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I'll be looking for Toni Morrison, thanks for that.

I had expected her work to be difficult to get into because most people I know try her novel Beloved first, and have trouble processing it. People seem to either find that book incredible, or frustrating. I'm not sure if that's because of the content or if it's just densely written, like stream of consciousness.

The style in Sula is very approachable. It is told almost orally, it seems. There's an interesting moment where the writing suddenly goes into first person for one of the characters. It's so subtly done you have to reread to notice, yet that single moment within the novel is underlined because of the momentary style change.

Sula is set just after World War I and begins with a veteran returning from the front. The story is about his attempt to cope with the realization that human life is finite and unpredictable and cannot be tidily categorized, but it is mostly told through the perspectives of two women in the town who come to the same realization and have very little to do with him. From early in the novel:

"It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.”

There aren't final answers or resolutions in the novel. It's just raw, uncompromising bewilderment, and the desire to find oneself within that. Sula  asks what exactly "good" is. What "love" is. What "peace" is, and some of it is incredibly difficult to read. Not because it's stylistically difficult, but because some of what happens is gruesome and incomprehensible, and Morrison doesn't make it easy to take it in. She doesn't make it pretty. I feel that the novel is like poetry because of that. She shows it to you, but she doesn't tell you how to feel about it.

I think I'll try Beloved soon. I think it's supposed to be her masterpiece:

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smoothes and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind -- wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

“Sweet," she thought. "He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, 'goodbye' would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet."

This is Morrison talking about Beloved:

“In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.”

My library has a copy of Child 44. It's on the way. x