Novel
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987
Synopsis
Ohio, 1873. Sethe, who escaped from slavery eighteen years earlier, lives with her daughter Denver in a house where a dead baby makes noise and where no one enters any more. Paul D arrives, a man she knew on the plantation: he quiets the house and stays. Soon after, a young stranger who has come out of the water sits down in front of the door, with no memory or past, and says her name is Beloved. She moves in. The mother stops working, the daughter grows anxious, and the house closes in on them.
Context
The book starts from a press report that its author had found in 1974 while preparing, as an editor, an anthology of Black archives. It opens a set of three novels, with two books of 1992 and 1997. Challenged in several states, it has been removed from some school libraries for its scenes of violence and sexuality. In 2006, a New York Times poll of more than one hundred and twenty writers and critics named it the best American fiction of the preceding twenty-five years. Jonathan Demme brought it to the screen in 1998.
Who it is for
A novel of medium length, with a broken chronology and many ellipses. It is reputed to be difficult and its subject is harsh. Two French translations, from 1989 and 2023.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize 1988, a few months after a letter from forty-eight Black writers regretting that it had not won the National Book Award.
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