Search Sign up   Subscribe


Detail

Title: Paradise (Beloved Trilogy #3) ISBN: 9780452280397
· Paperback 318 pages
Genre: Fiction, Classics, Cultural, African American, Historical, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, Feminism, Race, Contemporary

Paradise (Beloved Trilogy #3)

Published April 1st 1999 by Plume (Penguin Books Ltd) (first published December 24th 1997), Paperback 318 pages

"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins this visionary work from a storyteller. Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Paradise opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma.

Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.

In prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem, Toni Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation of race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present.

Must be read

User Reviews

Violet wells

Rating: really liked it
Sometimes you have to hold up your hands as a reader and admit maybe you didn’t do a book justice. I found Paradise really difficult to follow. Mainly this is due to there being no central character. The central character instead is a town called Ruby where only blacks live and are free of white legislation and a nearby building known as the convent. The awfulness of men and magical prowess of women is its theme. Well not quite but the divisions drawn here are not between blacks and whites but between men and women. The men drawing their inspiration from the past, the women much more inclined to look forward.

I’d be interested to know how many characters there are in this novel. I would guess about a hundred and they all have significance which for me meant Morrison was asking too much of the reader. No doubt a novelist lives obsessively in the novel she’s writing. As a reader this isn’t the case. We have the rest of our life to get on with every day. If a character who has only had two lines reappears after a hundred pages it’s almost cruel to expect us to remember him or her. And yet if we don’t remember them here we are punished, shoved out of the narrative. To fully appreciate this novel I’d guess you’d have to read it in three sittings. Unfortunately I was only managing to read about twenty pages a day. On top of that I wasn’t really convinced by any of the characters.

At the beginning, a lynch party of men set out with guns and various other weapons to put an end to the reign of a few mysterious women living in the building outside the town. A witch hunt in other words. The men have managed to convince themselves these women are ungodly. The novel then goes backwards in time to document both the history of the small town of Ruby and the various women who have ended up at the convent. There’s some cleverness in the construction of this novel – I liked how it turns full circle which does create a lot of intrigue - but there’s also a good deal of clumsiness. For starters the characters aren’t particularly memorable with perhaps one or two exceptions. A lot of them, especially the men, seemed interchangeable. Neither is the prose as haunting and exalted as Morrison’s usual fare. So though I felt I didn’t do it justice I can still say with conviction it’s no Beloved. In fact it’s my least favourite of the Morrison novels I’ve read.


Rowena

Rating: really liked it
" They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the convent, but there is time, and the day has just begun. They are nine. Over twice the number of the women, they are obliged to stampede or kill, and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement--rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, mace, and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns."- Toni Morrison, Paradise

In my opinion Paradise is one of the most complex books Morrison has written, and possibly the one I've had the most trouble reviewing. This is my second reading of it and I feel I need at least a couple more before I truly get it; I’m happy with what I gleaned from it this time around, but to put it all down in words is still difficult.

Paradise tells the story of the black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, founded by former slaves who find themselves rejected both by white people but also by lighter-skinned black people ("Us free like them; was slave like them. What for this difference?"). Ruby was created to insulate the townspeople (as much as possible) from Out There, the outside world:

"Out There where your children were sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be annulled..."

Since reading Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, I've been curious about the founding of black towns.Through this fictionalized account I was able to think more about how black towns were formed (the "why" is easy enough to guess at), but it's also clear to see that towns like these, often founded with high hopes, are definitely not utopian. Ruby ends up becoming quite insular and patriarchal, and full of strife not only due to inter-generational quarreling, but also because of the women in the Convent. Throughout the book independent women, such as the women living in the Convent, are met with ridicule, scorn, hatred, and fear. The Convent is a haven, a refuge for women who have experienced trauma and hardships in their lives, and a place where women are enterprising and self-sufficient. The Convent women actually benefit the town, but all that labour and kindness is taken for granted and unappreciated in the end. It's practically a witch-hunt where strong, independent women are the scapegoats when things aren't going well:

"So, Lone thought, the fangs and the tail are somewhere else. Out yonder all slithery in a house full of women. Not women locked safely away from men; but worse, women who chose themselves for company, which is to say not a convent but a coven."

Morrison is one of the best at illuminating different aspects of African-American history with human stories. This always helps me appreciate the history even more and also think of the people involved, not just the bare facts and figures that we are often fed when we are taught history, so much so that we often feel removed from it. Definitely recommended for those who enjoy challenging reads!




Jean-Luke

Rating: really liked it
The moment I wake up, before I put on my makeup, I say a little prayer for you--but more on that in a moment. Reading this after reading The Bluest Eye is probably like reading Dubliners and then following it with Finnegans Wake. Well, maybe not quite (I wouldn't know as I haven't read either one), but this one is definitely much denser than The Bluest Eye and has a cast of characters as large as the Bible. It's not something you read with the TV on in the background, or while having a conversation with your spouse.

Not unmanageable, and certainly not unenjoyable (there's a wedding scene that is simply mesmerizing, or should I say Divine, hence the song from My Best Friend's Wedding, you know where Julia Roberts sits annoyed and horrified as the whole family breaks into song). I would compare it to one of those jigsaw puzzles where the main image, on closer inspection, is composed of hundreds of smaller images. Despite it being divided into sections based on characters, you don't get a single character's whole story in their section. Just keep on reading.


Tim

Rating: really liked it
Why is it that so often in life the very thing you’re trying to avoid becomes you? Why do the oppressed become the oppressor? Why do the abused become the abuser? Why do those who demand openness and equality become insular and elitist? Why does the love that we strive so hard to obtain turn into a protective curse when we attempt to contain it vs. allowing its empathy and compassion to extend to all? These open-ended questions are only the tip of the iceberg in Toni Morrison’s "Paradise". It is an incredible novel that incorporates many complex themes, mind shattering symbolisms and an obvious personal investment of experience, echoes of generations gone by and silent whisperings from history that we should heed and never repeat.

