Category: I have owned the paperback for about seven years, but never got around to reading it until now.
My thoughts: Wow. Like Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison comes into my life every once in awhile, and I am reminded what an amazing writer she is, and her words become absorbed into my bone marrow. This is the fourth novel of hers that I have read—the predecessors being Sula, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye (in 11th grade, I tried to read Beloved for a research paper, but I stopped…let’s just say that it was too much for me at the time).
Paradise is the story of an all-black town, Ruby, Oklahoma, its inhabitants, and what they will do to keep things the way they want them to be. It is also the story of the women of the Convent, a mansion/former school on the outskirts of the town that, in the minds of Ruby’s inhabitants, threatens their hard-won peace because it is inhabited by “unconventional” women (each of whom, in her own way, is in search of and in need of paradise). The book opens with an assault on the Convent women at the hands of nine Ruby men (“They shoot the white girl first” is the jarring opening line of the novel). The men, descendants of former slaves who were once excluded from every place they sought refuge, have a perverted sense of right and wrong, of who belongs and who doesn’t, because of their ancestors’ experiences.
Like other novels by Toni Morrison, Paradise is…inscrutable. I had to take notes and reread the first three chapters, and I admit that I still don’t understand the enormity that this book encapsulates. Paradise is not easy or comfortable or linear. But it is a damn good book. The novel contains ideas of patriarchy, intra-racial discrimination, and religion, and throws uneasy questions in the reader’s face. As with her other novels, in this one Toni Morrison produces some of the most heartbreaking (and disturbing) images I have ever read. What stuck with me, and I know will remain with me for years, is her description of a young woman slicing her skin open. I’m glad I finally decided to read it, though. Now, I just need to read Beloved…I think I’m ready.
Great passage: What she knew of them she had mostly forgotten, and it seemed less and less important to remember any of it, because the timbre of each of their voices told the same tale: disorder, deception, and, what Sister Roberta warned the Indian girls against, drift. The three d’s that paved the road to perdition, and the greatest of these was drift.
Next up: Lipstick Jungle (because I’m in the mood for a little light reading)
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