Word: slaving
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sorted out. Like real relationships, they are messy, incendiary, lingering past the pleasure point. Kureishi's women can be doctrinaire or maternal or game for a good time; his men, the "unfair sex," can be docile or brutal or just led by their lust. Poor randy Sammy, slave to the priapic imperative: "I'm like a little man being pulled around...
Similarly, the characters and settings are updated, presumably in an attempt to make Ibsen's satire more relevant to a Harvard audience. Trolls become yuppies. Slave trading becomes arms dealing. War in Greece becomes war in Nicaragua. And the ocean becomes--literally--the Adams House swimming pool. These are all easy targets for jokes, but Prascak has nothing novel or interesting to say about them...
When Paul D, another slave from the Sweet Home farm in Kentucky, fetches up at Sethe's address 18 years later, he finds evidence of defeat rather than triumph. Sethe's two oldest children, both boys, have run away. The youngest, the girl Denver, seems hostile and reclusive. The third child, also a girl, is long since dead, but her spirit disruptively haunts Sethe's house...
Morrison's supple prose makes such desperation palpable. Beloved is full of vivid images, freshly rendered. Here is the runaway slave facing the Ohio River, which stands between her and liberation: "Sethe was looking at one mile of dark water, which would have to be split with one oar in a useless boat against a current dedicated to the Mississippi hundreds of miles away." Here are Sethe, Denver and Beloved enjoying a rare moment of pleasurable abandon on a frozen lake: "Their skirts flew like wings and their skin turned pewter in the cold and dying light...
Toni Morrison' s Beloved evokes the violent desperation of a slave struggling for freedom. -- A brilliant novel by Britain' s Ian McEwan...