The idea that a group from any oppressed race can run from their problems, form their own society, and live by their own rules contains within it the basic dangers inherent in utopian thinking. So often, it is not applicable or realistic according to the complexities of human nature. In fact, the idea that this utopia can be acquired affirms the thesis of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. We can see this in modern society with the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians. Or the way that America has chosen to repress and exploit the Third World and the various racial/class/homosexual/religious/political groups at home. Here we have victims creating new victims…and the cycle continues. The real question is, how do we break this cycle? It is only through immense courage, love, empathy, compassion and strength that we step up and say no. I forgive you for what has happened to me and to make that forgiveness concrete in my own life, I will strive to not become bitter and will do my best to not consciously or unconsciously pass it on to others.

The concept of Paradise in Toni Morrison’s novel is akin to looking into an endless sea of mirrors. It reflects back upon you over and over and over. Its meanings can go on to infinity, and those religious representations in the novel imply that Paradise can be infinity itself.

First we have the town of Ruby. It is an honest, and at first, noble idea of escaping exploitation. Ah, but here we have our first red flag. These African Americans are descendants of a group that has set out from the post-Reconstruction era in Louisiana and Mississippi to establish their own community void of whites, or for that matter, any inter-racial mixing. So the very idea of exclusion is there from the start. This is what gets us into trouble. While it is obvious that the group believed they were simply avoiding intense suffering, there was a deep dark seed of hate that had been planted by the white man. Now lest anyone come down on me, I am not saying that this hatred has no reason for being there. It would be quite impossible to be treated as chattel for centuries and not carry animosity. I am only pointing out that this is one of the great tests of life, and applies to any oppressed group. How do you handle this situation within a history of racism experienced? How do the Jews react to the Holocaust? How do the Palestinians react to Jewish oppression?

Unfortunately, the citizens of Ruby handled it by attempting to keep their society untouched by “contamination”. Contamination represents anything outside of their direct ancestors. This incorporates skin color (even as compared to other African Americans), an unspoken but expected moral code, a hierarchy in society that revolves around the founding families, and the expectation of keeping the generations continuous through marriage within the community. It revolves around purity in religion, in dress, in being a productive upstanding member of society, and, consequently, becomes patriarchal, authoritarian, repressive and a power struggle.

This is where we can introduce the Convent to the story. The book does it from the very beginning, but that beginning is actually the end of the story. Or is it the beginning of another beginning? Is the symbolism involved in how the women of the Convent treated the attacking men of the town only the beginning of another cycle of repression? Or, to put it more clearly, are the women plotting revenge at the end of the story that will then turn them into the oppressors? Again, they would certainly be justified. However, what will it accomplish? Only more and more violence.

The Convent is located about 17 miles outside of the town of Ruby. It was originally the project of a white collar criminal, but was taken over by a group of nuns who became yet another symbol of oppression. The patriarchy that bleeds through the pages of "Paradise" is evident in the treatment of women by the Catholic Church. The nuns of the Church have been programmed with this repression to such a degree that they in turn act as the patriarchs in this very convent. It is an important point to understand, because of the way that Connie is affected. She believes that she needs this authority to survive. Connie is the perfect example of the woman who has been pushed down by patriarchy and authoritarianism to the point where her thoughts are not her own. She has not learned the process of discovering her own individuality, but she will and does.

A quick side note, as I’ve mentioned it before in my writing reviews, but Morrison doesn’t miss a beat with touching on what I refer to as “the benefactor syndrome” of missionary work. The convent was set up to take the message of Christ to the Native Americans and “wean them away from anything that was enjoyable in their lives”. It’s the idea that we have it right; you are the sinner, so conform to our way of thinking.

But the Convent is to go through another evolution centralized around Connie. After Mary Magna passes away, Connie is all alone. Mary Magna was the woman who rescued Connie from the poverty of being an orphan, and she was who Connie lived for. Connie never thought of the crucial process of discovery while Mary Magna was around, because she never felt the need. She never had to think for herself as long as she had the convent and the sisters. She didn’t realize that she was a prisoner. It was only the ability to “step inside” that was introduced to her by Lone that not only symbolized empathy, but allowed her to realize the importance of herself as her own person. Yes, this seeming display of supernatural power from Lone is symbolic of the power of Connie and the rest of the women she takes under her wing to realize their own potential.

These free thinking women are precisely what a threat to the utopia of Ruby is. Women are a threat to this society because they stand in the way of “progress”. Female babies can not carry on the “holy” family names of the town. Female midwifes and child bearers stand between the successful births of healthy baby boys. To the men of the town, this is everything. Without the ability to continue the utopia, the dream dies. Any woman who is able to amass too much power is a clear threat to their authoritarianism. What if she doesn’t want to bear children? What if the 8-rock women gain so much power that they refuse to marry the men of the community, and instead go outside and inter-marry with others?

All their dreams, all their fears, their purpose for living, the very idea of the town of Ruby, the outside threats, the unsubmissive women, the impurity, the non-conformity, the strangeness of the other is all wrapped up in the women who have taken residence with Connie in the Convent. This is why they must be stopped. This is where the idea of purity and a way of life become more important than love and acceptance. This is the culmination of our narrative. The formerly oppressed (the citizens of Ruby) have made the transformation into the oppressors. The woman has become the victim.

It is perhaps no mistake that our story revolves around the Civil Rights era. For it is in this very movement that the fight for equality in the black community became patriarchal. The idea of freedom for the race did not incorporate the equally important drive for women’s rights. That fight would have to come later. It is symbolic and central to Morrison’s novel that the women are left out of “purifying” the town of Ruby. What the men have to say, and how they plan to execute their actions is no place for a woman’s involvement. In this, we can see the warning from Morrison that any fight for equality can become repressive in and of itself.

This idea of “Paradise” therefore involves many different elements to Morrison and our characters. Freedom is one common thread. Self-determination is another. The ability to escape is a third. However, what many of our characters struggle to grasp is the all-consuming love that is so important for Paradise to become a reality. Through the lens of love, everything becomes clear. One’s vision of a Higher Power (yet anther “Paradise” theme) is all about how love is incorporated. Without love our world falls apart. Love and its corollary, equality, is about embracing the differences we see in the other. This can not be accomplished by a dogmatic adherence to principle, purity or structure. It is not done by taking sides. It is searching for the common ground that makes us all human.

