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Gail Wilson Kenna

Taking Leave of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison

I’m holding a circular fob attached to a USC key chain; and on the small white circle is a cheeky quote from the infamous Oscar Wilde.

“If one cannot enjoy reading a novel over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”


I would amend this to say that a good book club discussion of a novel requires a second read. Which is why I gave Toni Morrisons’s Beloved that second read last week, not counting the time I read her novel in 1988 when it won the Pulitzer Prize.


This past week I read about Morrison’s life. It interested me that she wrote her M.A. thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, two famous & earlier postmodernists. I also learned her Nobel Prize was awarded for “postmodern shifting narration.” This characteristic of her writing is understandable given her M.A. work on both Woolf and Faulkner.

Last Thursday at the book club meeting, I was glad to hear from those who appreciated Beloved more than I did. This is how book clubs should be, with novels read carefully and members speaking from having given serious attention to the literature.

Yet I will admit that after seeing the three-hour movie of Beloved, I thought about skipping a second read. Yet how could I do that when I expect the members to read each novel twice?  My copy of Beloved is 274 pages in three parts. Near the end of the second, Morrison shifts from an observing third person narration to first.

“BELOVED, she my daughter.  She mine.”

Then another segment, “BELOVED is my sister.’

A third begins, ‘I AM BELOVED and she is mine.’ This one has white spaces within the writing.

A fourth begins, ‘I AM BELOVED and she is mine.’ This page is without white spaces. But it also ends with, ‘She is mine.’ Next are three pages of a prose-poem. “Oh, please, Toni” I wrote in the margin. The next chapter returns to the third person narrator: “It was a tiny church no bigger than a rich man’s parlor.”

The critics were kind to Toni Morrison and Beloved.  But the black critic, Stanley Crouch, noted that Morrison “perpetually interrupts narrative with maudlin ideological commercials.” This claim rings as demeaning. I wonder if Stanley watched the movie instead of reading the novel.  It’s fair to say (!) Beloved was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Stick to your talk show, Oprah.  But then… who am I to judge because I do not watch horror films! Which is what it was, as well as corny and mawkish, and very very long. (I shun qualifiers, but they apply here.) Okay, different works and different flicks for different folks! 

What will the book club be reading in November? 


Two novels with the same title of Snow: one by the masterful John Banville, who combined forces with his ghost writer, Benjamin Black, for an Irish mystery under Banville’s name. The second Snow is from the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, who won the Novel Prize in 2006. His novel is long. Banville’s can be read in one sitting. Who can stop reading this mystery? I couldn’t.



I leave you this Sunday with two lines from a Jorge Luis Borges poem, “Boast of Quietness,” as a tribute to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison.

“Writings of Light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors”

&

“My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.”

 

Back in two weeks… Gail and Ilona

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