| Title | : | A Mercy |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0307264238 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780307264237 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 167 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2008 |
| Awards | : | Orange Prize Fiction Longlist (2009), James Tait Black Memorial Prize Fiction (2008), The Rooster -- The Morning News Tournament of Books (2009) |
This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter - a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
A Mercy Reviews
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This is a devastating look not only at the slave experience in the 17th century, but of various forms of bondage and of the place of women in that world. While skin color may have defined one sort of servitude, gender and class define others. Yet there are ways to find space between the bars.
Toni Morrison - from The Telegraph
Set in the late 17th century, this is an ensemble story. Florens is a young, spirited slave girl. She speaks in the first person giving us a look from inside her skin. Except for one chapter by Florens’ mother, the rest of the book is third person. We see Florens’ experience with owners, families and yearnings old and new. Jakob is a kindly merchant/farmer, eager to help the unfortunate, always recalling his own humble, even desperate childhood. Rebekka is outwardly a free white woman, but truly was sold by her parents to be Jakob’s wife no less than any black slave. Lina is the eldest of three helper women on Jakob’s farm, a mother and friend to Rebekka. She is a Native American, a survivor of a small pox outbreak and the subsequent torching of her village. Sorrow is a black-toothed, somewhat addled woman who washed up on shore after a shipwreck. She holds conversations with an imaginary twin. Morrison also shows us two indentured servants. Despite having fixed terms to their indenture, their bosses find or concoct excuses to prolong their indebtedness and thus their servitude endlessly.the original seven years stretched to twenty-some, he said, and he had long ago forgotten most of the mischief that kept extending his bondage.
One cannot but think of today’s extension of tours of duty in the military.
Religion comes in for a beating here.Religion, as Rebekka experienced if from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred.
In one scene, Florens is suspected by a bizarre woman of being a witch and is forced to strip so she can be checked to see if she has a tail. Later, she attaches herself to a free black man in another form of devotion, only to have that work out badly. Lina had been taken in by a group of fundamentalists, who, unkindly, named her Messalina, seeing her as cursed by God. A curate is guilty of buggering a young boy.
The 17th century is a cruel, harsh world…it was clear in her household that execution was a festivity as exciting as a king’s parade. Brawls, knifings and kidnaps were so common in the city of her birth that the warnings of slaughter in a new, unseen world were like threats of bad weather
both in the old world and the new. Jakob offers a relatively safe place, a fenced-in peaceful community where orphans collect.
But even with all the horror of the world we still define for ourselves who we are, maybe by paring crusted misery from our memory, maybe from holding some part of our true self separate from the harsh world.Solitude, regret and fury would have broken her had she not erased those six years preceding the death of the world. The company of other children, industrious mothers in beautiful jewelry, the majestic plan of life: when to vacate, to harvest, to burn, to hunt; ceremonies of death, birth and worship. She stored and sorted what she dared to recall and eliminated the rest, an activity that shaped her inside and out. By the time Mistress came, her self-invention was almost perfected. Soon it was irresistible.
While maybe not the masterpiece that
Beloved was, A Mercy is a very dense novel, a torte of a work, covering a range of subjects rich in significance, in language that is moving and penetrating.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Morrison’s
Facebook page - Morrison passed in 2019. The page is maintained by Knopf.
Reviews of other Morrison work
-----2014 -
God Help the Child
-----2011 -
Home
-----1987 -
Beloved
Read but not reviewed
-----1977 -
Song of Solomon
-----1973 -
Sula -
“It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song– all of it cooked together in the colour of my skin.” – Toni Morrison, A Mercy
It’s the 17th Century, and slavery is still relatively new in the Americas. The people living there have either been brought there by force or have voluntarily gone there to start a new life. They are people with no roots in their new country, no family either. And in such a small space, Morrison manages to pack away so many stories, so many emotions.
This was definitely a satisfying read and, as is always the case with Morrison, we are rewarded with poetic and perfectly crafted sentences.
Morrison paints the New World as a place of hope, but also very different from the Old World:
“Right, he thought, looking at a sky vulgar with stars. Clear and right. The silver that glittered there was not at all unreachable. And that wide swath of cream pouring through the stars was his for the tasting.”
“Unlike the English fogs he had known since he could walk, or those way north where he lived now, this one was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream.”
What’s common among the women in the story is that they are all victims. Regardless of colour or station, be they slave or free, they are reliant on men and their situation is precarious. They are in many ways pawns; their role in the New World is only slightly above cattle.
How do people displaced from their homes try to come to terms with this separation? How do they try to save their cultures and traditions?
“Relying on memory and her own resources, she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world.”