In the end, the road to Paradise is narrow. However, it is not a narrow experience or way of thinking. It is simple yet complex much like Morrison’s novel. Love is never easy, but in the end it is all we have. Love is meaning, our very existence, the essence of what we describe as “God”, and the only way to Paradise.


Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it
This is the most complex book I have read from Toni Morrison. It is the story of a black community called Ruby in rural Oklahoma in the 70s and the reaction to a female commune of sorts called the Convent out on the edge of the town. At issue here is skin-tone, the 8-rock dark black founders and their suspicions towards those with lighter skin. The book starts with describing a massacre and then goes back to paint in the details of the lives of the women and the story of the town. The narration is highly variable and not always easy to follow. I realize how important this book is and recognize the wonderful writing, but dropped a star from the lack of fluidity in the reading of the text and the confusion that this entailed.

The book begins rather violently with one of Toni's most powerful opening sentences:
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. (p. 3)
Morrison discusses her choice of this phrase in the afterward and it definitely leaves an impression on the reader. It sets the expectation of a frenetic pace, although the book does slow down until the last chapter Save-Marie. Each chapter is named after one of the women starting with Ruby, who dies before the story starts and gave her name to the town.

The next chapter Mavis also starts out strong:
The neighbors seemed please when the babies smothered. Probably because the mint green Cadillac in which they died had annoyed them for some time. (p. 21) Mavis' story tragic - spousal abuse and poverty - but she runs away to the Convent to join the handful of women living there where she first meets Connie:
"You all ain't scared out here by yourselves? Don't seem like there's nothing for miles outside."
Connie laughed. "Scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside." (p. 39)

The next character we meet is Grace, or Gigi:
Either the pavement was burning or she had sapphires hidden in her shoes. (p. 53) On her way to Ruby, her erstwhile train companion wants some ice and the racist salesman wants to charge him a nickel:
"Listen, you. Give him the ice you weren't going to charge me for, okay?"
"Miss, do I have to call the conductor?"
"If you don't, I will. This is train robbery, all right - trains robbing people."
"It's all right," said the man. "Just a nickel."
"It's the principle," said Gigi.
"A five-cent principle ain't no principle at all. The man needs a nickel. Needs it real bad."
 (p. 66) Small but meaningful exchanges such as this abound in Morrison's writing always with a little moral in them - here, the price of a principle.

In the next chapter, Seneca, we learn a bit more about Ruby and the residents of the town, the Oven, the scandal around the motto engraved on the Oven (a central piece of their community symbolizing their flight from Reconstruction to Oklahoma and freedom) - "Furrow of His Brow" - and how it came to be interpreted, re-interpreted in the community. What is striking is the many uses to which Morrison puts language. This passage beautifully uses color as a mixed metaphor:
Even now the verbena scent was clear; even now the summer dresses, the creamy, sunlit skin excited him. If he and Steward had thrown themselves off the railing they would have burst into tears. So, among the vivid details of the journey - the sorrow, the stubbornness, the cunning, the wealth - Deek's image of the nineteen summertime ladies was unlike the photographer's. His remembrance was pastel colored and eternal. (p. 110) Seneca is abandoned by her sister and in turns abandons her deadbeat boyfriend in a prison and winds up at the Convent.

The next chapter, Divine, gives us more back story on Ruby and introduces Pallas who the girls at the Convent decide to name Divine after her mother DiDi. Her story is the most tragic of all, although the story of Billie Delia comes close (I found her story with the horse to be very moving). The chapter, however, starts with a sermon from Father Misner of one of the three competing churches in Ruby:
"Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good.
"Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like that. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural than you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God." (p. 141)
This sets the tone for how the religious community will respond to the Convent later in the story although Misner will be horrified by it.

The next chapter goes to one of the more central personalities in Ruby, Patricia, who is obsessed with family trees and old stories. I think it was my favorite chapter, perhaps because the narrative shifts were far less violent, but also because the language is perfectly beautiful: as she tries to glean more information about the families, the people of Ruby clam up:
Things got out of hand when she asked to see letters and marriage certificates. The women narrowed their eyes before smiling and offering to refresh her coffee. Invisible doors closed, and the conversation turned to weather. (p. 187) It is also in this chapter that we learn her theory about black on black racism. The original founders of Ruby were a deep black color that she uses the mining term 8-rock (the deepest, darkest level of the mine) for. Trying to keep the purity of their black blood, the founders tended to look down at lighter skin tones. Later, this has catastrophic consequences for the Convent (Remember that first line?) Later, in a conversation with Reverend Misner,
You're wrong, and that's your field you're plowing wet. Slavery is our past. Nothing can change that, certainly not Africa."
"We live in the world, Pat. The whole world. Separating us, isolating us - that's always been their weapon. Isolation kills generations. It has no future."
"You think they don't love their children?"
Misner stroked his upper lip and heaved a long sigh. "I think they love them to death." (p. 210)

The Convent is run by Consolata, the subject of the next chapter. In the good clean darkness of the cellar, Consolata woke to the wrenching disappointment of not having died the night before. (p. 221). She is the last of the nuns that once populated the Convent. Her wine cave is well-stocked and she serves as a guru and muse to the women that come live at the Convent. She falls in love with one of the community founders (who is married of course) in their respective youth: Speeding toward the unforseeable, sitting next to him, who was darker than the darkness they split, Consolata let the feathers unfold and come unstuck from the walls of a stone-cold womb. Out here where wind was not a help or a threat to sunflowers, nor the moon a language of time, of weather, of sowing or harvesting, but a feature of the original world designed for the two of them." (p. 229). Unfortunately for Consolata, her lover dumps her and returns to his family.

