Scan barcode
A review by jlkenneth
Sula by Toni Morrison
5.0
”In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood on the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, maples, and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby…”
Only Toni Morrison could write this novel in such a richly layered, precise manner. Sula is a novel I will have to read again and again as life goes on, each time plumbing the depths of its nuanced themes and many mysteries a little more fully. This is a novel to analyze and unpack again and again and again!
I was really struck by Morrison’s precision with words and her ability to craft sentences like no one else. Who else could write that ”grass stood blade by blade, shocked into separateness by an ice that held for days”? SHOCKED INTO SEPARATENESS?! Come onnnn that’s gorgeous.
This was truly one of the most compelling explorations of rebel/outlaw women I think I’ve ever read. I loved the tension and contrast between Nel and Sula; you truly couldn’t say who was right or wrong, and that’s entirely the point. I have a strong knee-jerk reaction against some of Sula’s actions, and I know that Morrison sets her up deliberately to be expunged and exorcised from what we think of as “good” society. That said, I still really struggled to like her character at some points in the novel. I think we’re naturally bent to favor Nel, as Sula is the character who acts in opposition to the rules and norms of society.
I had such an “Aha” moment about 80% of the way through the story, however, when I finally thought to compare this to many of the Feminist awakening stories written by white women (Edna Pontellier in Chopin’s The Awakening came readily to mind), and the contrasts between how we view Sula vs. those other female protagonists helped me to greatly understand what Morrison’s doing here.
Regardless of which side you favor, the contrasts here are marvelously outlined. This was one of my favorite conversations between Nel and Sula about their choices to conform or rebel (among other, more spoiler-y issues that I’ll leave you to discover for yourself):
”You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.”
“What’s that?”
“Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”
“Really? What have you got to show for it?”
“Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”
“Lonely, ain’t it?”
“Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”
I personally don’t know exactly how I feel about a lot of this book and about several sections toward the end. It’s largely ambiguous and leaves a lot to the reader, and as a result it’s difficult to fully understand how some themes tie into the story of Nel and Sula vs the rest of the Bottom. But on the whole, I think I’ll be thinking about this book for days, wondering as the meaning of its doublings and contrasts, and questioning my own world more thoroughly as a result of reading it. In other words, it’s great and real literature; not the kind that is wrapped up smoothly in a single reading, but the sort that must first be lived to be understood.
Morrison shows us all how the world of the novel is deliberately constructed by the narrator to illuminate the themes and characters of her story. She frequently uses nature to reveal and foreshadow the events of the novel; this quote, for instance, exploring the coming of adolescence the loss of childhood:
”Then summer came. A summer lomo with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. And the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. Even their footsteps left a smell of smoke behind.”
Somewhat unrelated, but I had Hozier’s “All Things End” stuck in my head playing on a loop for the final 50 pages, and it really suit the tone and vibe of this book.
One last exceedingly lovely quote:
”There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tidy bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.”
Only Toni Morrison could write this novel in such a richly layered, precise manner. Sula is a novel I will have to read again and again as life goes on, each time plumbing the depths of its nuanced themes and many mysteries a little more fully. This is a novel to analyze and unpack again and again and again!
I was really struck by Morrison’s precision with words and her ability to craft sentences like no one else. Who else could write that ”grass stood blade by blade, shocked into separateness by an ice that held for days”? SHOCKED INTO SEPARATENESS?! Come onnnn that’s gorgeous.
This was truly one of the most compelling explorations of rebel/outlaw women I think I’ve ever read. I loved the tension and contrast between Nel and Sula; you truly couldn’t say who was right or wrong, and that’s entirely the point. I have a strong knee-jerk reaction against some of Sula’s actions, and I know that Morrison sets her up deliberately to be expunged and exorcised from what we think of as “good” society. That said, I still really struggled to like her character at some points in the novel. I think we’re naturally bent to favor Nel, as Sula is the character who acts in opposition to the rules and norms of society.
I had such an “Aha” moment about 80% of the way through the story, however, when I finally thought to compare this to many of the Feminist awakening stories written by white women (Edna Pontellier in Chopin’s The Awakening came readily to mind), and the contrasts between how we view Sula vs. those other female protagonists helped me to greatly understand what Morrison’s doing here.
Regardless of which side you favor, the contrasts here are marvelously outlined. This was one of my favorite conversations between Nel and Sula about their choices to conform or rebel (among other, more spoiler-y issues that I’ll leave you to discover for yourself):
”You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.”
“What’s that?”
“Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”
“Really? What have you got to show for it?”
“Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”
“Lonely, ain’t it?”
“Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”
I personally don’t know exactly how I feel about a lot of this book and about several sections toward the end. It’s largely ambiguous and leaves a lot to the reader, and as a result it’s difficult to fully understand how some themes tie into the story of Nel and Sula vs the rest of the Bottom. But on the whole, I think I’ll be thinking about this book for days, wondering as the meaning of its doublings and contrasts, and questioning my own world more thoroughly as a result of reading it. In other words, it’s great and real literature; not the kind that is wrapped up smoothly in a single reading, but the sort that must first be lived to be understood.
Morrison shows us all how the world of the novel is deliberately constructed by the narrator to illuminate the themes and characters of her story. She frequently uses nature to reveal and foreshadow the events of the novel; this quote, for instance, exploring the coming of adolescence the loss of childhood:
”Then summer came. A summer lomo with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. And the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. Even their footsteps left a smell of smoke behind.”
Somewhat unrelated, but I had Hozier’s “All Things End” stuck in my head playing on a loop for the final 50 pages, and it really suit the tone and vibe of this book.
One last exceedingly lovely quote:
”There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tidy bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.”