According to Sandy

(Originally posted in 2012)

I always get excited when Ms Morrison graces us with a new book. Just released this week, her latest is “Home”, which centers on a man’s two most life battering experiences – while a soldier during the Korean War and growing up in the South in the 50’s. 

Ms Morrison, now 81, has such a fantastical, spiritual approach to her characters and plot, but she’s also got “edge”. She can set a tone, paint a picture, capture identifiable feeling/emotion and describe events so clearly and with such poetry that it makes you laugh or, it makes you cry. There are some passages in her much acclaimed book “Beloved” that are so painful that your throat clutches and closes.  Her “truth”, cloaked in make believe, is sometimes difficult to handle – sort of a ground glass in the oatmeal type of thing. You feel it.

I think she is amazing and a real gift. “Home”, by Toni Morrison

FYI – “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and Ms Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.) 

“Writing was … the most extraordinary way of thinking and feeling. It became the one thing I was doing that I had absolutely no intention of living without.”  Toni Morrison

A book reviewer in my local paper, “San Francisco Chronicle”, Joan Frank described the most recentToni Morrison novel, “A Mercy”, as “ferociously beautiful”. (Actually, that can describe many of her books this way.)

Ms Morrison has such a fantastical, spiritual approach to her characters and plot, but she’s also got “edge”. She can set a tone, paint a picture, capture identifiable feeling/emotion and describe events so clearly and with such poetry that it makes you laugh or, it makes you cry. There are some passages in her much acclaimed book “Beloved” that are so painful that your throat clutches and closes.  Her “truth”, cloaked in make believe, is sometimes difficult to handle – sort of a ground glass in the oatmeal type of thing. You feel it.
(“Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and Ms Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.)

I think she is amazing and a real gift. “A Mercy”, by Toni Morrison