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Beloved
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Beloved
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Beloved
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Beloved

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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About this audiobook

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

Editor's Note

A staple of American literature…

Toni Morrison’s most beloved novel (a masterful feat) is haunting and heartbreaking, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. From the start, with one of the most memorable openings — “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” — Morrison’s work solidified itself as a staple of American literature.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 16, 2006
ISBN9780739342138
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Beloved

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Reviews for Beloved

Rating: 3.911194800830696 out of 5 stars
4/5

5,056 ratings210 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Every page a poem, every page an insight. And the most beautiful ending scene to any book I've ever read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This has been required reading for me in both high school and college. This time around, however, I was old enough and involved enough to actually understand and appreciate this book. So while I hated it in high school, my feelings have changed. It's very powerful, and I can respect and comprehend more of the history. The story, overall, is so fascinating that I had to research the actual events that inspired Morrison to write this. Reading it in a classroom setting helped me understand it, but it was so emotional that it will definitely be one I read again for pleasure. A true classic.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Took my breath away
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautiful, haunting book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This story takes place in the Cincinnati area, several years after the Civil War and follows the lives the of a former slave family. In this story, the ghost of her long dead child comes to haunt Sethe and her daughter Denver. The storytelling is slightly hard to follow. At one point you are in the present with the ghost and Sethe, and the next chapter might be in the past, in a different location, and/or a different character's point of view. Despite the trouble I had with following the story, I found the story intriguing and though-provoking. The lengths that were went through to escape and to keep her children out of slavery were great and ended up being detrimental to Sethe.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was amazing. I read it for the Great Books discussion group, and I actually finished it before the discusson, and I read it within a month. This is an American gothic tale. I had no idea. I would pair it with Octavia Butler's _Kindred_. The middle section, Section Two, where chapters are written in 1st person and shift between the 3 central women is a little weird, but other than that, flawless. Narratively Morrison is an artist when it comes to shifting the 3rd person POV narration between the characters: it happens so seamlessly the reader barely notices it. And that gives the reader the narrative through multiple POVs. I think that the title character never being referred to by the name she must have had prior to her death is significant. This is a ghost story, a poltergeist story, a haunting, and it of course allows for a reading of it as a haunting of an African-American family, of the entire African-American community, and of this entire nation. Brilliant use of the form; brilliant style. I am tempted to label it slipstream, but if I do so, then I need to label the gothics written by writers like Louisa May Alcott also slipstream, don't I?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really interesting story that makes you truly glad you did not live thru any of this. Strong stron characters; style takes getting used to though.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Woah.

    Gonna need some (a lot) of time to process this.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Certainly worth reading, but not for the squeamish, and muddled at times.Quotes:On hell:"...suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too."On the past:"To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The 'better life' she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one."On cooking:"The cabbage was all gone and the shiny ankle bones of smoked pork were pushed in a heap on their plates. Sethe was dishing up bread pudding, murmuring her hopes for it, apologizing in advance the way veteran cooks always do."On feelings:"Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting ever goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside."On religion:"She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it."On white people:"Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world worse but whitefolks.""He simply looked at the face, shaking his head no. No. At the mouth, you see. And no at whatever it was those black scratches said, and no to whatever it was Stamp Paid wanted him to know. Because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear. A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro's face in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby, or outran a street mob. Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something out of the ordinary - something whitepeople would find interesting, truly different...""Eighten seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank."On slavery:"He wasn't surprised to learn that they had tracked her down in Cincinnati, because, when he thought about it now, her price was greater than his; property that reproduced itself without cost.""Cogitation, as she called it, clouded things and prevented action. Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they had, for she considered love a serious disability. Her puberty was spent in a house where she was shared by father and son, whom she called ' the lowest yet.' It was the 'lowest yet' who gave her a disgust for sex and against whom she measured all atrocities."On love, slavery, and motherhood:"Risy, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one. 'Why?' he asked her. 'Why you think you have to take up for her? Apologize for her? She's grown.''I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.'"On women:"...like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the eye's needle; a soft moan she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks."
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Powerful and haunting. There are cruel and shocking images, but the lasting impression is of beauty. "We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow".
