about 100 pages in I got kind of distracted from Beloved in part because I was in Mexico and I was feeling stupid about having never fully learned Spanish so I started very slowly reading Memoria del Fuego by Eduardo Galeano with the intention of doing what a character in Lightning Rods does with Proust, reading a foreign language every day, making notes of all the words I don’t know and reviewing the words later, then rereading what I previously read before progressing further, repeating this process which by doing something every day it becomes easier just by doing it every day, then I quickly let that project drop again because I lack discipline and likely will never make good on any of these ambitions I have because how the fuck could I without any serious dedication, I even abandoned The Golden Bough and The Emperor’s New Mind and Programmed to Kill all in the last few months, but then at some point I picked up Beloved again and you know maybe I don’t have to be so hard on myself, just let things happen in their own time, because I finished rereading Beloved a few days ago.
it’s wild they teach this book to high school kids. there are descriptions of slaves fucking cows in the first chapter, and throughout there’s very frank, not-exactly “woke” discussion of sex. but the novel more than deserves its status as one of the great works of American art of the 20th century, a perfect transcendence of the haunted house story that emphasizes how the real evils of this world are the things misguided humans do to one other, often from a place of love. it’s immaculately structured, hypnotically paced. it’s the novel William Faulkner wishes he could have written.
my only complaint is that I wish it were funnier; I often claim that I don’t trust artists who aren’t funny, and it’s not that Morrison isn’t funny, but the atmosphere of Beloved is nigh unbearably claustrophobic.