The next to last chapter is about one of the other Ruby residents that has had limited contact with the Convent, Lone. Toni saves the last chapter, Save-Marie, for the massacre scene announced in the opening line and its dreadful consequences. The book ends with several of the women survivors and returns to a metaphor of Piedade which was introduced earlier in the book. I found the closing paragraph quite beautiful: When the ocean heaves sending rhythns of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise. (p. 318)

As I said earlier, this is definitely not one of Morrison's easier works, but it is still rewarding and merits several reads to get all the layers that she was laid down here.

Fino's Toni Morrison Reviews:
The Bluest Eye
Sula
Song Of Solomon
Tar Baby
Beloved
Jazz
Paradise


Vince

Rating: really liked it
Scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside.

To my knowledge, this was the first book Toni Morrison wrote after Beloved which won her the Pulitzer prize. Like all of Toni Morrison's books, this one starts out with a great hook to pull the reader in from the get go and it certainly did that with me. The novel is about a town named Ruby, where African Americans create their own community after trying to leave behind the horrors of slavery and build new and hopeful lives. They create a great life for themselves, so great that it ends up being too good to be true which leads unfortunately to things falling apart from the inside where they become the very thing they fought against. Not far from them live a group of mysterious women who live in a community called the Convent.

The Convent is a place for women who are frightened, broken, and alone to go where they receive safety, love and acceptance. But the occupants of Ruby are wary about the women of the Convent which is surrounded by superstition and leads the citizens of Ruby to inevitably take out their anger and fears on the unsuspecting women of the Covent who they use as a scapegoat for all of their worries and troubles. It's a violent and tragic tale but it's told in Morrison's beautiful and lyrical style which was a pleasure to read. Every sentence was so absolutely lovely and well-crafted that it's hard to look away even through the horrific moments. The only problem I have with this book is that it has far too many characters to keep up with.

It seemed like there was a new character introduced every other paragraph which made for a confusing read at times. As a consequence, some characters are more interesting than others and I would find myself frustrated when I finally became attached to one character, only to immediately switch to another the following page. Other than that I liked this book quite a bit and I would highly recommend it.

A solid 4 out of 5


Teresa

Rating: really liked it
Reread

I’d already started my reread of this novel, whose opening sentences are They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time., (of course, the “they” are men) when the March 26 metro-Atlanta killings occurred. I had the thought that I might have chosen an inopportune time to be reading this, but my second thought was when is the murder of women by men with guns (at least in the U.S.) not happening.

When I first read this at its time of publication, I think my focus was more on the backstories of the women who live in the so-called Convent and what led each one of them there. I might not have had the vocabulary then to describe one of its major themes, but I'm sure I intuited it. This time that theme was a focus for me: the denunciation of the aims and motives of the so-called righteousness of a patriarchy.

I have one lingering question, and theory, about Lone’s role near the end of the book that I will put in spoiler tags in the comments section. I haven’t seen it addressed anywhere, so perhaps I am making too much of it.

This is not an easy book, in all senses of that adjective; but with both my readings, I lingered over its last pages. Not because of any difficulty, though there was some, but because of Morrison’s language, which always pulls me through, which is somehow always comforting, even when it leaves me bereft as it overwhelms my heart.


Raul Bimenyimana

Rating: really liked it
"How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it."

In the town of Ruby there have been no deaths. No murders, no rape, no excess violence. A town formed from dream, a continuation of a legacy and vision of the descendants of the founders of Haven. Haven was a town established by Black people recently emancipated, having been rejected for their race, dark skin colour and class, through hard work and sacrifice. Therefore the people of Ruby, just like any society, have their origin story, a set of rules, and their internal conflicts. But being the patriarchal society it is, a set of rules administered by the male leaders of the town is maintained in the running of this town. And just like in all patriarchal societies, these rules are meant to control women's bodies and their sexualities as well.

So when a group of traumatized women seek refuge in the outskirts of the town, in what was a former school for Indian girls ran by nuns, their free lives, uncontrolled and unsupervised by men, draws the attention of the town. They become scapegoat and threat to the male leaders of Ruby and violence erupts.

This book was so good, so vast and so difficult. The complexity of its structure, the many full formed characters that are hard to keep up with, the different ancestry lines explored, this book required effort. It took about halfway through the book for all that had been set to unfurl itself, but I had complete trust in Toni Morrison and I can say that the trust and effort were certainly more than rewarded. This book felt similar to Song of Solomon in its language and how myth, the "unnatural" and mysterious blend so richly with the story.


Alisha

Rating: really liked it
I swear, it's the most fulfilling when you read an author and you have ambiguous feelings towards them and their writing. But being an unbiased, fair, desperately enthusiastic reader; you come back to give it a second try and it will be with that second book that you make your definitive judgement towards the author — either you like them or don't. You respect their writing and just can't get down with it or you think their writing is crap.

I thought I didn't like Morrison. I respected her as I could judge from the first book I read by her that she knew what she was talking about. And as far as I could smell, there was no propaganda about her writing in which she wrote for personal gain, not to educate about Afro-American life (I think that claim about another African-American writer and it unsettles me greatly because the writing is good and it sucks to think the intention isn't as well).

But with Morrison's writing, I wasn't sure I was gaining much information or insight into the past. I thought she hid too much of it behind a fantastic plot; more magic than reality.

This second and last time proved to the second and best and proved it definitely won't be the last.

While I really did like and appreciate Beloved — the focus on family and the description of fear turned to desperate measures — I could not really get into the vignettes that depicted the slave life. I didn't discount it... let's just say I felt I could read about it somewhere else and get a stronger bullet-through-the-heart feeling that depictions of slavery leave you with.