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a book about the sorrow and suffering under slavery as seen through the eyes of Sethe and Paul D. They were fellow slaves on the ironically named "Sweet Home" farmstead in Kentucky. They both suffered severe physical and mental scars which are revealed slowly and painfully in flashbacks of "rememory."This is mainly Sethe's story of her escape from slavery to Ohio where she spent 28 days of happiness followed by 18 years of guilt and shunning by the community surrounding 124 Bluestone in Cincinnati. It's about the ghost of slavery and the communal memory of the ugly truths represented by the reincarnation of Beloved.Based on the true story of Margaret Garner, this is also a book of hope as Sethe is forced to confront her demons in the form of Beloved who also serves as an agent of healing and forgiveness. The supernatural heart of this book was a huge barrier for me the first time I read it over 13 years ago. I've grown as a reader since then and now consider Beloved to be another masterpiece from a master of modern American fiction, Toni Morrison. You can't read this book passively. It contains many layers of symbolism and allusion in the form of strong images of brutality that are difficult to read about and impossible to forget.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Too obtuse.I really struggled to finish this book, it just seemed unnecessarily complicated. I read it for a book group and managed to get the gist of most of the book through the discussion, but if I'd been reading it alone I would almost certainly have abandoned it.I suppose you'd call it a ghost story as Beloved died as a baby. She lives as a spirit in the house occupied by her mother, grandmother, brothers and sister. When the boys leave and the grandmother dies, we are left with just Beloved, her mother and sister. Beloved's presence becomes more and more real as time passes, until we are led to believe that she is actually living in the house.Meanwhile the story recounts the events that lead up to the family occupying the house. They were originally slaves and the experiences they have had are, at times, quite traumatic. Unfortunately I was not always quite sure exactly what was going on, where the baby was born, what happened to her father etc.I was sorry that this book was not more readable as the problems encountered when given their freedom are every bit as interesting as the struggles of the slaves while in captivity. I would have liked to have enjoyed this and learned from it.I had previously read Sula by this author and only rated it 2*. I doubt I shall read any more Toni Morrison.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very well written, as evident by the label of Pulitzer Prize winner. I can't say that I had ever heard of a Slavery or Post Slavery Era Mystery/Horror novel, prior to Beloved. Toni Morrison did a great job with the dialects and social interaction of those days, however I must admit that it took probably the first 150+ pages to become really interested in what I was reading. The story from that point on, was very enthralling.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another great Morrison read. Everyone swears this is her best book, but I think Bluest Eye and even Song of Solomon were better reads. Still, a true masterwork written by a brilliant author.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The first Morrison I ever read. Not my favorite, but still pretty good. I try to get all of my students to read it in the hopes that they will read Song of Solomon when they get older.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really struggled with this book. I don't know if it was the dark nature of the story or the writing style, which left me confused at points. I first tried to read Beloved in the summer but found the mood of the book did not fit reading it on sunny days, sitting on the porch. So I put it away until the grey days of winter. When I started it again, I thought I had finally grasped the story and understood the storytelling style of Ms. Morrison. However, there were still times when I found myself shaking my head in confusion, knowing I was missing something as I read the words but couldn't seem to pick up on their meaning. Overall, I liked the story of Sethe, her struggles and her family but the style of writing was not suited to me and I came away from the book with a relief that I finally finished it, like it was a task rather than a pleasure.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A haunting and tragic novel, which brings home the reality of American slavery more vividly than a shelf of history books could do.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My first thoughts are that this is not a good holiday read. In fact, I think it should primarily be read in the summer. Things are dense and close and a little too intimate perhaps. It feels like you are seeing something you are not supposed to be seeing – like a couple arguing in public or a friend revealing something a bit too personal – and in a way you are. Beloved is not supposed to be here; she should be away, somewhere else. The story is tragic. The language is lyrical. It is not a comfortable read. However, I highly recommend it. The manner in which the story is crafted can only be described as sublime – the beauty of the terrible. 
