and I'm really enjoying it so far.

Just finished my first Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye, her debut book. Her style is unique and very appealing, in this book she has used a combination of Prose and poetry.

I think you may find that poetry in all of her work, Nidhi. But sometimes you just love a voice and I love Toni Morrison's!

Just finished Jazz, and absolutely loved it. The most unique of hers that I've read, and it contains so many layers--I'm already seeing the need for re-reads.

Thanks for the earlier discussion in this thread that led me to reading it before Paradise. I'm glad now that I kept to the order--I could really feel the Purgatory in this one.

I'm bumping this thread as Rose and I will be reading Paradise and discussing it here - everyone is welcome to chip in as always or join us.

It's billed as #3 in the loose Beloved Trilogy - the earlier books being Beloved and Jazz, both incomparable.

Morrison is one of those authors where I really want to be a completist - maybe that will be my 2027 project?!

Every time I start a Morrison book I remember all over again just how very good she is and why that Nobel prize was so well deserved.

She doesn't make things easy for us: here she brilliantly wrong-foots us (me, at least!) in that opening chapter on multiple levels (Ruby, who the attackers are).

Also the density of her prose is just wonderful. I'm constantly trying to convey without judgement in reviews how prose can be simple to the point of simplistic - Morrison is the complete opposite.

The audio arrived for me, so I plan to start this soon.

Still waiting for my copies - audio or print, whichever I can get ahold of first. Glad you are enjoying it so much RC!

I'll be interested in hearing how the audio works for you both - it might depend on the individual chapters. The first is very dense as we switch between past and present, but the second is more straightforward.

I'm at about 25% and have settled into this now - Morrison has hooked me for sure. Her range of characters is striking and the way she is able to make them 'real' with such lightness of touch.

It's also interesting that she leaves gaps that we fill in ourselves with our own assumptions, so that when she proves us wrong we have to try to understand our own errors. Without spoilers, she caught me out in the time setting. Although maybe this is connected to me not being an American reader, it feels deliberate too.

This is also interesting in terms of how communities work and the internal dynamics. There was some of that in Jazz but this seems more focused on how individuals interact to form groups, and what that means for the person. Which makes it sound dry and dull when it's blazing with life!

Has anyone else started Paradise yet? I'm dying to talk about it! I'm just over halfway through but it's a book not to rush and which needs attention.

It feels to me like Morrison's model was something like an epic poem like the Iliad as well as the bible - she shifts between big picture writing then zooms in on a character or scene or situation. She studied Classics, I think, and her Beloved drew on Medea.

This is definitely a book that would reward with a second reading, I feel. But it's wonderful, probably the most ambitious work by Morrison I've read to date.

Oh, and I feel like I'm learning so much about America from this and the Black American experience.

ooh . I'll do my best Roman C . I've read it twice in four years and agree it's to a complex and compelling masterpiece . I don't know much about the Greek classics but it did help to have an expert in my book group . I know the Bible better and feel that Morrison draws on this too .

The opening is stunning , of course , with that gut punch of a first sentence and , as she's done in other novels , she gives us the "what" first and then we get the "how ".

I’m really eager to start, but I have to focus on finishing Emma, as it’s due soon, and there is a queue for it. (It’s the sole copy of the Juliet Stevenson reading among the 3 library systems to which I have access.) i’ve finished all the other things that are about to be due, so perhaps tomorrow or Saturday.

Hester wrote: "I've read it twice in four years"

I can certainly see why that would be the case - I almost want to re-read it immediately, knowing what I know from what comes later.

I just checked and Morrison studied Classics as a 'minor' (I still don't really understand how US degrees work...) during her English degree but yes, the bible is definitely there too with the idea of paradise lost, the puritanical rules of Ruby, the patriarchal structures etc., and the concern with both the purity of 'their' women as well as the emphasis on bloodlines.

The Oven is like the central hearth/monument of the classical agora or Forum and links to the idea of 'founding fathers' where the masculinised noun in underlined.

There's also something very Ovidian about the images of rocks and trees being entwined and making love to each other.

Such a rich book!

