Best American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

BTW, I read Beloved in a day this past weekend.

Can you read Joyce's "Ulysses" in a day AND understand it?

There are people over at the James Joyce Quarterly who have been reading Ulysses for thirty years who wouldn't claim to understand it.

Joe(so how's by you?)Nation

The cow did not read Beloved, Miller. Ask her what is written in the preface. She would not know!!!!

There are some people who only read a preface and then claim to have read the whole book. They lie. They didn't even read the preface.

They are also the same people who believe calling other people names is acceptable adult behavior. They are victims of arrested development, in need of counseling and ought not to be allowed to continue being a member of this community of grown-ups.

Joe(you know who you are)Nation

Aaaaaaameeeeen.

A2K has many teens and young adults as members.
Just read the threads devoted to miscarriage and pregnancy and you'll realize this.

Was this meant as a sequence?

Since Bernardagatto railed so fervently against Beloved, I decided to read it, when and if I could find a second hand copy. I did this weekend.


Miller -- Do you have a new avatar?

It isn't seemly to mention James Joyce on a fiction thread.

He didn't have anything to do with fiction.

Ah, Miller's being coy and Spendius (who always cracks me up) is being Spendius.

plainoldme: Do you care to present your review of Beloved?

Joe(I'm a fictional character myself)Nation

It is clear that Joe Notion and the "cow" who claims to have read Beloved do not know that the book discredits itself even before it begins.But since Joe Notion may not know how to read and the "cow" does not know how to interpret what she reads, they would have missed the RIDICULOUS
preface in which Toni Morrison CLAIMS that sixty MILLION black people were killed in the slave trade coming to the new world and during the slavery years.

This is race-carding at its zenith and, as such, invalidates ANY esthetic or literary value the book might have.

I cannot understand why people like Joe Notion and the "cow" don't understand that basic idea.

LYING PROPAGANDA DOES NOT MAKE FOR GOOD LITERATURE!

Hmmmm . Racist and inflammatory in the same post while admitting to only having read the preface of a book under discussion, and perhaps not all of that, perhaps only the quote from the preface on the back of the book's cover. A better example of arrested development would be hard to find.

Would that this were, Miller, a teenager or a young adult, at least then there would be some sense that certain proclivities rising from immaturity could be forgiven, as it is not, the only reaction is one of disgust for the pathetic attitude which cannot rise above grade school name calling and the more pathetic racist mindset that the creature apparently cannot escape.

This, I hesitate to use the word person, does not belong on these pages.

Joe Nation

Joe -- Hi! Yes, I would. I thought the book was involving. Otherwise, I would not have spent an entire day reading it. I did feel it was flawed. I think that Morrison's plan was overly ambitious, that she grappled with too many themes in one book.

Thirty years ago, I heard Joan Didion describe what was then her most recent book. She had an idea about a man and a woman travelling along the coast of California, staying in motels. When she put together her notes and snippets, she looked at it and said, "hmmm. This is a bit thin." Well, Morrison should have looked at her book and decided there was too much there.

I found the sections of prose poetry repetitious and wished she had eliminated them as they broke the flow of the narrative.

There are elements of magical realism here that I think she should either have developed more or eliminated completely. I would have to read it a second time to clarify my position on that.

However, I felt the characters were very well drawn and believable.

Well, Joe Notion, it appears that even Plain Ol Me found some problems with "Beloved". I read the entire book as well as the preface. What I found lacking verisimilitude was the stark division of the world into two sections-

Black = Good

White = Bad

If you, Joe Notion, had any real KNOWLEDGE about Slavery in the United States, you would immediately class Morison's book as a race-card propaganda piece.

Since you are IGNORANT about Slavery in America, Joe Notion, I will quote a section from one of the USA's FOREMOST RESEARCHERS on Slavery--Not a race carding female like Morison but a true scholar!!!