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I've just finished reading "Beloved" for the fourth or fifth time, and I'm sure it won't be the last time. This is THE great American novel. No one has confronted the terrors of slavery and the toll that both slavery and prejudice have taken on individuals and on our country as fully or as bravely as Morrison has. And I doubt that anyone else has the poetic gifts that she brings to her writing to make us see what has been done and what needs to be done.If you are an American, and you have not read this book, shame on you. And what a treat you have in store for you if you dare to pick it up and engage with Morrison's vision.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Having read and enjoyed Sula by Toni Morrison, I was excited to finally pick up a copy of Beloved. In this book Sethe and her daughter Denver live alone in a house in Ohio shortly after the Civil War. Sethe's two sons, run away from home by the time they are thirteen.The house is haunted by the ghost of Sethe's 2 year old unnamed baby, simply known as Beloved. The haunting is severe and poltergeist-like, Beloved throws things, the house rattles and shakes, yet Sethe refuses to leave. No one visits Sethe and Denver, they don't want to go near the house, everyone knows it is haunted. One day, an old acquaintance of Sethe's, a man named Paul D, shows up at her doorstep. The two become involved right away. Paul D knew Sethe years ago when she was first married and lived on a plantation before they were freed. He is happy to reconnect with her all these years later.Not shortly after, a woman shows up in front of Sethe's home. Something about her is different, she can't talk much, is very sleepy and her skin is baby soft. When asked her name, she simply spells out the word, 'Beloved'.Sethe lets Beloved into her home, gives her a place to sleep and takes her in for the time being. The family just figures she is a wanderer with no place to go. Beloved soon becomes obsessed with Sethe, and Sethe herself thinks of Beloved as her own child. So many scenes stood out for me. One part in particular is when Denver walks in on her mother kneeling by her bed, praying, and sees a baby's white dress next to her, hugging Sethe around her waist. Just the thought of how this baby ghost still clings to her mother, and how even in death, mother and child are forever connected, gave me chills while reading.Several scenes in this book also shocked me. If you've read this one, you know what I mean. As shocking as it was, I did enjoy this read. The characters are well written, the plot was excellent, the writing was fantastic and I found myself not wanting to put this book down. This is the kind of book that once you are done reading, you kind of just sit back and think about it. It's the kind of read you want to discuss.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It took me awhile to know what to say about this book or even want to put it into words. It is haunting and powerful. I think the other worldliness does more to impress the horror and displacement of slavery. Beautifully sad and evocative.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beloved is a powerful story that tells the story of a African American community struggling to attempt to create an identity and come to terms with the past tragedies that they all had to endure. The introduction of the 'ghost' in the story creates an unusual atmosphere because the reader is never really sure who or what she is. All that can be truly said is that she is Beloved.Toni Morrison's masterful literary skill seeks to draw the reader in and make them have a true understanding on the lack of identity through various methods such as not defining who is speaking in a subtle way and identifying characters through the ghost or the past. The lack of explicit character definition forces the reader to have to ask 'who am I and what creates that identity'.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom."Summary of the BookSeethe was a slave at Sweet Home Plantation. The Garners, who own the plantation, are nice and respectful towards Seethe and the other slaves. But after Mr. Garner dies, Mrs. Garner has to bring in Schoolteacher to help. Schoolteacher and his nephews abuse a pregnant Seethe, sell the slave Paul D. and Seethe's husband, Halle, and kills Paul D.'s brothers. Seethe manages to escape to Ohio, sending her children on ahead of her to her mother-in-law's house. However, after she arrives, Schoolteacher finds her. Still badly scarred by slavery, Seethe tries to kill her children rather than see them become slaves. She succeeds in killing her toddler daughter. The other two eventually run away and all that is left is Denver, the child she was carrying when she arrived in Ohio, to house 124.Seethe is now haunted by the memory of slavery, the memory of killing her child, and the ghost of her murdered child. Paul D. shows up one day and is now living at 124 as well. Seethe is finally starting to relax and think there are things to hope for when Beloved shows up. Beloved is a 19-year-old girl who cannot remember her name or where she comes from. However, through a series of strange events over a span of time, Seethe and Denver come to believe that Beloved is Seethe's murdered daughter. Beloved's presence helps soothe Denver's loneliness, but brings back floods of locked-away painful memories for Seethe and Paul D. that they are forced to deal with. But when Beloved disappears because she has no identity, the reader is left wondering if Beloved is a real person, a medium to communicate with the dead, or a psychological invention of those