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“Toni Morrison: She Can Give You Dreams”

In the first paragraph Leonard writes about Morrison, “All you need is genius.” At that point you could pretty well guess that it was going to be a positive essay. She is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner (1993). He goes on to write, “Novel by novel, Toni Morrison re-imagines the lost history of her people, their love and work and nightmare passage and redemptive music. It’s a brilliant project, a ghostly chorale…” and walks us through the each novel from The Bluest Eyes (1970) to Sula (1973 to Tar Baby (1981, Leonard doesn’t like this one as much) to Beloved (1987) to Jazz (1992).

Leonard has a lot of plot lines to recap and much to say about what they all mean, but in the end, he’s saying that Morrison writes a history that existed outside of whites’ view African Americans, “Without Beloved, our imagination of America had a heart sized-hole in it big enough to die from.” Leonard posits that Morrison, in doing so, is fundamentally a political writer and quotes Morrison, “It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”

I’ve never read any of her novels and I can see that one draw back to this section will be to add to my already long “to-read” list on goodreads.com. For now, I’ll add Beloved.

Leonard quotes generously from the novels in this essay and I like good quotes and especially really good first lines. I’ll wrap with the first line from Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eyes, “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.”

That's pretty good, but I challenge anyone to find a better first line that from Gabriel Garcia Maquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

The American Book review lists it as fourth best, but, judge for yourself.

http://americanbookreview.org/100bestlines.asp

New word: cloisonné = an ancient technique for decorating metal work.

New learning: Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford. She decided to throw away her pen name and use this given name on her first book, but her decision was too late…the books had already been set for printing.

Cool street art of Morrison in Vitoria, Spain: