Beloved

 I'm falling behind on writing these little reactions...

A collage I made to serve as the Zoom background for the January 2024 KLBAC book-club discussion.

I've read Toni Morrison's Beloved before, way back in graduate school, and it was good to read it again. Rereading after so long away from a book is rediscovering it, a lot of "oh yeah!" and also, in the case of a dread-filled book like this, a lot of feeling of impending doom as you know bad things are coming.

I've often encountered people who say they never reread books, and can't even imagine why people do. Well, all right, but I have to reread. It's part of my job, for one thing. For another, if the book is deep and multilayered like this one, you really don't get to know the book without rereading.

This time, I went the audio route, and I chose the author-as-narrator edition. Not all authors make good narrators. In fact, probably very few do. I know I wouldn't. Natalie Haynes certainly did, with the audiobook of Pandora's Jar, and Mary Robinette Kowal is a great reader of her Lady Astronaut Series. But then, they're both actors, as well. Someone told me she didn't like Toni Morrison's reading, but I thought it really worked well. Morrison's voice is very warm and enveloping, and it feels like she's telling you the story directly, sitting with you in a dimly lit room.

Beloved is a ghost story, and the ghost story is perfect for telling a story of memories that haunt, that twist us up, that we have to deal with but don't want to because dealing with them is painful and make us feel ashamed. Based on a true incident, this is the story of a murder, done out the purest intentions, by a mother who wanted to protect her children from absolute horror. But it's also the story of slavery in the USA, and how it destroyed lives and poisoned a nation. Slavery haunts the USA, and the more we try to ignore it, the more pain and shame it'll take to lay it to rest.