Word: novelization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...novel opens starkly--"They shoot the white girl first"--and then coils back and forth through a century of imagined history to explain who "they" are and why, on a dewy Oklahoma morning in 1976, they felt compelled to storm a decaying mansion and wreak violence on the handful of women living within...
Then there is the subject of race. It is not mentioned a great deal in Paradise, perhaps because nearly all the characters are black. It is almost impossible to identify the white woman whose shooting is announced in the novel's opening sentence. As the women drift, singly, into the Convent, the reader--knowing what lies in store for the white one--must wonder: Is it Mavis? Grace? Seneca? Pallas...
...Morrison laughs at a subsequent event that has, in terms of mass recognition, affected her life more dramatically than did the Nobel Prize: the selection, in December 1996, of her 1977 novel Song of Solomon as the second offering of the Oprah Book Club. "I'd never heard of such a thing," she says, "and when someone called, all excited, with the news, all I could think was, 'Who's going to buy a book because of Oprah?'" The answer came fairly quickly and astonishingly. "A million copies of that book sold," she says, again shaking her head. "And sales...
...naturally welcomes the commercial windfalls such recognition brings, but she is not terribly comfortable with being recognized in that way. She faces her upcoming publicity tour for Paradise with a certain dread, although she feels she owes the effort to her publisher, which has a large investment in the novel. "I get cranky and depressed on the road," she says. As a Nobel laureate, she has a little more cachet than struggling first novelists, so she has been able to set certain limits on how she is displayed. "I've refused to do the morning TV shows. I just...
Paradise? She laughs at the question. "It's not my place to define paradise for anyone else. That, in one way, is what the new novel is saying. It's not anyone's place to do that. But I'll confess my idea of what paradise would be for me. Nine days of seclusion, total seclusion. No obligations, no demands, nothing but doing anything I wanted, when I wanted." She pauses, perhaps considering the duties she faces in the coming weeks. "I've had four or five days, but never nine. Not yet." Heaven must wait...