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Title: Tar Baby by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0-452-26479-0 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: September, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.77 (43 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Didn't understand it all. but liked it.
Comment: OK, I didn't understand all of this novel, but I liked it. Being a 46 year old while male I probably never will undestand it all. How ever, I can report that the character studies of Valerian Street and his wife ("The principal beauty of Maine") are some of the most devistatingly accurate upper class character studies I've ever read, and very funny in a vitriolic way. This is my introduction to Toni Morrison, and I plan to read more.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Shocking Socioeconomic Prescription!
Comment: In reading Toni Morrison's striking novel Tar Baby, I came to characterize Jadine as a cultural orphan. The two often times conflicting worlds of white and black juxtapose along the lines of social, cultural and political demarcation. In the midst of such duality exists the character of Jadine, who symbolizes a contemporaneous example of the black female in a post-Civil Rights moment. Jadine is a woman who is educated, elevated and moneyed and in sharp contrast to the perceived notions of what it means to be black and female in a time of vast social and political change.
Jadine is a woman trying to escape the stigma associated with her class position. Her family has money, but finds it hard to truly identify with them. She has no allegiance to African-American cities; she had received an education at the Sorbonne and was afforded the kind of lifestyle that is alien to many African-American women of her time. Jadine finds herself torn between the black world and the white world, fitting into neither. She equates her position as a black female in the culture through two dogs copulating in a street in Baltimore, Maryland. She is in a working-class situation and does not enjoy it - especially since she witnessed the "other side of the tracks," figuratively speaking, and saw life through the rose-colored lenses of the white world.
Jadine is part of a new generation - one that did not grow up in a segregated society. The culture she is in and the lifestyle she inherited is predominately white - her upbringing, her education and her outlook.
African-American culture is a hybrid culture, leading one to wonder why Jadine would be viewed as a cultural orphan, but there are political reasons, which determine why we rally under the flag of race or gender or sexual preference, etc. There is a change in the culture and Jadine is reflective of such change in a culture that has always been hybrid since its very beginnings. Toni Morrison, through the characterization of Jadine in the novel of Tar Baby is trying to redefine the parameters and scope of the term "culture" and gerrymander its boundaries.
Rating: 5
Summary: Passion
Comment: Name the big Black romance novels. I dare you. Name them all. Ok, five, name five romance novels centralized around Black characters, in love, loving, making love, living well, being well that doesn't have four women as successful best friends?
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Toni Morrison is not easy. Do not mistake her ever for easy, do not mistake her subject matters for simple to pierce or to understand. I agree with the previous reviewer, people expect books to be like TV. And they aren't. Good books anyway. Books that are literature. This book is literature.
Hopefully more will come along, more romance that mean something, that say something about culture, about color, about power and the abuses.
Son is all of the projected racial fears and Jadine is the homogenized Black America wants Black people to be/to become. Grateful and still on some level serving in the kitchen (Sydney and his wife). Black people are required to be so much within this world, this America. Savage, erudite, butler, maid/cook and yet all of the characters here in the book, that are White, are one form (rich) here. White is a decision to be, to be a thing, rich, poor, bohemian, angry, depressed, rebllious, vane, but all that is shiftable, malleable. Black however is static from White perception and being Black from the inside out? That's birth from a dead womb.
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Title: Jazz (Plume Contemporary Fiction) by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452269652 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: April, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452260116 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: September, 1987 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Paradise by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452280397 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Sula by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452283868 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 05 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Beloved by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452280621 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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