beloved

There are a lot of intimidating books on my reading (modern) classics list.^[1] Toni Morrison's Beloved was certainly up there in terms of intimidation factor, purely because of its content. I was expecting emotional devastation. Actually, I had really high expectations for this book.

Let me be clear: this book is certainly masterful, and emotionally fraught. It wasn't, however, the kind of life-changing read that I'd built it up to be.

Mainly, I wanted it to be weirder. I wanted it to be weird in the vein of Slaughterhouse-Five particularly. But Morrison does trauma very differently than Vonnegut. Vonnegut's trauma is incomprehensible; Morrison's is more devastatingly known. She leans heavily into the persistent rawness of the experience, the way that every interaction has the capability to uncover something horrible. She also emphasizes the shared, entangled, and heritable nature of trauma, which is something that is obviously more relevant in the case of a generations-long traumatic event like American slavery than the relatively brief World War II^[2] with which Vonnegut contends.

Anyway, it makes sense for Morrison to be writing a different sort of trauma than Vonnegut. It's a sensible choice, and I'd even argue the right choice. It does, however, make for less of a me sort of book. That's fine—not every book, or even every great book, in the whole entire world needs to change my life (to be honest, that sounds exhausting). But it does mean that I have rather less to say here than I did in my previous reviews.