Slavery is never easy to read about but this line was especially poignant to me:
“The two men walked the row, inspecting. D’Ortega identifying talents, weaknesses and possibilities, but silent about the scars, the wounds like misplaced veins tracing their skin.”
This book has a lot of sadness in it, then again Morrison’s books are never cheerful. What I love about her chronicles is that she gives voices and feelings to people who are often ignored. Morrison always seems to adds a new layer of emotion to her characters. -
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Toni, Toni, Toni...it feels good to know you again.
A Mercy is a gorgeous narrative of a dark time that flitters from person to person: child, slave, sympathetic Dutch businessman, mother. Betrayal is ever present, even seemingly from mother to child.
The setting and subject is slavery in 17th century America, specifically Catholic Maryland. These are early days in the New World. Superstition was rife. Black magic and the devil were palpably real.
With a bevy of glimpses Morrison displays most of the facets of slavery in this period, in this place. She does not forget that it was black Africans who kidnapped and sold black Africans to white Europeans, who sold them into slavery. She did not forget that white slavery existed in this time. She wrote about a people's strife without bended knee and bleeding heart, and yet your heart will bleed.
Admittedly, I was turned off within the first few pages, because of the gypsy narration. I like permanence in my storytelling voice and this was very reminiscent of William Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury with its variant and confusing p.o.v.s and its scene setting via murky imagery. But I stuck with it, soon was enjoying A Mercy and in the end, came to love it.
The writing is so strong, emotive and filled with vivid imagery. It is the kind of writing that inspires writers in their craft.
This was a revisit to an old acquaintance for me. Not since college have I read a Toni Morrison novel. I loved it then, so why the delay? Why do we do that? When you only have one life - a single existence which could be snuffed out in an instance - why neglect the good things in life? Cherish what you have. It may be taken from you. Though we can only hope fate will be merciful. -
Back in college I took a course on Colonial America because I had to. It was pretty tough for me to get into it at the time, since I never really gave a crap about that inaccessible and unglamorous period. I wish this book had been around in those days, because Morrison's efforts to describe that bizarre and confusing world might've helped me get better picture of the time, and therefore care more about what I was learning. To me, A Mercy really is incredible historical fiction that provides access to a strange time and the people who lived in it. Morrison exposes the insides of her seventeenth-century characters in a way that made them sympathetic and comprehensible, though still remote and unfamiliar, even foreign. I didn't feel I could relate to these people at all, which for me was part of the point -- what do I have in common with someone living four hundred years ago? -- but also kept me feeling somewhat detached for the first two thirds of the novel. I enjoyed it, but I didn't really freak out about this book the way some other Booksters did until the last few chapters, which were totally fabulous and really did blow my mind.
Recently on here there was some friendly (I think) bickering about Howard Zinn's People's History of the US and the whole question of multiculturalism and revisionist history. Although it's fiction, A Mercy is an almost perfect example of how I like my American history served: organic, unflinching, and successfully synthesizing, rather than just reacting against previous histories. In A Mercy, Morrison tears away the veil of idealism and whitewashing to stare unflinchingly at the myth of America, then unapologetically celebrates that very myth (it seemed to me), and it's pretty extraordinary. There's one passage in here about a character leaving the cramped, violent filth of Europe for the fresh, clean, virginal Eden of the New World, and it just gave me chills. I mean, it's really spectacular! She writes about all this slavery and sexual violence and persecution and disease in a way that lets you imagine what it was like to live in that era, and somehow, paradoxically, it makes the classic American myths -- especially the myth of freedom -- seem true for the first time, in a new way.... if that makes any sense. Morrison captures the complexity and brutality of Colonial America, cataloguing the various ways there were to be unfree (slavery, indentured servitude, marriage, etc.) through a multiethnic cast of characters who she's able to write as both weighty symbols and deeply human individuals in a way only
Toni Morrison -- and almost no one else -- is able to get away with. The chapters are written from the perspectives of the various characters, in this unbelievable Morrisonesque language that will make you freak out. Yeah, this book probably will make you freak out.... Plus, it's super short! It's also a really interesting perspective on the legacy of American slavery, that recontextualizes it in a much earlier, more northern setting than most treatments, and gets into some different questions and issues than a lot of us are probably used to. Also, did I mention this lady can write?
So yeah, in closing: I wasn't competely nuts about this, and especially at the beginning I had a couple weird moments where I almost felt like I was reading a trashy romance novel -- because of the subject matter, not the style -- but it was a good book, and I do recommend it. -
An author arrives at the pinnacle of her powers. She writes her masterpiece. Does she know it will never be so good again? Virginia Woolf famously struggled after completing The Waves and went into a long mounting depression that killed her. Toni Morrison's writing career though is more similar to Don DeLillo. The masterpiece came relatively early. Lots of novels follow the masterpiece. None of them reach the heights of the masterpiece but they are novels we're very glad to have in the world.
