Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - The Bluest Eye

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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

2 reviews

lizziaha's review against another edition

4.25

The language in this book is so wonderful. Each word tumbles into the next—a pace that I occasionally wanted to slam the brakes on due to the perverse and horrific things the words depicted. But the words tumbled on, slipping and sliding and settling in my brain. It’s odd, because they seemed comfortable at first, but quickly became restless as Morrison’s words stayed in my brain long after I’d put down the book.

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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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