Name: Toni Morrison
Year Won: 1993
Read: Beloved
Original Language: English
Reason: "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality"
About: Beloved is about a group of escaped slaves who have made it to Ohio from Kentucky. It is now post civil war, but they are haunted by their past lives in slavery, particularly Sethe. Things become even more peculiar when a teenaged girl shows up with a mysterious quality around her and the name "Beloved"...the same name that Sethe gave to her baby daughter who she killed rather than see enslaved again during her escape.
What I liked: Beautiful writing, of course. Also horribly, tragically evocative of the lives the characters spent in slavery as well as the way it continues to torment them. It also does a sublime job of weaving the non-real (Biblical allusions, Beloved being clearly not entirely human) and the mundane.
What I Disliked: At times, it felt like I almost had to stop and parse what was happening, at least if I wanted to figure out the plot. I know, typical literary stuff, but I still find it kind of annoying to go, "okay, so what point is the author trying to make here with all of this poetic language"? It's especially weird as I've read other novels by Morrison that are far more straight forward.
Should it have won a Nobel: Yes. Morrison is taught in classrooms precisely because she's a genius writer. She also brilliantly captured the horrors of slavery, both to the slaves as they live it, but the way it continues to haunt them afterward, beautifully.
Next Up: "The Changeling" by Kenzaburō Ōe
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