Beloved

Morrison, Toni

3.95

434,582 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 0739342274 ISBN 13: 9780739342275

Publisher: Random House Audio, 2007

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding audio transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

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Review:

As with the ghost at its center, Beloved has taken many forms--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to Oprah Winfrey's decade-in-the-making movie to this challenging audiobook read by Lynn Whitfield. Whitfield, who won an Emmy Award playing the title role in The Josephine Baker Story, has a tough assignment as she guides us back and forth in time with Sethe, an escaped slave who's still shackled by memories of her murdered child. But, as we shift between Sethe's brutal plantation days and her haunted life immediately after the Civil War, we learn one secret after another until, finally, past and present are masterfully reconciled. (Running time: three hours, two cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs

From the Inside Flap:

Nominated for a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording, Toni Morrison's Beloved.
"The novel as spoken word is a completely new venue for readers and returns narrative to its origins. I am overjoyed that one of my books get to participate in this rejuvenation."
-Toni Morrison on her Grammy nomination
8 cassettes / 12 hours
Beautifully read by the Author, Toni Morrison
Unabridged
Listen to Toni Morrison read her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked her life in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved.
Sethe works at 'beating back the past, ' but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in her memory; in Denver's fear of the world outside the house; in the sadness that consumes Baby Suggs; in the arrival of Paul D, a fellow former slave; and, most powerfully, in Beloved, whose childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who has now come from the 'place over there' to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining possession of her present - and to throw off the long-dark legacy of her past - is at the center of this spellbinding novel. But it also moves beyond its particulars, combining imagination and the vision of legend with the unassailable truths of history.
Upon the original publication of Beloved, John Leonardwrote in the "Los Angeles Times: "I can't imagine American literature without it."
In fact, more than a decade later, it remains a preeminent novel of our time, speaking with timeless clarity and power to our experience as a nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance.

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