In "Roll, Jordan, Roll" Eugene D. Genovese writes:( P. 59)

"The slaves fared as well, in material terms, as a substantial portion of the workers and peasants of Westen Europe and CERTAINLY BETTER than the mass of the Russian, Hungarian, Polish and even Italian peasants"

Geneovese goes on to give specific examples of how the life of Blacks compared to the European peasantry and why, in most cases, US Blacks lived better.


The "Racist Mindset" that Joe Notion talks about is nothing more than the mindset which most idiots in the US have garnered from the race carders like Jackson and Sharpton.

Reality is found in the quotes above, Joe Notion. It's too bad you do not have the ability to read such works with understanding!!

I'm with you on all of these points. She seems to have gotten lost mid-stream in a couple of places, losing the thread of one theme while trying to pick up (or insert) another. I was fascinated by the idea of the presence of the dead amongst the living, but I didn't think she carried through with making that unreality real.

As for the name-caller's assertion that the book divided the world into



that may well be his own view of the world in reverse, but I didn't see Morrison doing that. She seemed to make all the people in the book multi-dimensional, white or black. It difficult for a racist to see anything but race-card propaganda.

It is very big of him to quote a Communist, who's main point is that the economic conditions created by capitalism were less than beneficial to the masses, in support of something that wasn't under discussion.

He seems to think that living as a slave would be acceptable if given enough material benefits. Is there a better definition of a authoritarian follower than that?

Joe(um. Nope)Nation

It is clear that Joe Notion is completely IGNORANT concerning Slavery!

First of all, Eugene D. Genovese is NOT a Communist. He is a Marxist. There is a difference but Joe Notion is too IGNORANT to know that.

Joe Notion wrote:

It is very big of him to quote a Communist, who's main point is that the economic conditions created by capitalism were less than beneficial to the masses, in support of something that wasn't under discussion.

He seems to think that living as a slave would be acceptable if given enough material benefits. Is there a better definition of a authoritarian follower than that?
end of quote
Secondly, the facts about Slavery did not come from Genovese but are found in Genovese's book. Joe Notion is so IGNORANT, he does not know this.

If he knows how to read( I doubt it) and the library will let him in, he can reference the book which quotes the following people and authorities as saying that the slaves were better off than many Europeans.

Who were these people?

Raimondo Luraghi- Italian Historian who wrote a detailed study of the US during this period.

Jurgen Kuczynski- Noted statistician and historian of the working class.

NOW, NO ONE HAS SAID THAT LIVING AS A SLAVE WOULD BE ACCEPTABLE IF GIVEN ENOUGH MATERIAL BENEFITS


BUT

THE RACE CARDER, PHONY TONI MORISON, writes her propaganda piece with nary a word about the MATERIAL SUFFERINGS of the Slaves in Europe who in many places like Russia, where laboring under the slavery of Serfdom. She is clearly a propagandist. She exaggerates the evil from the whites. Anyone who would write that a woman would kill her children in order that they not be slaves, is not writing fiction, but rather science fiction.


Genovese writes:P. 59

"He might easily find that the living conditions of a large minority or even a majority of the world's population during the twentieth century might not compare in comfort with those of the slaves of Mississippi a century earlier"


Now, if Joe Notion can do no more than issue unsourced and/or unreference intellectual flatulence, there is nothing left to say.If he knows how to read, he might try to get AN AUTHORITY( certainly not an IGNORANT person like he is) to rebut the statements of Professor Genovese.

If Joe Notion is unaware of such things, he should read up!!!

Oh yeah, Morrison should have added a couple of chapters about the serfs in Europe in her book. Right. That would have helped the narrative flow a lot. Let's not leave out the Irish or the Jews or the untouchables of India. Put them right in there after the bit about Sweet Home and the earring gift. Hey, and how about those coolies in China? They would have fit right in between the escape across the river and the breakout from the slave camp. The name caller wouldn't know. He didn't read the book.

I used to think the poster whose favorite term was ignorant was serious.
Now I see he's a joke.