in 124 to help them deal with slavery and its aftermath.Thoughts about the BookThis book was a difficult read for me. First, there was a lot of skipping around and jumping between past and present events with little or no segues, which had me a bit confused for most of the book. Second, this is another book full of very intense subject matter.There are several themes running through this book: slavery, loss, anger, identity, motherhood, and ghosts, or the supernatural. Beloved is not just another book about slavery, either. It covers very intense aspects of slavery, including sexual assault/rape and the psychological damage of slavery. Seethe and Paul D. and Beloved were physically free, but they were not mentally free of slavery. They were haunted by it constantly.Despite the challenge of the book jumping around, I found the book to be a great work of literary art. This book would make a wonderful book group selection if you have not read it. Just take a look at the questions I have off the top of my head: * Why does Seethe stay in 124 where the ghost of her murdered daughter is haunting her? * How do you create an identity for yourself after being a slave? * Is Beloved a real person, or was she a psychological invention, created to deal with the pain and loss? * Do you think Seethe still believes she made the right choice in killing her child? * What happened to Halle?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This story creeped me out but I loved it and found it fascinating at the same time. Will read it again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Before I get to a review I have a story to tell. When I was growing up, I lived in a mostly white town. In fact, I think there was only one other black family in the whole town. So, my grandmother felt the need to constantly give me books written by black authors, and try to force me to read them. I would not have had a problem with it if it had not been for the fact that the books that she picked always seemed to deal with slavery. And for 8 or 9 year old me, that topic was too distressful. So, one day she gave me "Beloved" to read. Yes, my grandmother gave me, a 8/9 year old little girl, "Beloved". Needless to say, that I was so confused by the first chapter. This book is hard for some adults to read, I cannot begin to understand why she thought it was appropriate for a child. I have a feeling that she did not read the book herself but did like the concept. But anyways, I did not pick up that book until two decades later and was quick to tell anyone who asked that it was difficult and I would never try to read it again. In walks the Pulitzer Project and 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and "Beloved" is on my TBR list.What a difference twenty years make. I still believe that "Beloved" is a difficult read. The language and imagery is challenge. But I have to say that I enjoyed every last page. Morrison is a master with the English language. I could see the characters, the town, their past, and their present. For me Morrison made it all come alive. Now that I have really read the book, I can't remember what I found so difficult about it. Maybe my vocabulary and reading ability have evolved (I seriously hope so or the public school system has a lot to answer too).The characters were very well thought out and portrayed. Each of the main characters (Sethe, Paul D, and Denver) grow throughout the novel. Morrison took the reader inside their thoughts and let you see their feelings and the reasons for their actions. Nothing was left to guess about. Each character had their own personality and past that shaped their decisions. It was intriguing to see how the events in the past lead them to the point where the story takes place. How these events shape how they each react to Beloved's presence.Now for some people this will be a difficult read. While I enjoyed how Morrison was able to pact so much into the story, I can also see where it would make it hard for some. There are a lot of different things going on. A good portion of the story is dealt with through flash backs. Sethe, has flashbacks to her time as a slave and her escape. Paul D, has flashbacks to his own enslavement, incarceration, and all the hardship he had to go through. Denver has flashbacks to her lonely painful child. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out since Morrison gives you bits and pieces at a time. But I did enjoy her method, it just made me continue to turn the page.Another thing that can be hard is the imagery. While Morrison does not go into great detail, the subject matter is harsh. And the things that characters go through are sad and difficult (it is a post slave tale). The decisions that they made at times can be unthinkable to someone not in their position.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of the best novels by one of our best modern writers. Beloved is an eerie and disturbing story that - literary and figuratively - deals with the ghosts of slavery. Parts of the book read like a post-modernist response to Uncle Tom's Cabin. If you're new to Toni Morrison, this is a good book to start with.