Love by Toni Morrison
...From Bookreporter.com
In the magical mélange that informs Toni Morrison's creative talent, she transforms her stories into masterpieces. LOVE is her first novel in five years. It follows on the heels of PARADISE, her masterful story of free slaves, driven across the country until they were able to settle and build their own town. All was as it should be in their "paradise" until over time it became a painful form of hell. Like an alchemist she takes words, ideas, events and characters through an ingenious array of juxtapositions and transmogrifications, which transcend their mundane use by others. All of her work is rich in myth, metaphor, mirth, wisdom, humanity and biblical references.Love in its many heartfelt forms --- seductive, romantic, obsessive, misplaced, conjugal, courtly, honorable, devotional, intimate, affectionate, sentimental, abiding and faithful --- are catalogued in a concatenation of elegant structure. Love in its other forms --- unresolved, unrequited, betrayed, brokenhearted, faithless, critical, cold, misplaced, forbidden, jealous and degraded --- turns into hate. Love and hate emerge as mysterious "characters" imbued by their inherent inexplicability, and this adds depth to her newest provocative novel. LOVE is an exploration into the deepest regions of these most complicated of human emotions. Culture and society are rich in examples of how mere mortals have always attempted to understand the animal attraction between two people and, in doing so, to rationalize the essences of passion and romance. Ancient myths, poems, plays, novels, songs, folklore, fairy tales, film, advertising and popular culture in general all reflect peoples' preoccupation with love and its dizzying impact on the human psyche; both lover and beloved are equally bewildered by its bewitching spell. In a recent interview Morrison said, "I was interested in the way in which sexual love and other kinds of love lend themselves to betrayal. How do ordinary people end up ruining the thing they most want to protect? And obviously the heart of that is really the effort to love."
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4 comments:
finally finished the book. it ended in, i thought, better fashion than it began. the "love" wasn't a romantic love, but rather that of Heed & Christine (so i thought). i was a bit annoyed at the fact she didn't say who died, but i figured it was Heed. who knows.
what did you guys think?
I figured it was Heed who died as well but the ambulance makes you wonder, (unless it was for Junior). I was more irritated by the revelation that L- is dead. Is she italicized because she's dead? I love Romen- the savior, (we see in the end), that Cosey never was. Romen seems to know "love" instictively. I'm stealin' the phrase "Hey Celestial"...love that! Of course I can only use it with ya'll...
any other thoughts?
Hey Celestial!
i was a little annoyed that everybody was so annoyed at Heed. she was sold, straight up. once i figured that out (or found it out), i was forgiving toward her. i don't know how to take Junior, tho. she was like an incarnation of Heed, Christine, and May. like all their craziness wrapped up in one. i dunno.
I GUESS i enjoyed the book. it was very slow, maybe not slow, but too deliberate for my taste. i expected L to be, if not dead, a ghost or something else. that's how Toni rolls LOL.
Didn't know what to make of Junior, but I was curious about her infatuation with Cosey's portrait. She all but repented before what i imagined was an enormous alter of a frame holding his picture. Like Cosey, Junior possessed the spirit of carnality (I think of him masterbating in his granddaughter's room); had the ability to be liberate others (like Romen and his grandmother); and also contributed to Heed and Christine's paranoia. The book is an experience...all I can really say for sure is that I was both interested and irritated by it's ambiguity.
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