There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.
page 315
Table of Contents
Why Beloved?
The first book I read this year was Sula written by the inimitable Toni Morrison. After finishing that first joint, I immediately knew I wanted to read more of her writing. and I’ve heard Beloved recommended from multiple sources, including people who strongly recommended I read it after I mentioned reading Sula. So when I found that Beloved was the book club pick for lexi aka newlynova’s Patreon book club for the month of March 2026, I immediately put in a timed hold for it at the library.
I initially wanted to read this book as a bonus read for my Black History Month reading challenge but I made the decision to save it for the month of March so I could read it for the book club instead. That bonus spot went to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time instead, which was an excellent choice.
Beloved was first published in 1987 and since it was a highly acclaimed book, it has since had multiple editions published since then. Some of these editions come with an introduction by a scholar/critic. In my case, I read an edition published in 2006 by Everyman’s Library with an introduction by A. S. Byatt.
In my initial reading of this book, I skipped reading this introduction. I did this because I wanted to go into the text without another critic’s opinion on it colouring my reading. All I knew going into this book was what was in the Storygraph description and I wanted to keep it that way. I read the introduction after I had finished reading the book.
With that said, let’s get into it.
The Book
Beloved is a literary fiction novel set in 1870s Cincinnati, Ohio and tells the story of Sethe, an escaped slave and her young daughter Denver living in a place that gets referred to throughout the book as 124; looking this up says the full address is 124 Bluestone Road but as far as I remember it is mostly referred to simply as 124. In fact the opening sentences of the book mention it like so:
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.
page 9
Style
The opening paragraph is characteristic of what Toni Morrison is so good at. In my review of Sula I commented on Morrison’s ability to visualize the worlds in her books. From this singular paragraph I immediately got the vibe of the place this book is going to be spending a lot of time in. The house itself is a character but so are the people living in it and the paragraph does a superb job giving us a sense of both.
From a stylistic standpoint, the book differs from Sula in one key aspect which is its sense of chronology. Beloved played fast and loose with my sense of time and place and it moved between the perspectives of characters in a fluid manner eschewing any markers denoting such transitions.
As such, Beloved felt slippery. For large sections of the book, I had a hard time holding on to the book and its story and I felt my focus and my understand slipping away. In my previous book review I mentioned that I did not like overly long paragraphs as I tend to find them hard to parse. Along those lines Morrison opts to use long paragraphs of prose that are generally a combination of streams of both consciousness and memory.
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the book also does not denote character POV or timeline shifts at all. Which meant that I ended up re-reading paragraphs often just to figure out whose perspective I was reading and what was happening. This is not a book that can be read casually, it demands your full attention.
Characters
Beloved is told from the perspective of multiple characters, I counted five distinct POVs – Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Stamp Paid, and the titular Beloved. Just like with Sula, all POVs contain complex characterization, another aspect of Morrison’s writing that I very much appreciate.
I cannot say that I liked any of the characters but at the same I did not dislike any of them either. All of the POV characters are complex people with a whole lot of baggage that makes them the way they are. I found them all to be well thought out and intriguing people in their own right.
The characters in Beloved eschew simple moral definitions like “good” or “bad”. Nowhere is this more apparent in the story of Sethe which is derived from the real story of Margaret Garner who escaped slavery and fled to Ohio. Like with Margaret, Sethe also murdered one of her children, and she spends a lot of time in the story reckoning with that action from her past.
A significant chunk of the characterization of our POV characters comes in the form of memory sequences. That is, a character will recall an incident from their past, that is in some way connected to their “present” moment and that recollection or “rememory” as the book calls them serves as a way of providing the backstory for these characters.
Once I got past the slippery nature of the writing style in this book I found myself quite enjoying these memory sequences and they also showcase Morrison’s talent for describing scenes, people, events, and moments in such vivid colour that I could feel what the characters were feeling in those moments and what it meant to them in the present.
Themes
There is so much happening in this book thematically speaking that I still cannot quite wrap my head around all of it. I heard from people that this is a book that they read in school and I think it is great for that as it really benefits from deeper reading and analysis. In addition to that, the beauty of such a text is seeing the different interpretations and understandings people have of the story.
Memory
When I think of Beloved‘s themes, the first big one that came to me during my reading of the book was memory. More specifically, how humans interact with the past as sequences of memory and how and what we remember form the foundations of our very being. Our memories make us in a certain sense.
Adjacent to memory, this book is also one that deals with the nature of time and how that affects our perceptions of our memories and how that in turn affects our interactions with the people around us. Even the slippery time and place jumping prose of this book is a way that Morrison emphasizes this.
The characters of Beloved all have their own unique ways with dealing with the various traumas that happened throughout their lives. For example, Sethe’s whole deal is that she wants to keep the past away, which considering the details of her past is a very understandable impulse for her to have
To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The “better life” she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.
page 54
Paul D on the other hand has been worn out so much by his life and the various horrible things that happened to slaves in America that he has developed a tendency for repression even amongst those closest to him. The man is tired, and he is hurting but he isn’t quite ready to let it all out.
Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the beginning when her fingers on his knew, soft and reassuring, stopped him. Just as well. Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place where they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose, now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him.
page 88
Slavery
Since this book takes place in 1870s American and features former slaves as characters, the horrors and traumas of American chattel slavery are very much present in the bones of this book and every character’s memories involve memories of their experiences as a slave and in typical Morrison fashion, these are handled with a nuance and care that is not present in certain popular depictions of American slavery.
Like with Sula, Beloved is very much a book about Black people and everything about it is about those people and their lives, experiences, joys, traumas, and all the rest. I very much appreciate that Morrison continues to actively decenter white people in her writing. The white people in this book are more abstract voids of misery than actual individuals here.
Magical Realism
This book is often described and tagged as having elements of magical realism in it which initially triggered a feeling of trepidation in me. I generally don’t enjoy magical realism or find it particularly effective as a storytelling tool. In this case however, the elements of magical realism in this book are deployed sparingly and with great effectiveness.
Namely, the titular Beloved who’s appearance partway through the narrative actually enhanced the story with drops of gothic horror. This is not a horror novel but there are moments of interactions between Beloved, Sethe, and Denver that filled me with a certain sense of dread.
Concluding Thoughts
Beloved is one of those books that the more I think about it the more I like it. I think I am starting to understand why this book is so beloved (pun fully intended!) amongst critics and readers alike. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a book that demands your full attention and it rewards that attention with a story that has complex characters and a nuanced & compassionate understanding of the real history that their lives are based on.
My only major criticism of the book is about its writing style and I think I prefer the easier-to-read style in Sula over the slippery one of this book. That said, I still very much think this is an excellent book well worth reading, and if you haven’t read it already you should put it on your to-be-read pile.
This is certainly a book I won’t forget anytime soon which I think is apt for a book that deals with memory.
P.S – The epigraph of this book is a quote from Romans 9:25, and more specifically it is from the King James translation. The sourcing of this quote nerd-sniped for a bit because my copy of the Christian bible (a Contemporary English Version copy) had a different wording for Romans 9:25 so I didn’t know where exactly Toni Morrison got it from. There, now you know.
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