I got such a stronger picture of life through Paradise. I have no idea if it was because there were more references to things I had more available knowledge on (such as the civil rights era). But either way I got several lessons out of this book. I'll list them off so this reverie can be over:

1) Not all self-righteous people with a cause are doing it for the right reasons

2) Some African-Americans felt just as privileged and pompous as whites

3) Dark-skinned African-Americans felt hatred towards lighter skinned ones, although this is misdirected anger

4) Fear of integration will only cause unhappiness

5) Don't judge a woman without knowing what in her past caused her to act/behave in xyz way, no matter how vulgar you may find it

6) Don't judge a book by a well-written synopsis or by the first chapter, no matter how confused you are

Of that last lesson: my thoughts on this novel evolved constantly. The first chapter, which begins in medias res, not only confused me — it made me think "this won't be good". Even now after finishing it and loving it and getting a good grip on it's meaning/purpose, I don't know how to classify it. It's a feminist book, a story of how women can embrace, let go, and rise above their horrors and achieve a spirituality that is both not understood and, even more so, feared; it's a story of how you can live a clean life and people will conjure up the dirtiest story against you, taking your life into their hands; it's a story about judgement and justification to feed a personal (and destructive) agenda; it's a story about one's duty as an African-American towards their race; it's a story of a corrupted, delusional people that only destroys itself and hurts it's descendants.

Most importantly: it's a story about us vs. them — young vs old; progressive vs traditional; open-minded vs close-minded; free spirit vs stuck; male vs female. It's about there not being a right way to live, only one's own individual way to live. And that way is only destructive if you're living for the wrong reasons.

(10/18/21) some notes I found:

p. 137-247

Patricia
- 8-R feels seniority over being there the longest but are upset to see light-skinned people reject them. “They knew there was a difference in the minds”

p.194
- Why do you think it’s called Disallowing?
- Scattering
- Technically the “New Fathers” weren’t disallowed — want to duplicate
- But Convent is very helpful and accepting. Convent is most likely all light-skinned girls — and why Ruby hates them.

p. 100-102
- Consolata
- Soane’s “sin”

Turning point.


John Pistelli

Rating: really liked it
Paradise was not well received upon its publication in 1997—influential critics like Michiko Kakutani, James Wood, and Zoë Heller disparaged it, and even Oprah's audience, instructed to read it for the talk show host's book club, demurred, prompting Oprah to call Morrison to offer the viewers encouragement. One of the studio audience members protested that, confused by the novel's multiple perspectives and non-linear chronology, she was lost on page 19; Oprah asked Morrison what the poor woman was to do; and Morrison's reply—which I have never forgotten—was, "Read page 20." Unsurpassable advice! Profiling Morrison in 2012, Boris Kachka summarizes the case against Paradise:
Both Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Don DeLillo’s Underworld came out in 1997, the year Paradise did. Both addressed historical eras and themes, as Morrison does, but both spoke directly to contemporary anxieties in a way that Paradise did not. Roth and DeLillo were nostalgic for an old American consensus and alarmed at its disintegration, and both used voices resonant with modern paranoia and neurosis. In contrast, Morrison still seemed to be in cross-racial dialogue with the same long-dead ­Modernists on whom she’d written her thesis in the fifties.
This is both right and wrong: Morrison does reject any nostalgia for postwar consensus (whether or not Roth and DeLillo express this nostalgia is another matter), but in so doing she very much speaks to "contemporary anxieties"; the problem is simply that many readers did not like either what she said or how she said it. They are entitled to their opinions about the "what," but once you have allowed such opinions to cloud your view of the "how"—for example, none of the above critics show any awareness that Paradise is often supposed to be funny—then you have lost critical control.

Let's get the "what" out of the way right now: Paradise bears an epigraph from a gnostic gospel narrated by a female deity, and it concludes with the theophany of a black madonna. Searching for a term to describe its apparent ideology, I could come up with nothing more neutral than "New Age." It is a novel that, parodying the Bible, at least entertains the notion that our religious sensibilities must expand to include female divinity. While this view would undoubtedly not interest Philip Roth much, it, along with other dissident religious approaches harking back to gnostic and pagan cults, was undoubtedly reflected in much late-twentieth-century Anglo-American culture. Such views are embarrassing to the liberal intelligentsia because said intelligentsia legitimates itself by its appeal to secular knowledge and often materialist or at least spiritually orthodox intellectual methods, and not without reason. This religious reflex, I believe, and not simply snobbism or sexism, accounts for the critical cringe Nick Salvato writes about with respect to Tori Amos, some of whose songs (see "Marys of the Sea," for instance) could furnish a soundtrack to Paradise.

But I did write above that Paradise "entertains" its religious thesis rather than straightforwardly promoting it. As Boris Kachka notes, Morrison remains faithful to modernism. If modernist writers from Eliot to Woolf shared one thing in common, it was a commitment to putting forth their spiritual intuitions in obsessively fragmented and recursive literary forms, to remind readers to take no single narrative on faith, especially not narratives about faith. This brings us back to Oprah's audience and their problem with Paradise: the novel has no single viewpoint, no clear chronology, no central character, and no reliable perspective. The most basic facts of the narrative remain in doubt by its conclusion. Even the miraculous resurrections with which it seems to end could be explained by a mixture of lucky escape and hallucination. Condemning religious orthodoxy and political ethno-nationalism for their shared demand of unthinking assent, Morrison leaves her readers free to differ with her suggestion that they worship the goddess.

"They shoot the white girl first," the novel famously begins. Its opening chapter is really its penultimate one, narrating the story's climax: in July 1976, nine leading male citizens of the all-black town of Ruby, OK, murder five women who are living in a former convent near the town. This first chapter is maddeningly indirect, as none of the men or women is named; moreover, we see through the men's POV so that the perspective is unreliable from the start ("They are nine, over twice the number of the women" they are seeking, the second paragraph begins; but, as Ron David long ago pointed out, nine is not "over twice" five; these little word problems occur throughout the text, making it impossible to read passively). The opposite of a mystery novel—though something of a mystery play—Paradise tells us who committed the murder in the first chapter and then spends the rest of the book seeking an explanation.