In many ways A Mercy feels like the novel Morrison wrote before Beloved. It is a beautiful book in its thrilling complexity of design and poetic prose. When I finished it I immediately began reading it again - to discover what I had missed and gain more clarity on how all the pieces fall together in chronology. It takes us back to the beginnings of America. Jacob Vaark arrives from Europe. He advertises for an English wife. He takes pity on a native American orphan and hires her. His ambitions though extend beyond farming. When a business associate can't afford to pay a debt he offers Jacob shackled slave workers. Jacob is appalled. A woman begs him to take her daughter. This is the act of mercy. The half crazy girl of a shipwreck also joins the family. Morrison shuffles time frames as she is so good at doing. And gives all her characters a distinctive voice. The women are all essentially captive though Jacob is a kindly master. He though dies of smallpox which his wife also catches. The girls know they will be leaves for every wind that blows unless the wife survives the sickness and the book almost ends with their attempts to save her, to change the course of history. The end itself is the beginning: the snatching of the mercy child's mother from her home in Africa and her experience of being sold into slavery. -
This story occurs in the late 1600s, during early days of slavery in America (that is, African people being used as slaves). By that time however, the tradition of using 'indentured servants' - essentially white slaves - was already well established.
In this tale, several slaves work on a small farm run by Jacob and Rebekka Vaark.
The indentured servants are: Native American Lina - whose tribe has been decimated by disease;
Black child Florens - who was given away by her mother;
And jinxed Sorrow, who seems to bring bad luck wherever she goes.
As Jacob and Rebekka fall victim to smallpox the women - Lina, Florens, Sorrow, and Rebekka - each tells her tale in her own voice.
We learn that Lina is a capable farmer who forged a friendship with Rebekka; that Florens yearns for affection and fell in love with a free African blacksmith;
That uneducated Sorrow - who may be more clever than she seems - still can't fathom why she keeps getting pregnant;
And that Rebekka traveled to America to marry a man she didn't know.
Though the Vaarks are relatively kind masters the book touches on the evils of slavery and demonstrates the soul-deep damage caused by this practice. A well-written book with compelling and interesting characters.
You can follow my reviews at
https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot.... -
Reread
When the furor erupted over the 1619 Project, my thoughts went back to this work, which is set in 1690. Its characters’ dealing with an outbreak of smallpox is another timely element.
With the enslaved mother and daughter at the core of the book, I could envision that some might feel this novel is
Beloved-“lite,” but I would say that’s true only in its size and its arguably easier style. In under 170 pages Morrison satisfyingly includes stories of several individuals, including a landowning widow and her daughter who's suspected of being a witch. I’m almost tempted to say this is my favorite Morrison, but I can’t—that would be like choosing a favorite child.
My favorite passage ends the second-to-last paragraph, so I won’t quote it here, as it ties up the themes beautifully and it’s best to come upon it yourself.
*
Previous review:
Yes, I am a
Toni Morrison fan and believe she is incapable of writing a bad book, but that doesn't mean I wasn't ready to be critical of her new book if necessary. It's not necessary. The beginning may seem slow (that never bothers me) as we are thrust into a world that is faraway in time, but real. Historical details never bog down; they are worn lightly, as a reviewer put it.
Reviewers have compared one character here to Sethe from
Beloved; and though I see the parallel, this is a very different book. Morrison never repeats a book: each is different from the others. Here the setting is the U.S. before it was the U.S. and slavery is presented in all its forms: black, white, natives, indentured Europeans, 'rescued' orphans, those who are needy, etc. Life is difficult, dangerous and arduous for all, yet there are some who manage to make connections to others despite everything. A slim book that contains multitudes.
The sign of a great book for me: I paged back to the beginning as I neared the end (as I approached the ending, I couldn't put it down) and when I was finished, I could've read it all over again. I will one day. -
All of Morrison’s novels are political and historical and poignant. A Mercy returns to the end of the seventeenth century to evaluate the unfolding of racial slavery within a dark, superstitious, colonial America.
From a thoroughly disadvantaged background, European settlers gradually develop a frightening ethnocentric view—coupled with greed—that will lead to relentless violence against blacks and natives. Stories of bondage and abandonment abound. Disorientation, caused by an absurd lack of moral decency, is intensified by Morrison’s multi-layered perspectives, all packed into one short narrative that concludes with the following: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing. -
A Mercy takes us on a voyage into the dark world of slavery in the 1690s through the eyes of several slaves and one owner. In typical Morrison style, the time is non-linear, but it is an easier book to follow than say Beloved. Its text is less powerful and poetic than say, Beloved, but still there is a poignancy and urgency to the writing. Given the current slavery-denial in the media, it is probably a timely read.