Hester wrote: "The opening is stunning , of course , with that gut punch of a first sentence and"

I'm actually wondering if that's a decoy as I still don't know which is the white woman and I'm not sure it matters, does it? There's more about the internal racism/colourism (though, of course, the white racism of the US is crucial context for everything that happens), and the sexism/misogyny that is tied up with the patriarchal culture of Ruby.

G wrote: "I’m really eager to start, but I have to focus on finishing Emma, as it’s due soon"

Sorry, I wasn't meaning to put any pressure on you or anyone else - I'm just obsessed with this book at the moment!

No pressure—well, not much. I’m really eager. My IRL book group that petered out after Covid has resumed with its original leader (whose leadership I preferred to the women who came after her), and we’re doing Beloved over 2 meetings, which prompted me to reread that book twice. I was the only white woman who came to the restart, and it was really helpful to listen to the insights of women whose own background and experience is closer to Morrison’s than my own.
It also whetted my appetite for more Morrison. I’ve not read nearly enough of her. So I’m really hankering to get to this. I haven’t read Jazz, and hope that won’t matter.

I'm picking it up from the library on Friday. I hope to get into it soon!

G wrote: "I haven’t read Jazz, and hope that won’t matter."

I don't think it does, there are no continuities of story, characters etc. in any of the trilogy. I think they all explore Black American experience and move chronologically, but I suspect they could be read in any order.

I thought Jazz was magnificent in the way that Morrison creates a kind of syncopated rhythm in her prose.

@RomanC . I think I heard Morrison say that she deliberately left the identification of the white woman a secret . I love the way she often creates this confusion in her novels so that you simply have to trust her skill as a writer .

Hester wrote: "@RomanC . I think I heard Morrison say that she deliberately left the identification of the white woman a secret . I love the way she often creates this confusion in her novels"

Ah, good to know I didn't miss any identification. Although this scene seems more about extreme misogyny that inflicts violence on women regardless of race or skin colour. The way they are seen as pollution and corruption so that male violence is constructed as self-defence is all over that opening scene.

Good point about confusion and ambivalence in Morrison's writing - perhaps that's to do with her ambivalences about the gaps between the idea of America and the reality? There's always a strong social/political critique in all her books I've read so far.

Has anyone read her essays and non-fiction?

Btw, wiki has a character list that I've found helpful, though don't read the plot summaries if you're avoiding spoilers.

Roman Clodia wrote: "Hester wrote: "@RomanC . I think I heard Morrison say that she deliberately left the identification of the white woman a secret . I love the way she often creates this confusion in her novels"

Ah,..."

Does your edition have Morrison's foreword? That covers some of your questions. I could only find an extract from it online:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/boo...

Morrison once said that she emulated African writers when depicting many of her characters, just as these authors weren't writing for the 'white gaze' she often strived to do the same. So she often didn't include - or deliberately omitted - conventional markers of race.

Thanks Alwynne - mine's an old edition which doesn't have that foreword from Morrison. I definitely need to read her essays now after hearing her voice in that extract.

I guess that's what I was getting at with the white girl being what I called a decoy - a bit like foreshadowing what Morrison does in Recitatif?

Apologies, this is my own ignorance, but is the founding of first Haven and then Ruby part of the Great Migration? I'd heard the term but not really understood it.

The other thing I noted was that the Ruby women straightened their hair and disapproved when Anna Flood returned from Detroit and refused to do it. I knew the Afro was part of 1960s/70s counterculture, Black pride and Black Power, but I somehow hadn't realised how old the idea of straightening (ironing?) was.

Roman Clodia wrote: "Apologies, this is my own ignorance, but is the founding of first Haven and then Ruby part of the Great Migration? I'd heard the term but not really understood it.

The other thing I noted was tha..."

The Great Migration primarily in the 1920s and related to movement from the Southern states to the Northern ones. Haven is just post the Reconstruction era i.e. the period that followed the end of the Civil War. So closer to the movement that encouraged Americans to go out and settle unsettled or formerly indigenous land.

If it helps, Oklahoma was particularly significant in Black American history and think that's why Morrison makes it the setting for Haven, that history clearly important in the novel:

https://www.okhistory.org/publication...

Ruby is founded in the early 1950s so during the Civil Rights era, and iirc the killings take place in the post-Civil Rights era?

