Winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison presents an audacious vision of the nature of love, profound in its understanding of the vitality of the past. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida, and L are women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate these women's lives long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the center of, their stories, he ...
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Winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison presents an audacious vision of the nature of love, profound in its understanding of the vitality of the past. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida, and L are women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate these women's lives long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces: a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial. Morrison's novel captures love's appetite, its sublime possession, and its dread in a subtly nuanced group of characters and strikingly imagined setting.
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It's about how getting the right amount of love makes you ok and not having it makes you broken. This isn't news, but I was still amazed to think about all that can ripple out from one evil. Toni Morrison is a very gifted writer (I know I'm late to the party on that one, but it's still true).
Theonewhoknows
Feb 29, 2008
Superb language!
I think "Love" is, by a long way, the very best of Toni Morrison's books. The book combines amazing linguistic skill with superb characterisation - every character has a distinctive voice- and yet all this is done with economy. Not one word is wasted or out of place. I enjoyed it immensely, so much so that it will now belong to that select list of books that I will re-read, probably several times, for the sheer pleasure of the language. I might add that this is not just a "women's book". My husband enjoyed it so much, that when he finished reading it, he started again from the beginning!
rejoyce
Oct 2, 2007
Loss of Lyrical Specificity
Toni Morrison's eighth book, Love, is about three-quarters of a good novel. Bill Cosey is the successful resort owner who rose from poverty and for whom the female characters vie and contest. There are echoes of Sula in the female friendships and resentments and Beloved in the triangular female bonding and Cosey's spirit visitations--in my view, a rather perfunctory bit of magic realism--and the writing is often beautifully sustained, but the ending seems to collapse, the dialogue descending into therapeutic mode. The narrative promises revelations of Cosey's ambiguous character, but when they come, they're of the pedestrian, tabloid variety: sins committed, secrets witnessed.
It seems to this reader that a certain lyric specificity went out of Morrison's work after Song of Solomon to be replaced by a kind of high rhetorical style. Given the subject matter, the spareness of style was justified in Beloved, but one misses the astonishing beauty of language of the earlier novels. What isn't missing is the author's acute intelligence and sly humor, but the ending to Love is problematic.
