Paradise
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Amazon.co.uk Review
"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun." So begins Paradise, Toni Morrison's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. As one would expect from the author of such brilliantly imagined novels as Song of Solomon, Beloved and Jazz, Morrison's Paradise is ambitious, political, deeply spiritual and peopled with characters as complex as they are unforgettable. Time is fluid in the universe of this particular novel; though set in 1976, Morrison travels easily between eras, taking the reader back in time to the founding of Ruby, an all-black township in Oklahoma, at the end of World War II, then further back to the establishment of its predecessor, Haven, which parallels the story of Exodus: a band of former slaves wanders the Oklahoma territory in search of a homeland. Overlying the strong sense of character and place that imbues each page is a touch of the supernatural--ghost children skitter through the halls of an abandoned Catholic girl's school and "unseen friends" visit lonely women by night.
Even as Morrison deftly limns the history of the town and its inhabitants, she lays the foundation for the conflict brewing in the present-day story: A new minister has come to town, bringing with him a whiff of the politics that engulfed that era--civil rights, student uprisings, rioting in the streets--activities which speak to the restlessness of the town's youth. Meanwhile, 17 miles away at the former girls' school nicknamed "the Convent," a small group of unconventional women have moved in. Their stories, told in individual chapters bearing their names, are also stories of exile, exodus and eventual homecoming. For the men of Ruby, however, these women represent everything that is dangerous about the outside world and as the sanctity of Ruby's traditions begin to crumble, nine men go on a deadly hunt.
As always, Morrison is not afraid to explore the relations between the races or the genders and she is particularly adept at creating characters who, though frequently not likable, are always sympathetic. Paradise is a book you'll want to read more than once and each time you'll find something new to haunt and amaze you. -- Amazon.com
Book Description
Toni Morrison's eagerly awaited new novel - her first since winning the Nobel Prize in 1994.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Riveting and satisfying,
By A Customer
This review is from: Paradise (Paperback)
I could hardly stop reading this book. Toni Morrison really is an amazing writer - it almost felt as if someone was singing this book to me as I read it. I was interested to read the comments in the other reviews about the ending. I am a bit of a 'hard to please' reader. I like to know what happens to my characters, but I really don't like it when authors string together improbable plot twists to make it all 'make sense', or scrunch years into the final chapter to give a sense of what happened next. I think Morrison, however, gets the mixture just right in the ending of Paradise. It closes on a mystery, but gives you distinct clues about what happens to the crucial characters. How you interpret the clues is entirely up to you and the beliefs you hold. Fantastic - she includes us in the process of creation at a crucial moment. We make this book ourselves, as the men and women of Ruby made their worlds.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Morrison's best work so far,
By A Customer
This review is from: Paradise (Paperback)
In 'Paradise' Morrison's writing is even more beautiful and provoking than in her previous novels. Probably not the best for a first time reader, but absolutely incredible.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paradise - Toni Morrison,
By
This review is from: Paradise (Paperback)
I haven't read Morrison before, and I'm slightly wary that I've started here, with what is almost surely (such is the exemplary quality of the prose, the themes, the style, the control, the compassion, the tension, the intellect) one of her best books. If there are better among her works, then she more than deserves that Nobel prize.Paradise is, of course, a story of race. From it's explosive opening line ("They shoot the white girl first.") this is clear, even if one were not more generally aware of Morrison and her work. What unfolds is a story of two communities: the racically black town of Ruby, about to be riven by a conflict between it's youngers and elders, and a neighbouring community of women living in "the convent", named for the building's previous use. Through eight chapters, each bearing a woman's name, the story of the town and the convent, and how the separate women each come to live in it, and the tensions between the two, emerge, flinging the reader firmly to the immense detonation in the novel's final pages. Paradise is certainly one of the most powerful novels I've read. Primarily it is about tensions, conflicts: between gender, race, age, communities, time, even nature and humankind. It is compassionate, sometimes sharpy brutal, infused with history and poetry, and one of the most completely moving books I've come across. All reactions to books should be to some extent visceral rather than mental, purely instinctive rather than rational, and this appealed to me in those terms: like all my favourite novels, I can't explain why it draws me other to say: it struck me as a force, entire of itself.
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