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, and sometimes I find myself wondering if the people on the Pulitzer committee care if a book is coherent or not when they give their awards. Here's the thing: this is a powerful story full of imagery that makes you cringe. Every so often I found myself thinking that these things couldn't be real, and then it occurred to me that no, all this and worse happened, and that's part of why it's so important to tell these stories. But here's the thing: I want my books to be coherent. I want to have a clearly-defined line of action, a thread, if you will, that carries through the book. I want to be able to track what's going on at any given moment. I don't like excessive description and imagery, and I want my transitions to be clean and clear and easy to navigate. This book fails on all of that, and it does so in a spectacular way (it's the first book I've ever run into where a sentence goes from present tense to past to present -- in a single sentence! -- for no discernible reason). The perspective changes at wholly random times, sometimes giving a paragraph to a character we'll never see again for reasons we can't figure out (it's not to provide us with another picture of a character, because that doesn't happen). It goes from past tense to present with no regard to any kind of order. It goes from present-day to flashback to other flashbacks with transitions so invisible that you can literally read for ten pages without understanding why these people are back from the dead. In short, this is the kind of modern literature I just can't stand -- hard to read, hard to keep up with, structure bent and played with but not for any reason I can tell. And while it feels really weird to give such a negative review to a book so many people consider so important and such a classic, I feel certain that there are better books that tell a story like this one out there (Octavia Butler's Kindred comes to mind). It's a classic I read simply because it was a classic, and I'm not sorry (it didn't take long), but it's definitely turned me off Toni Morrison's work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book tells the story of Sethe, a runaway slave who is now living with her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and daughter, Denver. Present in the house also is a not-so-kind spirit whom she believed to be her deceased daughter. 9 years after Baby Suggs died, a man from Sethe's past arrived and it changed the household on Bluestone Road. I found the book to be really slow until the second half. The beginning explains what is hapenning in this particular house with bits and pieces of the past of how these people arrived at this house. The second half explores the past in depth of their previous lives and what drove them to escape and be who they are now. It is amazing what oppression can do to people. It is even more amazing to see what the combination of love and oppression will make you do. It's a sad story and like everybody else in the book, you will judge her for what she's done but if you were in her position, what would you do? The book explores both views expressed from different people and in the end, I could only hope that I will never be placed in such situation.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the labelBook #23: Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987)The story in a nutshell:To understand the importance of 1987's Beloved, you need to understand that before this first novel of hers, author Toni Morrison was already a respected executive within the publishing industry, and a highly educated book-loving nerd; this is what made it so frustrating for her during the 1970s and '80s, after all, when trying to look back in history for older books detailing the historical black experience, and finding almost nothing there because of past industry discrimination, general withholding of education from blacks for decades, etc. This novel, then, is Morrison's attempt to partially right this wrong, loosely using a real historical record from the 1850s she once discovered when younger and obsessed upon for years, the story of a slave woman her age who once voluntarily killed her own child rather than let her be taken back to slave territory.In Morrison's case, the novel is set in the decade following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, up in Ohio (in the northern US) where so many former slaves fled during the so-called "Reconstruction" of the American South in those years. As such, the actual plotline resembles the beginnings of what we now call "magical realism," a style that has become virtually its own new sub-genre in literary fiction in the last twenty years; because not only is this woman's house haunted by a violent poltergeist, but eventually even a young woman appears claiming to be Beloved herself, the bizarre revenge-seeking reincarnated version of the very daughter this woman killed during the Civil War years. But is she? Or is she a runaway taking chance advantage of intimate knowledge she randomly happened to learn through odd circumstances? And does it matter? Just as is the case with most great postmodern literature, Beloved actually tackles a lot of different bigger issues in a metaphorical way, perhaps the more important point altogether than the details of the magical part of the plot, which never does get fully resolved in a definitive way even by the end; it is instead a novel about love, about family, about responsibility, about the struggle between innate intelligence and a formal education. It is ultimately a book about the black experience, a sophisticated and complex look at some of the emotional issues people from that time period must've had to struggle with, Morrison writing their stories for them precisely because none of them were allowed to back then, or were given the education to express themselves in such an eloquent way; and as such, it's not really the "ghost" part of this ghost-story that is important at all, but rather that it serves as a convenient coat-rack in which to hang all these other issues.The argument for it being a classic:Well, for starters, it