I'm not giving this book any stars because, to be honest, I don't really understand what I just read! There were moments of beauty in this book -- pearls of exquisite writing -- but I just could not follow the story line let alone make sense of the greater meaning. I'll be discussing this with some friends who I hope can enlighten me!

Like the first two book in the Beloved trilogy, Beloved and Jazz, the overarching themes of Paradise are coping with loss and pain; powerful, toxic memories; loss of innocence; and a more nuanced examination of female empowerment in the context of the legacy of slavery. The more granular themes in this third novel are hatred, love, and a kind of NIMBY sensibility.

Unfortunately, I liked this book the least of the three and was disappointed that the almost magical lyricism of the first novel and, to a lesser extent, the second novel, was absent in this one despite the oft pretty prose. The story focuses on fifteen families over five generations in an all-Black Oklahoma town, Ruby, which actively excludes outsiders. It begins when armed men from Ruby search a convent some miles out of town for five women who they believe are immoral and pose a threat to the harmony in Ruby. The story that follows focuses on explaining who those men are and why their intended victims were brought to the convent in the first instance. The chapters are named after different women, and told through various narrators, some more reliable than others. in reality, the women are a scapegoat for Ruby’s own intergenerational conflict. I did like Morrison’s character development, but I found in this novel there was more telling than showing, unlike the first novel. The themes Morrison wove like magic threads into a sturdy tapestry with seamless subtlety in Beloved seemed to have devolved into an explicit bludgeon. I even examined my reaction for, perhaps, some visceral reaction to the citizens of this all-Black town becoming oppressors, and I do not believe it was that. It is just that I recently read Beloved and Jazz, and this one did not measure up, to my great disappointment.
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“Paradise is defined by those who can’t get in.” - Toni Morrison

I have felt with all Toni Morrison’s books, that I would really benefit from re-reading them. In the case of Paradise, I feel a re-reading is essential.

I think this is a very sophisticated novel, and if I am able to draw more satisfying conclusions on a second read, than I will have learned a lot, but at this moment I am a frustrated reader who was just bested by a book. The only thing I know for sure right now is that Paradise as a concept, is a paradox.

In the Foreward to Paradise Toni Morrison writes, "The idea of paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is over-imagined which amounts to the same thing . . ." It is that idea of a definition of paradise that perhaps began as a garden available to all and with each generation turned into a place defined by separation, exclusion, judgment, a place where the symbols that once brought a community together have lost their original meaning.

In the town of Ruby, Oklahoma there are a range of definitions of Paradise that divide the town between generations, genders, through colorism and between places. And those confliction notions are what erupt in violence.

This is Toni Morrison's theology on display taking place with the backdrop of American history, a story that shares much in common with the Book of Judges with its cycle of drifting away, encountering trauma, calling out and redemption, angst over who belongs in the promised land -- and a people, generations after a great Exodus, still trying to keep/understand a covenant that has changed in many of the minds of the community.

This is a challenging book to read with a greater expanse of characters (also like Judges) than most Morrison novels, but so worth making it to the end for one of the best pieces of magical realism that pulls the story into a coherent whole. ( )

Premio Nobel de literatura 1993