Reader Response for Beloved

I’ve never taken the time to read book reviews, and let me just say this is probably more entertaining than social media. I spent a good hour just on Goodreads before I realized I still had not visited the other two sites. I digress, Beloved has a rather wide range of reviews from people both young and old. It varies from this novel is an abomination to this is the best novel in the entire existence of the universe. I was immediately drawn to the reviews that were negative since I think this novel was one of the most complex and intriguing thing I’ve read in a while, I like to see why people didn’t like it. This one star review jumped off the screen from Goodreads:

I know the book is supposed to give you a view on the cruel treatment of slaves but after I finished I actually less sympathetic for them. How exactly am I supposed to feel sympathetic to people who screw cows -that is just disturbing on so many levels- and kill their own babies. Paul D even admitted that the male slaves usually rape the girls. Beloved (the charater (sp)) is supposed to give the book more depth but she was just confusing and quite annoying, so is the mom by the way.

This view to me was interesting because I thought the opposite of this reviewer. Sure, beastiality is disgusting and wrong, but had the people not been African American, would it have made a difference? What about all the white men who locked up and raped the African American women brutally for years? And what about the many years of mistreatment of slaves, both physically and mentally? The schoolteacher in the book even referred his students to “. . . put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right” (Morrison 228). White people saw African Americans as animals; so technically, if they saw them as animals and raped them, they also assaulted animals. In the mindset of a white man, how is that any different?

Some of the other negative reviews were about the book’s structure and how it was too confusing to follow, which I would slightly agree with. It’s very poetic in places and sometimes it gets a little wonky, but I believe that this style adds elements to the story that we wouldn’t get if it were a linear story. Some of the positive reviews from Barnes and Noble were raving about Morrison’s lyrical writing and described Beloved as “indescribable” and “a story not to pass on” and something that you cannot get out of your head once it’s read. Since reading this, I find myself comparing it to things we read in class (such as The Woman Warrior and how “The Unnamed Woman’s” community abandoned her just like Sethe’s did), amongst other things.

One three star review from Amazon that I agree with is:

But while I can appreciate the story, the structure, and the way it was written, I found it extremely tedious to read. It hangs on the thinnest of narrative thread, and whenever a plot threatens to develop, the scene ends and we find out what happened later as an aside. Most of the 275 pages are dense interior monologues, frequently repetitious, that sometimes degenerates into what seemed like random text.

I felt a lot of the novel repeated itself; maybe that was artistic choice, but it was unnerving at times when it seemed like a story was about to take off, then bam, we’re eighteen years in the past. Sethe would repeat her stories, sometimes it seemed without prompt, which made me view her as narcissistic. I think some stories that were repeated did have some positive qualities for the novel; the story about Sethe being raped and losing her milk came up for what seemed every other paragraph, which made the reader never forget it. In a way, we became Sethe, never forgetting what happened. It was interesting to read some of the reviews and seeing how broadly they ranged. Since the reviews were so diverse, I would have to say Morrison achieved her goal of whatever she was trying to write and hopefully, this novel will be talked about for many years to come.