"Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover along possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye."
I have just finished my 3rd novel by Toni Morrison, and yet again, I am speechless. Phenomenal, The Bluest Eye was phenomenal, all of that and more. Morrison's adroit writing seems complex to all who do not understand the message she gives throughout this work of a masterpiece. And still, even those without a wide base of strong vocabulary has the ability to understand Morrison's writing because the picture she paints is very clear.
Morrison has a great way of putting emphasis on the right things. She hardly ever starts off with a dialogue. Instead, she relays to us all the background information of the person to be discussed, so the actions that will be told in the dialogue can be understood way before we even get there. Her writing skills are amazing. It baffles me how all of her books that I've read is actually poetry, prose. A novel with thousands of words still morphs into prose. For a person that loves dialogue, he/she cannot and will not put his book down even though dialogue is at a minimum. When the dialogue comes, your excitement reechoes a high. The book is that good.
Below is an excerpt from Morrison's own opinion on The Bluest Eye, found at the end of the book. This explains what I previously mentioned about giving us background information before actually telling us what happened. It is a critical tactic she uses repetitively in order for us to understand why the action took place, while also forewarning us of something that society would consider rather unmoral, deviant.
"This forgrounding of 'trivial' information and backgrounding of shocking knowledge secures the point of view but gives the reader pause about whether the voice of children can be trusted at all or is more trustworthy than an adult's. The reader is thereby protected form a confrontation too soon with the painful details, while simultaneously provoked into a desire to know them."
In fact, her books are too powerful. Even though they are all fiction, they are based on real problems blacks have had since being oppressed unlawfully, immorally. I have concluded that I cannot read her books back-to-back. Way too powerful. It also takes a while, upon completion, for the book and its message to fully settle in you. You will even find yourself Googling certain meanings of quotes you came across. You shouldn't read her books back-to-back. You should take a few days to research and fully understand her work in length.
Work of art.