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I was enthralled with the incandescent prose and moving voices of four women in this tale set on a remote farm in colonial New York in the 1690s. It was outstanding in the audiobook form read by the author, often sending chills up my spine with the vibrant power of its poetry. A major theme is how people harness love in all its forms and how they deal with the perception of betrayal. Another is the paradox of the foundation of the new world both on the hunger for freedom and on various forms of slavery (classic slavery, indentured servants, arranged marriage).
The characters are wonderfully drawn. Rebekka is a “mail order” bride from England for a Dutch farmer turned trader, Jacob Vaart, whom she comes to loves dearly. Her household includes: Lina, a Native American orphaned from the decimation of her tribe by smallpox; Florens, a black slave girl whom Jacob reluctantly takes on as payment of a debt; and Sorrow, a mentally disturbed black slave who grew up on a ship of her slave trader father. Together they make a virtual family over the long intervals while Jacob is away.
Rebekkah grieves over the loss of her children to disease and injury. She doesn’t take to the judgmental forms of Christianity in the distant town. Instead she finds community with her workers at the farm. On the ship journey to America, she surprised herself by admiring the verve and parallel outlook of fellow women passengers headed for a life of prostitution in the new world:
What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men. Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms. Some, like Lina, who had experienced both deliverance and destruction at their hands, withdrew. Some, like Sorrow, who apparently was never coached by other females, became their play. Some like her shipmates fought them. Others, the pious, obeyed them. And a few, like herself, after a mutually loving relationship, became like children when the man was gone.
The life Jacob brings her is so much freer than her life in London, but his travel to fulfill his ambition for an estate is a form of betrayal which leaves her in helpless loneliness:
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness, the menace of familiar objects lying still. …
Silence would fall like snow floating around her head and shoulders, spreading outward to wind-driven yet quiet leaves, dangling cowbells, the whack of Lina’s axe chopping firewood nearby. Her skin would flush, then chill. Sound would return eventually, but the loneliness might remain for days. Until, in the middle of it, he would ride up shouting.
“Where’s my star?”
“Here in the north,” she’d reply and he would toss a bolt of calico at her feet or hand her a packet of needles.
I was most interested in Lina, who is the most self-reliant of the women. Despite her losses, she has the strongest foundation owing to having had a loving mother and identity forged through her connections of her tribe. The betrayal she feels lies in the blind destructiveness of the immigrant invaders:
Her people had built sheltering cities for a thousand years and, except for the deathfeet of the Europes, might have built them for a thousand more. As it turned out the sachem had been dead wrong. The Europes neither fled nor died out. … They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any women for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god. …
Solitude would have crushed her had she not fallen into hermit skills and become one more thing that moved in the natural world. She cawed with birds, chatted with plants, spoke to squirrels, sang to the cow and opened her mouth to rain. The shame of having survived the destruction of her families shrank with her vow never to betray or abandon anyone she cherished.
Sorrow is a strange bird with few skills to survive and an imaginary twin to ease her solitude. Having never known love, she is totally bowled over and obsessed with it when it happens to her, first with a free black man who periodically does blacksmith work for the farm and later with her child. The blacksmith betrays her by not committing to the relationship. The rapture of her love for him is portrayed so compellingly:
The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there. I run away into the cowshed to stop this thing from happening inside me. Nothing stops it. There is only you. Nothing outside of you. My eyes not my stomach are the hungry pats of me. There will never be enough time to look how you move. Your arm goes up to strike iron. You drop to one knee. You bend. You stop to pour water first on the iron then down your throat. Before you know I am the world I am already kill by you. My mouth is open, my legs go softly and the heart is stretching to break.
Florens comes off as the smartest of the women. She is the only one who can read, and she shows great courage and problem solving skills when tasked to make a long journey alone to get help from a herbalist when Jacob falls ill. Her mother made a sacrifice to give her up to Jacob instead of herself as a means of saving her from sexual assault by the master who owes Jacob money. Yet Florens is blind to that mercy and forever feels thrown away.
