Reviews with content warning for Sexual harassment - The Bluest Eye

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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

48 reviews

emicrk's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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badspringbye's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

"There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how."

I've been having this earnest dream of experiencing to read a book that's told through the cycle of four seasons until the discovery of this piece of literature, only in a completely unexpected circumstances. one element that I remember the most is the excellent association of human beings and materialistic things:

p. 35 "The furniture had aged without ever having become familiar. People owned it, but never known it. No one had lost a penny or a brooch under the cushions of either sofa and remembered the place and time of the loss or the finding."

it started off with the unharmonized pattern of furnishings, then ended up with the cause of it: irrational and made-up hatred, fused by a single scratch. it's also hard to describe the vividness of the young children's hardships, especially Pecola, through the eyes of Claudia and Frieda while sustaining the adults' perspective nonetheless... from the comparison of envy and jealousy, distorted notion of their 'kind', being restricted to do, to act, to have rights. another noteworthy writing style by Morisson going beyond language:

p. 159 "The pieces of Cholly's life could become coherent only in the head of a musician."

"{Only those who talk their talk through the gold of curved metal, or in the touch of black-and-white rectangles and taut skins and strings echoing from wooden corridors, could give true form to his life.}
{Only they would know how to connect the heart of a red watermelon to the asafetida bag to the muscadine to the flashlight on his behind to the fists of money to the lemonade in a Mason jar to a man called Blue and come up with what all of that meant in joy, in pain, in anger, in love, and give it its final and pervading ache of freedom.}"

in the 1st phrases with curly brackets, she mentioned different types of sounds. in the 2nd one, she gave an example with scenarios from our character. again, extreme geniusness. she implied the parallelism so freaking well.

reading Morrison felt like getting lost in an otherworldly forest. I don't really think I can encapsulate everything into a brief review. the best that I could do is to leave some beautiful and powerful lines here.

excerpts:
p. 20 "I knew that the doll represented what they thought was my fondest wish." ... "What was I supposed to do with it?"
p. 21 "Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object, I wanted rather to feel something."
p. 45 "She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away." ... "Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left." ... "They were everything. Everything was there, in them."
p. 92 "Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed , they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between."
p. 122 "...physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion."
p. 138 "They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other." ... "All the difference was all the difference there was."
p. 206 "Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye."

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jme14's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Toni Morrison is officially in my top two authors of all time (next to Steinbeck, I can't choose between them). Morrison is a master at manipulating the form to tell her stories as they are supposed to be told. There are no rules: the story is out of order, the characters are unrelentingly disturbing and disturbed, and the language blunt. She is the master of empathy. She conjures such vile actors, then turns your rage into uncomfortable sadness, transferring that rage from the individual to the setting. I don't know how she can do it, but she's done it twice (in her labeled masterpiece "Beloved" and now in this). Her work is deeply disturbing, but there's no other way to convey these themes in a way as affecting as this. She is a true master and deserving in her place among the greatest authors of all time.

I don't think this is QUITE as good as "Beloved" due to her clearly more unrefined style. This feels more restrained with its magical realism and slightly less comprehensive with its characters, but that is some extreme nit-picking. Seriously, read this book. I'm so excited (and emotionally nervous) to read the rest of her work.

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angelinite's review against another edition

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challenging reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.0

i think i need to read this again to fully understand it. what i'm left with is the sense of pecola's abscence from the book, whilst even the most horrible of characters get the chance to be heard she is kept silent and that is the most poignant thing for me about this book.

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