Edit: I read somewhere that during the Reconstruction/post-Reconstruction era that there was a proposal that Black Americans all be settled in the West on former indigenous land.

This might help with hair, the history of straightening goes back a long way.

https://www.bustle.com/articles/18904...

I've read novels in which young female characters talk about having their hair treated with lye etc and how much they hate the process. Think it comes up in novels and memoirs by Alice Walker and Maya Angelou.

Roman Clodia wrote: "Thanks Alwynne - mine's an old edition which doesn't have that foreword from Morrison. I definitely need to read her essays now after hearing her voice in that extract.

I guess that's what I was ..."

I think it is partly a decoy but 'whiteness' is also the anomaly here rather than the representative of a majority or norm, so hints at that too.

I got side-tracked by the 'oven' and its overall symbolism beyond generational conflict. Also found the more mystical elements challenging.

I also wondered why Morrison decided to write a foreword to the novel years later. Was it something she commonly did? Or did she think that this novel had been misunderstood or needed further framing for her readers?

Alwynne wrote: "Does your edition have Morrison's foreword? That covers some of your questions. I could only find an extract from it online:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/boo......"

Thanks so much for sharing this, Alwynne. I read Paradise last year, and my copy also does not have this forward. What a wonderful read--like a short story.

And RC, I think your word "decoy" is a good one. And I love your comparison to Recitatif, which I also read last year, and it left me thinking: "Why do we so badly want to find out who the 'other' is?"

Alwynne wrote: "I got side-tracked by the 'oven' and its overall symbolism beyond generational conflict. Also found the more mystical elements challenging."

The Oven seems to have so many values inscribed on it. I didn't really understand how it played a part in the Haven women not having to work as servants in white households which either Deek or Steward remembers - this made it a way of the men protecting their women from sexual harassment or rape at work.

It reminded me more of the classical hearthstone that Greek cities placed in the agora, as the heart of the community. The Romans still had their hearth gods so that when they moved house, they dismantled the hearth and took it with them as is the case here.

As well as being the site of the generational conflict you mention, the idea of a hearth or oven is also associated with women, of course, and female work tying them to the home, so it has all kinds of conservative values attached symbolically. I guess that's partly why it's the site of the Black Power graffiti - and it's the women who scrub that off even though it's the men who are most offended by it.

I always find the mystical elements in Morrison enriching but I've been surprised since I understand she was intensely religious - I guess she was just expansive in how she understood religion.

Alwynne wrote: "If it helps, Oklahoma was particularly significant in Black American history"

That's great background - thanks. And also helps illuminate the subdued presence of Native Americans and the previous activities of the nuns at the Convent.

Alwynne wrote: "This might help with hair, the history of straightening goes back a long way."

That's fascinating and disturbing. Gosh, lye! A corrosive being used on the scalp and so near the eyes is horrific. I remember reading somewhere that servants, laundresses etc. in the nineteenth century had cracked hands because it was used as/in soap for washing clothes. Certainly gives wonderful context for imagining how radical Anna Flood must look in Ruby when she returns with natural hair. Now I'm wondering what the Convent women did with their hair?

Kathleen wrote: ""Why do we so badly want to find out who the 'other' is?""

Exactly - and Morrison is both trailing this and then leaving us to examine our own thought processes. It's interesting to see how many reviews here have 'identified' the white woman... only the reviews often alight on someone different!

I am enjoying the remarks.

Oklahoma race history is very important, and at the time of the writing, much of the negative had been buried history to many. IMO, this book helped bring this to light.

https://www.neh.gov/article/1921-tuls...

The sense of epic is very strong here. There is not only Classic but also a sense of biblical narrative with the "lost tribe," finding a place to settle and developing traditions. The hearthstone/oven has oven has over time lost the meaning of its use and its later meaning has become symbolic or traditional and I think Morrison crafts the danger of how these symbols can be corrupted.

Morrison was also a Woolf and Faulkner scholar and wrote her master's thesis, "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated," written under her given name Chloe Ardelia Wofford. I think you can see the influence of both in her novels and I think their is a lot of Faulkner in this one. Morrison would push back on the influence of Faulkner but I think it is apparent and worth noting in Paradise. She is not copying, but building on some of his themes.