Tabs & Twists
Beloved
Sethe, who escaped slavery, is haunted by the child she lost, and by the young woman who arrives one day claiming her name.
- Setting / Period
- Post-Civil War America
- First published
- 1987
- Pages
- 324
- Language
- English
Review
Eighteen years after fleeing a Kentucky plantation, Sethe lives in Ohio in a house haunted by her dead daughter. When a mysterious young woman called Beloved appears, the past that Sethe has tried to bury demands to be faced.
Morrison does not let the reader look away from slavery, but she does something harder than documentary: she shows what it does to memory, motherhood and the self. The prose is lush and fragmentary, and understanding arrives in layers.
It is a demanding read, and some passages are very painful. It is also one of the most powerful American novels of the last century, a ghost story where the ghost is history itself.
