The Bluest Eye

by

Toni MORRISON

206 p.

This counts for

My own Reading challenge:

Books Published in The First Years of My Life.

Book published in 1970

ABOUT THE BOOK

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing. [Product description]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931) is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed black characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. [wikipedia]

REVIEWS BY OTHERS

“Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black. [Miss Morrison’s prose is] so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry…I have said ‘poetry,’ but The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music.”
–John Leonard, The New York Times

“A fresh, close look at the lives of terror and decorum of those Negroes who want to get on in a white man’s world…A touching and disturbing picture of the doomed youth of [the author’s] race.”
–L.E. Sissman, The New Yorker

MY OWN THOUGHTS

I have rarely read something at the same time so disturbing in content AND so beautiful in style. Her prose is often mere poetry. A classic to read. As for the disturbing side, it’s alas a very common story, things we may want to forget or pretend they no longer exist, but they do.

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