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The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways. With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.
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My first full-length Toni Morrison novel - can't wait to read more!!
* 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 alone possesses his gift of love. the loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye. (206)
* all of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. and all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. all of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. we were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. her poverty kept us generous. even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. and she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. we honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. (205)
0As one would expect, this is an incredibly heavy read. The stories told within this book are incredibly compelling, and Morrison doesn't shy away from, well, human ugliness. For a book published half a century ago, there's so much in it that remains so regrettably relevant in the current day and age. I can't think of another book I've read that has simultaneously been so viscerally disturbing and poetic, and also in some sense academic. I think that last part is what I had the most trouble with - there were some aspects to how this book was structured that pushed me away from the story itself. Some of the jumps between characters and timelines were really disorienting, and honestly the Jane story that was then used as chapter headings each time left me feeling a bit of shame because it seemed like a very intentional intellectual choice that I didn't "get." On the one hand I feel an impulse to still rate the book highly despite that because of that fear it's more of a reader issue than writer issue, but on the other those structural elements did ultimately negatively impact my experience and also the accessibility and interpretability of the text to some subset of readers.
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