Love - Hardcover

Morrison, Toni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0676976182 ISBN 13: 9780676976182

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived audio that illuminates the full spectrum of desire.

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida -- even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces -- a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

This audacious vision of the nature of love -- its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread -- is rich in characters and striking scenes, and in its profound understanding of how alive the past can be.

A major addition to the canon of one of the world’s literary masters.

This is coast country, humid and God fearing, where female recklessness runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence -- a kind of pitty-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two-seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like Presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can’t hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart. -- from Love

About this title

Review:

The first page of Toni Morrison's novel Love is a soft introduction to a narrator who pulls you in with her version of a tale of the ocean-side community of Up Beach, a once popular ocean resort. Morrison introduces an enclave of people who react to one man--Bill Cosey--and to each other as they tell of his affect on generations of characters living in the seaside community. One clear truth here, told time and again, is how folks love and hate each other and the myriad ways it's manifested; these versions of humanity are seen in almost every line. Monsters and ghosts creep into young girls' dreams and around corners and then return to staid ladies' lives as they age and remember friendships and cold battles. Men and women--Heed, Romen, Junior, Christine, Celestial, and the rest of Morrison's cast--cry and sing out their weaknesses and strengths in rotating perspectives. Sandler, a Cosey employee, is a brilliant agent of Morrison's descriptions of human behavior, "Then, in a sudden shift of subject that children and heavy drinkers enjoy, 'My son, Billy was about your age. When he died, I mean.'" And Romen is allowed to play hero by saving a young girl from a brutal gang rape, while at the same time, he battles disgust like no superhuman would be caught dead feeling.

Though slim in pages, Morrison constructs Love with a precision and elegance that shows her characters' flaws and fears with brutal accuracy. Love may be less complex than others in the grand Morrison oeuvre, but not because Morrison performs literary hand-holding. Readers will experience in this smooth, sharp-eyed gem another instance of the Toni Morrison craftsmanship: she enters your mind, hangs a tale or two there, and leaves just as quietly as she came. --E. Brooke Gilbert

From the Back Cover:

“Love seduces with Toni Morrison’s signature lush prose and colorfully complex, textured scenes of human longing, scheming, suffering, and loss.”
-Lisa Shea, Elle

“It’s a dense, dark star of a novel, seemingly eccentric, secretly shapely, ... and with Morrison writing at the top of her game.”
-David Gates, Newsweek

“Haunting . . . In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals the glories and horrors of the past . . . Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel.”
-Publisher’s Weekly

“Love is a profound novel. As a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric but comfortably open style.”
-Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred and boxed review)

“A gorgeous deployment of enigmatic flashbacks...Love is an elegantly shaped epic of infatuation, enslavement, and liberation: a rich and heartening return to Nobel-worthy form.”
-Kirkus (starred review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0676976182
• ISBN 13: 9780676976182
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208