Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
I really, really loved this book. I have never read Morrison before and now I'm wondering what took me so long. I think her writing is just exquisite. This was not an easy book to read, and I am left pondering many things, but where ambiguity usually leaves me feeling dissatisfied, with this book it somehow feels "right", like I am meant to be thinking about this book long after I have finished 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 conversat...
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...
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 b...
" 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, handso
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 creat...
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 sup...
I'll confess that, though I'm an adoring Morrison fan, I've avoided three novels (this one, Jazz, Tar Baby) because of the less-than-stellar things I've heard about them. (Not to mention I found Love tedious.) Well, I went in as a skeptic and I came out a believer.The first sentence, quoted again and again here on GR, really deserves another show: "They shot the white girl first." It's so perfect, so emblematic of Morrison's ability to write both elegant, haunting, ornate sentences, and--just as...
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
RereadI’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 m...
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 w...
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. T...
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 Mo...
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
"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 peo...
The story opens in 1976. A group of men is converging upon the Convent, a repurposed mansion at the edge of the town of Ruby, Oklahoma. They intend harm to the women living there. The narrative then shifts to follow various unrelated characters. These individual stories, when combined, provide a unified whole. We learn of the founding of the all-black town, and the building of the Oven, a central place to prepare food (which serves as an important symbol). We learn the backstories of the women i...
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 c...
There are few authors that can make me feel as stupid as Morrison makes me feel time and time again. This novel centers on a small community in rural Oklahoma founded as a safe place for black families that had faced prejudice and a former convent nearly 20 miles away that has become a refuge for broken women. The stories of these women intertwine with the people of the town of Ruby. As the women slowly heal their psychological wounds, the town slowly experiences fractures and tension. Finally,
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,...
Another Morrison read and as ever I’m in awe of her rich prose, nuanced characters and multilayered narrative. It’s the 1970s, and follows many characters during their time in the fictional, all-black town of Ruby as well as their lives before, and is a beautiful blend of classic storytelling and magic. I loved that aspect of Beloved and Morrison wields her subtle use of magical realism and mysticism just as artfully in Paradise..The opening line is so powerful, setting up the shocking events to...