won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and when was the last time you won a Pulitzer, chump? Much more important than that, though, say its fans, it heralded a whole new sea-change in the global arts altogether; a triumphant moment for both black artists and women artists (and especially black women artists), a story that not only speaks powerfully and intimately to all people with that background, but that proves to the rest of the world that it's not just stuffy white dudes who can write beautiful, haunting, instantly classic literature. It's a major highlight of the postmodern period, say historians, a changing of the guard just as important as when the early Modernists shut down the Victorian Age; this one novel and its overwhelming success single-handedly ushered in a whole new golden period for the arts concerning people of color, women, the gay community and more. And not only that, but so far it's held up well too; it was not only made into an extremely high-profile movie ten years later, starring and produced by The Great And Almighty Oprah Hallowed Be Her Name Amen, but in 2006 was named by the New York Times as the very best American novel of the last 25 years. The argument against:A weak one, frankly; it seems that most people who read this book end up loving it, and with very little dissent found online. And a controversial argument, too; because the argument against this book being a classic seems mostly to be the anti-politically-correct argument, that books such as these got as much attention as they did in the '80s, '90s and '00s merely because the overly liberal academic community had a political agenda back then, that they were determined to usher in a new golden age for writers of color and women and the gay community, even if they had to falsely trumpet a whole series of merely okay books, or sometimes even semi-crappy ones. It's an argument more often applied to other, lesser books than Beloved, frankly; but like other books in the CCLaP 100 series, you can technically argue that this book started the entire trend, was the one that led to the lesser books afterwards that people complain about in a more valid way. I'm not sure how much water this holds, but you do see people arguing this point online.My verdict:So in many ways, this week's book very directly illustrates why I wanted to start this essay series in the first place this year, of why I first thought it good for my own life that I tackle all these so-called "classics" for the first time, and only then thought, "Oh yeah, and I could write essays about the experience afterwards too." Because I admit, as a white male with a Modernist education, I was raised as biased against books like these, and in fact until they started appearing in the '80s and '90s was one of those people who never even thought about their conspicuous absence from world classic/canon lists in the first place. Plus, I'm predisposed to dislike the so-called "ebonics" on display here in Beloved, an aspect of this book that continues to be controversial; that is, Morrison wrote all the dialogue here as actual barely-educated former slaves in the 1870s would've actually talked, making it difficult to follow along and requiring close attention while reading, a decision that some "Western Classics" style professors have accused of being damaging to the arts in the long term, and another bad legacy of the politically-correct years.But then again, let's plainly admit that I have absolutely loved reading all these old Victorian novels that I have through the CCLaP 100 this year as well, of looking back on the nerdy little overdressed white people who were my very ancestors and seeing how they talked, behaved, what they found important, what they fretted about when the doors were closed, feeling that connection between them and myself, feeling that except for the wardrobe and funky flowery language we were actually quite alike. When thought about this way, suddenly one has a lot of empathy for what Morrison and other intelligent, educated black women went through in pre-Beloved days; they simply wanted to have the same experience I've been having with Victorian literature this year, frustratingly couldn't because of no literature from smart educated black women even existing from those years, so realized that they were going to have to write it themselves. And also when looking at it this way, you realize that the ebonics of Beloved is no worser at all than, say, the Romanticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables; both are old-fashioned language, hard for modern eyes to follow, yet historically accurate and reflecting what those times were actually like. Both require patience, both require forgiveness, but both can offer up richly rewarding experiences if taken seriously and if meeting the author halfway.It's this essay series, this newfound attention to the historical classics, that is making my brain suddenly work in these new ways this year, to have a more patient and more expansive view of any particular project I tackle; like I said, that's the whole reason I decided to read a hundred classics in the first place, is to hopefully learn something from it, since so many people are always arguing that there's something unique and important to be learned from "reading the classics." It's why I call Beloved today an undeniable classic itself, one of the top-20 titles in fact of this entire CCLaP 100 list, why it turned out to be such a profoundly great book but only once I was ready to accept it on its own terms, and once understanding the real history it references. It gets an extremely high recommendation from me today.Is it a classic? Yes