May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L who cooks for them and sees everything - all are women obsessed by Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort (a glamorous black-only beachside resort that flourished in the post-war years), he's powerful charismatic, monstrous, shadowy, and he shapes the yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. But even Cosey himself is at the mercy of a troubled past and a spellbinding woman, 'a sporting woman', named Celestial. Christine is his granddaughter, Heed her pretty best friend, an uneducated Up Beach girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The two girls are inseparable until the moment when Cosey picks out Heed, aged only 11, and marries her ('One day we built castles on the beach; the next he sat her in his lap-One day we played jacks; the nest she was fucking my grandfather-. One day this house was mine; next day she owned it.'). Forty years on, the hotel is boarded up and the resort half under water, but Christine and Heed, old women now, bound together by a lifetime of jealousy and pain, are still the Cosey girls, 'as different as honey and soot', when Junior comes walking down the street and into their lives, in her short skirts and high boots and with a look in her eye- This audacious vision from a master storyteller of the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread - is shocking and moving in its profound understanding of love's ambivalence, and of how alive the past can be. It peels back the layers to reflect the different facets of love, shifting from desire through sex, lust, obsession, yearning, and ultimately full circle to the power of a girl's first love that marks her forever. And the only one who sees the whole picture is L (whose full name is revealed only near the end - a word mentioned only once in the whole of this novel), who has more to do with the outcome than anyone knows. (20030513)
Love
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A powerful novel. (Metro 20031119)
Breathtaking (Daily Mail )
Love is a brilliant book...Into a short narrative she [Toni Morrison] packs mystery, suspense and a multi-stranded tale told with extraordinary deftness (Financial Times )
Breathtaking (Daily Mail )
Love is a brilliant book...Into a short narrative she [Toni Morrison] packs mystery, suspense and a multi-stranded tale told with extraordinary deftness (Financial Times )
Book Description
Compelling, sensual, elegiac, shocking - a major new work by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, about desire, sex, lust, obsession, yearning, and ultimately about love. (20030513)
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
i found this a good read in that the language was evocative and thoughtful, the story has many layers and is therefore engaging (you have to think about what you are reading) and the characters are well drawn and alive! i shall read this book again some time in the future and for me this is the key factor in determining whether a book is worth it or not
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
By Dan
Format:Paperback
The incredible aspect of Toni Morrison's writings is hat she is able to adress such important themes without being preachy. This story is essentialy about the relationship of two women, which is a prevalent situation throughout her earlier works of Sula and Beloved. As always in Morrison's novels, trouble is brooding and the play's finale certainly pays out. However, regardless of the scenes of action, the real beauty of this play is the inner monologues, beautifully crafted and hauntingly evocative of an age we can only live through the book's discourse. Toni Morison is a wonderful writer who has an innate skill of using the right word for the right situation, and her imagery is contagious. I found myself saying 'fat stars'from Beloved, a number of times. This is a well executed novel of a lyrical grandeur unreached by many other American writers that adress the same themes of race and sex.
The only pitfall find of Morrison's work, is her narration that suddenly changes from one character to another without explanation. This often means that one has to read back a few lines to get the thread of the transition, as not to be confused over the following chapter's journey.
The only pitfall find of Morrison's work, is her narration that suddenly changes from one character to another without explanation. This often means that one has to read back a few lines to get the thread of the transition, as not to be confused over the following chapter's journey.
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a great novel by Toni Morrison, with interesting characters and a very emotionally driven plotline which will bring tears to your eyes. The various ways Morrison experiments with narrative form and style is inventive. Perhaps the plot is a little confusing for casual readers but Morrison blends both aesthetic style and plot together to make it enjoyable for a range of different readers. It deals with the varying concepts of love within a family but she also explores the damaging effects caused by love such as jealously. It focuses on the lives of the women who loved or had ties to Bill Cosey, a hotel owner.
In my opinion this novel meets the high expectations expected of Morrison's work (Beloved).
In my opinion this novel meets the high expectations expected of Morrison's work (Beloved).
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By LindyLouMac
Format:Paperback
Although I enjoyed this book I somehow felt it was not complete. At around two hundred pages I felt that the different sections within the book would have been more interesting if they were more detailed therefore longer? I somehow felt I was not getting the full story! I finished it so quickly and was somewhat surprised when it ended!
10 of 39 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Toni Morrison is by no means a writer of enormous repute in the UK and her status as Queen of the Novel in the US is largely unrecognised here. I'm not going to suggest that she is the Emperor's New Clothes, because there's much more to her than that. But this novel is little more than notes for a novel shuffled together and given a hard cover.
And that cover needs mention. One is reminded of the allegorical maze of association woven into portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. Morrison's bizarre photo on the back seems fraught with overworked imagery, designed to irritate and repel. Why the tasteless display of bejewelled accessories? Why does she lean in, face frozen in a stern, graceless half-smile? A game is being played with the reader before the book is even opened.
But inside is the disappointment. Unshuffle the chapters, write the vague, unfocused notes up into a story, or a novel, and you'd have something that really did talk to us of Love. She knows what she wants to say, certainly. Yes, there is race and gender for the zealots to get their teeth into and feel self-righteous about. But there is Love, too, and it's the sort of love that does not live within the boundaries that are acceptable to the more ferocious liberals who lionize Toni Morrison in America. There is an importantly non-judgemental air about the portrayal of relationships of all kinds lurking in here somewhere.
But Morrison seems preoccupied. She won't tell us the story straight out. She pussyfoots around, using silly devices from a bygone age of experimentalism (and more William S Burroughs than Virginia Woolf, more's the pity). We drift in and out of interior monologues, cut from past to present, sample communications with ghostly presences and so on.
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