The Bluest Eye

By (author) Toni Morrison; By (author) Morrison Toni
Short description/annotation:
A novel that immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family - Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola - in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows.
Description:

Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.

Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing.

‘She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That’s why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them’ Afua Hirsch

‘Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures’ Washington Post

‘When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape’ Ben Okri

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

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Not only a story but an awe-inspiring poem that confronts beauty itself.
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So charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry
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I imagine if our greatest American novelist, William Faulkner, were alive today he would herald Toni Morrison''s emergence as a kindred spirit... Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is the rarest of pleasures
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The Bluest Eye is a fine book, a lament for all starved and stunted children everywhere
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Morrison''s style rivets the reader...her synaesthetic, often rhythmic, even chanting prose recalls both Faulkner and Emily Dickinson
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Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her
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This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl''s universe
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A profoundly successful work of fiction... Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth...it is an experience
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I imagine if our greatest American novelist, William Faulkner, were alive today he would herald Toni Morrison''s emergence as a kindred spirit... Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is the rarest of pleasures
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Searing and haunting... [The Bluest Eye] is a unique piece of literature because it is both timeless and relevant
Biographical note:
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.
Promotional headline:
Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.