Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved is, simply put, one of the most powerful books I've ever read. Nominally the story of an ante-bellum woman's escape from slavery to supposed safety in free Ohio, Beloved is much more than that. In fact, while I was moved by the story, I was more taken by the world surrounding the story. I'm not sure I'm explaining this correctly, but to boil it down, Beloved brought home the horrors of slavery to me more than anything else I've ever read or seen. And frankly, I've read widely in the history of the era.

In this book, Toni Morrison hits the reader at a very visceral level with the physical trauma, psychological terror, and socio-political corruption of the slavery era. Not only is the physical damage of floggings and beatings (not to mention casual rapes) brought to your doorstep, but you, the reader, are forced to understand the psychological damage done to slaves. You realize what privations a runaway slave would endure to get to the "free" north. And then you understand at a very basic level what the Fugitive Slave Act was really all about and that the idea of "freedom" for blacks in the north was, at best, a very shaky proposition. You also come to learn what lengths a person would go to in order to preserve that freedom for one's family.

Morrison did several other interesting things in this book. Her take on love (man/woman, maternal, familial) in the context of these peoples lives is very intriguing. How much can one afford to love when one is a slave and your love might be torn from you at a master's whim? She also toyed with several classic notions of death, ghosts, and the spirit world in addition to a type of modified Christianity. Among the more obvious ones were death as a bridge to the afterworld and having to cross a river to get to (or back from) that afterworld.

Another aspect of the book I enjoyed was the occasional shift in point-of-view. It didn't happen too often, but when it did, it was very revealing of the characters, their inter-relations, and the wider world. It gave more weight to certain things than the exposition of the third person narrator would have.

Beloved is one of the most thought-provoking, horrifying, insightful, painful, and best books I've ever read. I shudder to think of the amount of research Morrison did in writing this book and I shudder even worse to think about how much it must have hurt to have written it which essentially meant having to have led the lives of her characters.