Menschenkind (1987)

A heady blend of historical fiction and horror, Beloved takes us into a household of Black women just after the Civil War. Haunted both by the mother's prior life as a slave and a spirit that inhabits the house, this family overburdened with too much past must find a way into the future. Poignant and creeping yet awash with profound and poetic prose, a rare feat of literary horror. ( )

I rated this only a 3.5 out of 5.0. It was a powerful story to be sure, but a little weird and hard to get into. ( )

Morrison's voice is so melodic and the story is so poetic and free-flowing that the audio book did not really work for me. ( )

With Beloved, Morrison continues the tightening of the focus in time and space that she was experimenting with in Tar Baby — we're down to a time-span of a single generation, straddling the American Civil War, whilst the migration from South to North is condensed to crossing the Ohio River, between slavery on Sweet Home farm in Kentucky and freedom in Cincinnati. With a plot that draws loosely on the Medea story, she creates a level of emotional intensity that feels almost like the unity of time and space of Greek tragedy.

As ever, the theme is the enduring damage done by slavery and racism, but here we are focussing on the people who were its direct victims, rather than on their descendants two or three generations down. And Morrison keeps a step ahead of potential critics by making Sweet Home a model farm, run by people who consider themselves liberal and enlightened. Mr Garfield claims that his slaves are the only black "men" in Kentucky (all others are "boys", of course); he teaches them to shoot and allows them to learn to read and write if they wish, and even allows Halle to hire himself out in his spare time to earn his mother's freedom. But of course it is neither "Sweet" nor "Home", and Garfield's social experiments do nothing to cancel out the horrible, dehumanising effect of the condition of slavery itself, least of all when he dies and leaves the slaves at the mercy of a less enlightened successor. Once she has got herself and her children away across the river at huge risk, Sethe will go to any lengths to prevent the children being taken back to Sweet Home.

This is a tougher book than Morrison's earlier novels, strong, tight, taking absolutely no prisoners, and giving us less chance to relax over social comedy and the eccentricities of the communities it is set in, but it must surely count as her best up to that point. ( )

How this book might have changed me had I read it 30 years ago!

Today, it moved me, brought laughter, tears, horror, joy. I could feel its attempts to renovate things --shift them around and upgrade my heart and my brain -- and it succeeded to some extent.

But, at my age, things are more solid, rusted, worn down, frozen in place. When I was younger, those same attempts at rearranging my soul...

If a book has such power over me today, I missed an opportunity to be a better person because of that book 30 years ago. Ghosts and regrets... ( )