The next eight chapters, each bearing a woman's name, tell the story of how four women on the run assembled in the late 1960s and early 1970s in an embezzler's mansion that became a Catholic convent and Indian boarding school before falling into disuse. In the stories of these women—Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas—Morrison enumerates the threats faced by the poor, the young, or the female, such as poverty, state violence, domestic violence, and sexual predation from the "mundane" (Mavis's marital rape at the hands of her husband) to the more outlandish (the Eyes Wide Shut scenario to which Seneca is subjected by a wealthy woman named Norma Keene Fox). Animal imagery abounds in the women's stories, from aforementioned predator "Keene Fox" to the name of Mavis's mother (Birdie Goodroe), as does classical and mythical allusion (Pallas, Seneca), to signal that this novel asks to be read skeptically as a work of exaggeration, as fable and myth rather than strict social realism. In fact, Morrison parodies realism with aplomb in the Mavis chapter, throwing brand names and other "dirty realist" paraphernalia onto the page with witty abandon—this to trick us into thinking that Mavis is "the white girl" of the first sentence by writing about her in the literary idiom associated with the white lower class.* Realism too, Morrison here tells us, is a fable, one whose moral we might distrust. As in her oft-misunderstood statement about Bill Clinton as the first black president, Morrison is making the point that "tropes of blackness" are often simply tropes of poverty, the latter fact deliberately obscured by the powers-that-be to divide the poor.

Those eight chapters also interleave the women's stories with the story of the founding of Ruby, "the one all-black town worth the pain." Summarizing this straightforwardly is no easy feat since the narrative comes piecemeal and from partial perspectives. The basic story is this: a group of very dark-skinned black people who had lived near Louisiana since the mid-eighteenth-century found themselves, at the end of Reconstruction, dismissed or oppressed not only by whites but also by lighter-skinned blacks. This led them to found their own town called Haven in 1890 in Oklahoma, when many all-black towns were created due to the federal government's encouragement of homesteading. When Haven fell into poverty and disrepair in the mid-twentieth-century, the grandchildren of Haven's founders set out again and founded a new town called Ruby.

In the 1960s and '70s, however, Ruby is torn by the social conflicts tearing apart the rest of the country—between men and women, old and young, conservative and radical. These conflicts center on the town's symbolic center, a brick oven that bears the words "the furrow of his brow." The contending ideological forces in the town differ over how this message is the be completed: "Beware the Furrow of His Brow," as the conservative town elders insist, or, in the preferred message of the young radicals, echoing the gnosticism that Morrison evokes with her epigraph, "Be the Furrow of His Brow"? Or even, as one of the town's female citizens thinks, "Be the Furrow of Her Brow." Eventually, the town elders come to see the convent women as the source of their troubles—"not a convent but a coven"—and go on a witch hunt.

Just before they are hunted down, the women consolidate themselves into a quasi-religious order. The old woman Consolata, who was kidnapped from a Rio slum by the nuns and who has lived in the convent ever since, becomes the "new revised Reverend Mother" for a kind of mystery cult wherein the women shave their heads and heal themselves with "loud dreaming" and artistic expression. These scenes provoked a not entirely unpersuasive objection from Zoë Heller in the London Review of Books ("the narrative itself dissolves into Adrienne Rich-ish poetry"), but just as Morrison is unsparing in her portrayal of the racism and colorism that led the men of Ruby to their extremes of intolerance, so her tongue never quite leaves her cheek in her depiction of this New Age religion, which makes the women too otherworldly to function: "Gradually they lost the days." Warned by a female citizen of Ruby that they are about to be attacked, the women "yawned and smiled," a small detail but a crucial one: Morrison, who once rather hair-raisingly wrote that it is "wildly irresponsible" not to inquire about women's complicity in their own rape or abuse, places supreme importance on personal autonomy and the material means of self-reliance. In the last glimpse we get of the convent women, after they have either come back from the dead or are appearing as ghosts to their loved ones, they are on the road and they are armed.

"Come back from the dead": yes, however hedged by modernist technique, Paradise entertains a spiritual notion. It does not entirely dismiss Christianity; Ruby's newest clergyman, Rev. Misner, is sympathetic to the young radicals in the town and muses with eloquence and authority on liberation theology:
See? The execution of this one solitary black man propped up on these two intersecting lines to which he was attached in a parody of human embrace, fastened to two big sticks that were so convenient, so recognizable, so embedded in consciousness as consciousness, being both ordinary and sublime. See? His woolly head alternately rising on his neck and falling toward his chest, the glow of his midnight skin dimmed by dust, streaked by gall, fouled by spit and urine, gone pewter in the hot, dry wind and, finally, as the sun dimmed in shame, as his flesh matched the odd lessening of afternoon light as though it were evening, always sudden in that climate, swallowing him and the other death row felons, and the silhouette of this original sign merged with a false night sky. See how this official murder out of hundreds marked the difference; moved the relationship between God and man from CEO and supplicant to one on one? The cross he held was abstract; the absent body was real, but both combined to pull humans from backstage to the spotlight, from muttering in the wings to the principal role in the story of their lives.
All the same, the definition and defense of female divinity comes into view as the novel's theme. To the men of Ruby, the women they hunt are "[b]odacious black Eves, unredeemed by Mary." But Consolata tells us that "Eve is Mary's mother," and the novel ends, very beautifully, with Consolata in the arms of black madonna, presumably like that worshipped in her native Brazil:
In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf.

There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had: of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.

When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.
In other words, don't divide Eve from Mary, whore from madonna, but adopt a holistic spiritual view capable of embracing flesh and spirit, capable of leading us away from domination based on or justified by difference.

Do not miss, as the early critics did, the ending's emphasis on "endless work" (nor the admission that "down here" is all the paradise we're likely to get). What is the "endless work"? The work of interpretation. Midway through the novel, Ruby's resident writer Patricia, who has been assembling a genealogy, discovers that the men of the town have been maintaining their racial purity through incest in a parody of white racism ("They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him"). Upon finding this out, she burns her family trees—this to suggest that any attempt at purification is to be rejected as an arbitrary imposition. Ruby's elderly midwife, Lone, takes a view of God that is more in keeping with the novel's narrative mode:
Playing blind was to avoid the language God spoke in. He did not thunder instructions or whisper messages into ears. Oh no. He was a liberating God. A teacher who taught you how to learn, to see for yourself. His signs were clear, abundantly so, if you stopped steeping in vanity's sour juice and paid attention to His world.
Read the clues, try to assemble the narrative, but accept in advance your defeat even as you press forward in trying to understand. I accept—there is so much more to say about Paradise. About characters and their names ("His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason"), about twins and doubles. I have merely alluded to Morrison's parody of the Biblical Exodus and its American re-creation by the Puritan settlers, and I have not even mentioned how the novel emphasizes that both Ruby and the convent exist only because the land was cleared by the state of its prior Native American inhabitants. I have not mentioned the novel's love of nature, its endless invention, its food (the hot peppers that grow only at the convent).

