Tuesday, January 29, 2008

A blogger's review of Toni Morrison's 'Sula'

It is a typical story if you try to summarize it, but what makes the book enchanting is the compelling writing that sucks you into its depths of metaphors, wonderful moments and sadness. One moment you are free falling through Sulas mind and the next you are caught in Nells. Its like poetry came home disguised as a novel. Great writing is being able to make the reader abandon the environment she inhabits entirely to step into the book and smell the earth the walk on, be all the characters in it, lead their lives and take a while to come back to where you are. I felt that because I couldn’t bring myself to close the book and I kept hoping that I hadn’t read the last line.I couldn’t switch on the tv and expose myself to my ordinary life after such fine writing. More than Nell and Sula what I wanted was more of the words, the writing. That’s when I read about Toni Morisson on the first page. It was only right that she was a Nobel Prize winner with other awards in her bag such as the Pulitzer and the National Critics award. What I loved most about it is the irony of calling the town “The bottom” in spite of it being at the top of the hill and not the valley. That’s because it was inhabited by the blacks of the region and the whites lived in the valley. The Bottom of heaven is how she described it.

Culled from the blog of 'Green Casper'

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