Joe(and a terrific waste of time)Nation

Joe Notion wrote:

Oh yeah, Morrison should have added a couple of chapters about the serfs in Europe in her book. Right. That would have helped the narrative flow a lot. Let's not leave out the Irish or the Jews or the untouchables of India. Put them right in there after the bit about Sweet Home and the earring gift. Hey, and how about those coolies in China? They would have fit right in between the escape across the river and the breakout from the slave camp. The name caller wouldn't know. He didn't read the book.

****************

Of course she didn't add a couple of chapters about the serfs in Europe. That would not have added to the book. But, she could have AND DID NOT temper her PROPAGANDISTIC ACCOUNT. She could have told the truth but she did not. She chose to try to show that slavery was so bad and so vicious that a woman would KILL her child so that her child would not have to be a slave.

That is race-cardism at its highest.
Morison is a lying propagandist.

Proof? Well, what better proof than the writings of one of the greatest African-American leaders who ever lived--W.E.B. DuBois( of course, Joe Notion probably does not know who DuBois was, since his regular reading matter on the trains he rides is the ubiquitous comic book)

Du Bois wrote:

What did it mean to be a slave? It is hard to imagine it today. We think of oppression beyond all conception: cruelty, degradation, whipping and starvation, the absolute negation of human rights, or on the contrary, we may think of the ordinary worker the world over today( 1935).slaving ten, twelve, or fourteen hours a day, with not enough to eat, compelled by his physical necessities to do this and not to do that, curtailed in his movements and his possibilities, and we say, here, too, IS A SLAVE CALLED A FREE WORKER AND SLAVERY IS MERELY A MATTER OF NAME>"

FROM dU bOIS- Black Reconstruction--P. 9-10


Morison could have easily worked those ideas into her novel but since she is a lying propagandist, she did not.

I can't believe that she never read Du Bois. All African-Americans who aspire read Du Bois.

She knew the truth as written by DuBois above but she chose to ignore it.

**********************************************************

It is also evident that Joe Notion does not know the meaning of Ignorant.

That term applies to many on the left who write on these threads.

It means:

ig·no·rant (gnr-nt) KEY

ADJECTIVE:

Lacking education or knowledge.
Showing or arising from a lack of education or knowledge: an ignorant mistake.
Unaware or uninformed.


*****************************************************

Since there are so many on the left who do not have knowledge( evident by reading their posts) or are unaware--It is quite correct to refer to them with that word!

Just wondering here Possum, when you piss in the sink do you flush the toilet at the same time to mask the sound of your pissing in the sink?

Joe -- I liked the idea of the dead being among the living, too. It's funny, but, I have had several conversations since May about how the current pop-psychology fad of seeking closure is ridiculous. One of the people I spoke with is a psychologist who does corporate workshops and she says there is no time table for grief.

I think that's Morrison's main theme: Sethe is a woman whose grief is so enormous that she re-animates her dead daughter. This is difficult territory for a writer to explore. Morrison doesn't want to go the Anne Rice route. Or even the Stephen King route. She wants to present a woman under enormous pressure. Morrison stresses Sethe's personal responsibility in caring for her children; her confusion and concern over the disappearance of her husband; her anger and fear created by the molestation she suffered; her traumatization by the brutal beating she received. If some shallow "girlfriend" told Sethe to "get over yourself," there'd be hell to pay.

The Sethe the reader meets at the beginning of the book is a woman suffering from what is called temporary insanity. Strictly speaking, she would have been represented in court as unable to distinguish between right and wrong, but, what really happened with Sethe is that the wrong of slavery, of returning with her children into bondage loomed so large in her mind that killing her kids seemed like a way out.

I would have liked Beloved to have been a little more fully realized. I don't feel Beloved's advances toward Paul D. worked. However, it could be that in trying to create the character Beloved -- who obviously had roots in what Americans might call voodoo -- that Morrison may have found a too active revenant drifted into Rice/King territory.

I also think Paul D.'s return was a little too pat.

There was a question of what to make about Sethe's and Denver's venture into carnavalesque clothing. If just didn't lead anywhere.