Nor have I mentioned Paradise's flaws: it really is too short and feels thinner than it should as a result, with poetic prose often doing duty for narrative and characterization (James Wood was not wrong in this complaint). A novel of this spiritual and political ambition should be as long as The Brothers Karamazov, and I am convinced that Morrison would not bore us at that length.

Well, every narrative is flawed, including that of Paradise, as Paradise itself tells us. Even so, after twenty years we can say that its first critics judged it too hastily or too ideologically. It sits on the shelf without embarrassment next to the most ambitious fictions of its time. Don't take my word for it. Read it and "see for yourself."
_______________________________________

* It is often said that Morrison does not reveal who "the white girl" is, but this is false; readers are told her identity—indirectly but decisively—on the penultimate page of the eighth chapter. Her identity is crucial to the novel's theme of race as class, for the convent's lone white girl is also its lone rich girl.


Lorna

Rating: really liked it
Paradise, the third book in the Beloved trilogy by Toni Morrison was a searing exploration into the lives of black people after the abolishment of slavery in the antebellum south. Ms. Morrison, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes for Literature, states she was eager to manipulate and control metaphoric language. In her words:

"Exclusivity, however is still an attractive, even compelling feature of paradise because so many people--the unworthy--are not there. Boundaries are secure, watchdogs, security systems, and gates are there to verify the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves separate from crowded urban areas of proliferate. Thus it does not seem possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned let alone built in which poor people can be accommodated. Exclusivity is not just a realized dream for the wealthy; it is a popular yearning of the middle class."

"Other than outwitting evil, waging war against the unworthy, there seems to be nothing for the inhabitants of paradise to do. An open, borderless, come-one-come-all paradise, without dread, minus a nemesis is no paradise at all."


This novel draws from the rich history of all-black towns in Oklahoma subsequent to the Civil War and black Americans receiving the right to vote and other rights of citizenship such as property ownership. It is during this time that the novel explores the founding of an all-black town in Oklahoma named "Haven" that thrived until the aftermath and struggles of two world wars. At this point it was decided to move on and found a new all-black town named "Ruby," after a black woman who had lost her life during childbirth, in part due to the refusal of medical care because she was black.

The novel finds its heart in the attempts by various groups to find a paradise as they seek an isolated and self-sufficient idyllic existence away from the racism of the outside world. However, the Convent now a haven for lost women at the edge of Ruby, becomes an issue for the founding families of Ruby as they see it and what it represents as a threat to their community. The book is divided into nine chapters, each telling the background of various women in the convent as well as the many connections to the people of Ruby. As with all Toni Morrison's writing, you just have to give yourself up to her talented, beautiful and sometimes haunting prose. As we witness more of the women's stories, one becomes aware that all may not be as well as the town's leaders portray. There is a always a powerful message in her books, Paradise being no exception.


Zanna

Rating: really liked it
Paradise is one of my favourite words… I believe it came first from an ancient word in Farsi that means only a park, which says something about the Iranian idea of a park, perhaps. I think paradise is a place of welcome and peace and love, and in this book, I think that is what the founders of the town Ruby wanted to create, at a safe distance from racism and related violence vertical and horizontal…

But the folks in power are too rigid in defining and seeking to enforce their idea of paradise. They create a closed society where some can live fully and well, and others are harmed, are rejected entirely, or feel desperate enough to walk for miles down the freezing road out, going nowhere but away. At the furthest margin of the town, some of the outcasts find shelter in each other, work through trauma, care for each other almost without judgement (or in any case, give care along with judgement and try to keep the hard verdicts to themselves) and tentatively explore creative impulses. The convent is full of pain, but its anarchy is loving, and healing happens there. Yet the powerful men of Ruby cannot tolerate the outcasts even on their borders, and move to destroy them.

Here, by the way, is a minister in Ruby chastising a couple at their wedding:
Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn – by practice and careful contemplation – the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it […] if you are a good and dilligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma… conferring certain privileges: th[at] of expressing love and [that] of receiving it.
Could any speech be more carefully designed to terrorise people for and out of their feelings?

In this novel I recognise, I think, much of the cultural critique as well as appreciation articulated in the work of bell hooks and Audre Lorde. The patriarchal and authoritarian flaws of Ruby emerge unevenly in contrast to, I think, what Audre Lorde calls the erotic, including but not at all limited to sensory and sexual pleasures. Not only the traumatised exiles are subject to the violence of prejudice and narrowness inside it, but also many of those who stay. Yet the town is in a state of change, examining and reworking its relationship to memory, to god, to the world outside. Maybe the future will open with some intervention from the exiles, who are witches in the town’s imagination, and thus absorb and refigure a potentially powerful patriarchal mythology.
Billie Delia was perhaps the only one in town who was not puzzled by where the women were or concerned about how they disappeared. She had another question: When will they return? When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town? A town that had tried to ruin her grandfather, succeeded in swallowing her mother and almost broken her own self. A backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in the lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them. She hoped with all her heart that the women were out there, darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their nails, filing their incisors.
But the novel doesn’t end with this… I think its answer to Ruby’s violence is that paradise is in us & between us in all the ways of love (which is easy and natural and a gift). It’s heartening that one of the perpetrators, one of twins, realised he was in the wrong, and found the will to change. Here is work to be done…





Annie

Rating: really liked it
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.

So, famously, begins Toni Morrison's Paradise.

But we never learn who the white girl is. Apparently, Morrison said she started with race, and then erased it by never identifying who the white one is. Does that bother you? she seems to ask implicitly. Does it unsettle you? Do you feel like you can't understand these characters unless you know which ones are white and which ones are black? Are you not sure which ones you're supposed to or allowed to identify with until you know their race?

In an interview, Morrison said of her decision to not identify the white girl, "Does it interfere with the story? Does it make you uncomfortable? Or do I succeed in making the characters so clear, their interior lives so distinctive, that you realize (a) it doesn't matter, and (b), more important, that when you know their race, it's the least amount of information to know about a person."

It's like Morrison is holding up a mirror and demanding you l0ok into it, and examine how important race is to you. It's more than a novel; it's a psychoanalysis of the reader.

I think I know who it might be, based on one line a character says to her, but I'm not going to say who it is, or look for more details. I think that defeats the whole point.

***

The writing in this book is nothing less than beautiful. Check this out: The venom is manageable now. Shooting the first woman (the white one) has clarified it like butter: the pure oil of hatred on top, its hardness stabilized below. Outside, the mist is waist high. It will turn silver soon and make grass rainbows low enough for children's play before the sun burns it off, exposing acres of bluestem and maybe witch tracks as well.

***

It's not magical realism in the overt way of, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There's not explicitly magical, and there are arguably practical explanations for everything. But there's an element that everything is not all it seems, and that these somewhat plausible explanations aren't actually the answer.

It's often a little difficult to follow, intentionally so. Things are kept vague: one character, for instance, is described only as "him" and you're supposed to guess from context clues which character he is that you've already met. He happens to be an identical twin, one of the two leaders of the all-black community known as Ruby located a few miles from a haven for women known as the Convent (used to be nuns "saving" Native American girls and forcing them to be Christians, but now is just a place where a handful or two of women live together).

Point of view can be disorienting, too. There are chapters titled with names of women, either the ones in the Convent or in Ruby (i.e. Consolata, Pat, Seneca, Divine aka Pallas, Gigi) but that doesn't mean that character will be the primary point of view for that chapter.

I found Pat (a resident of Ruby) to be the most interesting character. She was the most challenging to those around her. She refused to hop on board the us/them mentality of the Ruby residents (for instance, light-skinned black residents of Ruby were discriminated against and considered racially impure--despite the fact that Ruby was founded to escape racism).

***

It's the women who make this book. The men manufacture divisions and hierarchies, and the women resist them and create communities. In this book, women are connecting with and supporting one another, in spite of themselves, in spite of all the reasons they have not to. Wives and mistresses, black and white, light-skinned and dark-skinned, outsider and insider. All of them defiant.



~~~~~~BOOK RIOT'S READ HARDER CHALLENGE~~~~~~

#13: An Oprah Book Club selection


Ron Charles

Rating: really liked it
Reading a novel by Toni Morrison is an act of faith. She demands much from her language and her readers, but when that faith is rewarded, the effect is stunning.

In "Paradise," her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, she has produced a story sure to generate volumes of feminist appraisal. This novel doesn't reach the emotional spikes of her best early work, but in a way it is more articulate than her rich, exhausting "Beloved" (1987). Oprah Winfrey has already tapped it as the next selection for her TV book club.

Reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937), "Paradise" examines the residual effects of racism on the relationships among blacks, rather than between blacks and whites. The book bursts open with the first shot of a grisly assault on a women's commune by the leading citizens of the isolated town of Ruby, Okla.

Between that attack, set in 1976, and the book's conclusion just a few weeks later, Morrison stirs the long history of this mythical all-black community like a witch's brew. Racism serves as the fluid in which all the events take place, warping values and stirring the paranoia that eventually encourages conflicted men to murder the women they believe responsible for their town's decay.

In a series of swirling chapters, each named for a different woman, the author conflates the beautiful and the horrible, the past and the present. Forged in the fires of white racism and black rejection, the founders of Ruby constructed a paradise of stability and safety entirely detached from the rest of the world in 1949.

They built their homes and lives around a giant stone oven "that both nourished them and monumentalized what they had done." Inevitably the oven cools and this monument of their grandfathers' accomplishment grows irrelevant.

Some citizens find the possibility of change exciting, but the town leaders have identities and fortunes riding on the status quo. For them, Ruby is in a state of moral and physical decay, which only a radical rededication to its founding discipline can cure.

Tragically the drive to rid themselves of impurity slowly demonizes the odd group of women living outside the town in an abandoned convent.

Much of the novel tells the sad, sometimes shocking ordeals these young women endured in a misogynist world before finally stumbling upon this room of their own.

If Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" (1982) romanticized the harmonious culture of women in opposition to the contentious world of men, "Paradise" emphasizes that theme in bold italics. But Morrison is less intent on condemning the brutal, self-centered men in her novel than examining the way a history of instability has made these men fear the creative, unorthodox power of women.

At the center of the abandoned convent is the matriarchal Connie, whose doctrine of universal acceptance and unqualified compassion provides solace to women. With a strange mixture of mysticism, witchcraft, and Christianity, Connie serves as a radical alternative to the town fathers' confirmed xenophobia.

The number of characters spun through the desperate history of Ruby poses significant practical and emotional challenges for the reader. The entwined genealogy of the nine founding patriarchs produces a family tree as daunting as a street map of Los Angeles. Though it's sometimes difficult to feel attached to the individuals in this swirl of names, the effect is bewildering, bewitching, and stunning.

http://www.csmonitor.com/1998/0129/01...


Cheryl

Rating: really liked it
Why did I read this book before reading Beloved and Jazz when it is supposed to complete the trilogy? I'm bummed by that. I couldn't help it, I found the book on my shelf and decided to read it along with The Bluest Eye. Then there I was, reading it and thinking, why was this book not titled, “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” or “Furrow of His brow,” or, “The Oven?” I won’t spoil it, you will have to read it to see why I say that and you'll probably agree with me (I did hear though, that Toni Morrison wanted to call it, “War” but her editors disagreed).

(view spoiler)