The audiobook came with a helpful interview with Morrison added at the end. She eloquently explains some of her intentions in portraying the uncertain future for people living in the new world, the inventive ad-hoc nature of its social forms, and the prevalence of slavery independent of racism. I see this is the seventh book by Morrison I have had the pleasure of experiencing. I see also that I gave each one 4 stars. Enough of such niggling. Who am I to deny this one five stars when it resonates so long after reading it. -
[8/10]
What a beautifully heart-breaking book. It's a bit disorienting, jumping around from different characters' perspectives, and told in different writing styles. But I think that lends itself to the sort of medley of pain and struggle and sorrow these characters' face. Each has their own story to tell about loss, about displacement and about learning to live through it as best they can. And Morrison excellently captures those feelings without every feeling didactic. They are richly crafted and flawed characters who you can't help but root for. I think this one would reward a second reading after you've got the initial understanding of exactly what is happening, and upon re-read you can appreciate how she tells it so masterfully. -
[If you haven't watched the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, do yourself a favor and find it somewhere.]
I was uncertain about this book until a little more than halfway through at which point I fell in love. Eight women of no importance--mothers, daughters, whores, and thieves--having a tea ceremony in the dark lower deck of a ship crossing the Atlantic at the tail end of the seventeenth century. There is no tea, only warm water spirited with rum, along with cheese and stale biscuits, and the women each extend a pinky finger, imitating what they imagine to be the manners of queens. Magic! Then there's a bit of witchery, and a great deal of unrequited love with even some LGBT representation thrown im. The result is a gem only slightly less lustrous than some of the others in Morrison's crown. -
“America, whatever the danger, how could it possibly be worse?”
This may be a short novel, one of Morrison's last ones (2008), but the feeling of disorientation that creeps up on you at the first reading is immediately reminiscent of Faulkner. Morrison made use of the Faulknerian techniques of twisted perspectives and stream of consciousness before, but here she goes a step further. The result is that you only get a little insight into the story towards the end of the book, which immediately makes a second reading all the more rewarding. Because only then does the layering of this novel really come into its own.
The story may be opaque, but the context and themes provided by Morrison are not. The setting is the British colonies in what would later become the United States, at the end of the 17th century, so less than 100 years after their establishment. Morrison knows perfectly how to evoke the harshness and diversity of the inhabitants and the landscapes, at a time when the region still could evolve in all directions, and formal slavery, for instance, had only just made its appearance. The characters are equally diverse, although the narrative perspectives are mainly those of women. Also, all protagonist are damaged people, displaced in the broadest sense of the word (the Europeans, the Native Americans, the Afro-Americans), and none of them are all good or all bad.
The title betrays the biblical undertone, and this is certainly present in other respects (including references to paradise, and to the suffering of Job). But the main focus of Morrison is the precarious situation of the women, because she lets them do the talking most of the time. This book is by no means an easy read, but it once again demonstrates the power of literature to evoke an inscrutable world and make you think on the harshness of reality and of the place of human relations therein. (rating 3.5 stars) -
أولًا : بعيدًا عن الرواية لا تجعلوا دور النشر تخدعكم – خصوصًا العربية – بجملة الروائي الحائز على جائزة البوكر عام.... الروائي الحائز على جائزة البحر المتوسط عام …. الروائية الحائزة جائزة نوبل عام ….. هذا من باب العلم فقط وليس له علاقة بهذه الرواية. وفور مشاهدتكم لهذه الجملة أجعلوا الشك أول أمركم في العمل الذي بين أيديكم،
وعن الرواية لمن هم مهتمين بزمن العبودية وسيجدها طبعًا عند سادات العبودية في التاريخ الحديث حيث الولايات المتحدة الامريكية. لهدا تعود بكم الرواية لزمن الجذور. حيث القرن السابع عشر ميلادي توني موريسون. من قرأ كوخ العم توم واعجبه الإطار العام للرواية ستعجبه هذه الرواية.
عن تاريخ العبودية.. الرق.. استعباد اللون الأسو��.. هنا أحد أبرز سمات التاريخ الأسود الإمريكي، العبودية من خلال قلم توني موريسون وبحرقة وعنفوان تستشفه من خلاله الألم الحقيقي اللإنسان.
لم أجد تفسيرًا يليق بعنوان الرواية (A Mercy) غير أنها الرحمة التي يطلبها (العبد) في زمن العبودية من خلال الزمان والمكان في الرواية. علمًا أن هذا الموضوع للمؤلفة ليس بجديد بل نستطيع القول أنه القاعدة الرئيسة التي بنت توني عليها الكثير من كتباتها طوال حياتها.
يحتاج منك العمل أن تتحمله في الربع الأول فقط لعجزك الأولي عن تحديد نوع الرواي وكثرة الأصوات ثم سرعان ما تتحدد البوصلة. بوح الأم في الرواية كان وقعه قاس جدًا ووصف هجوم تجار النخاسة على منازلهم وحرقهم لها شيء مقزز. -
Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is one of the most infuriating, lovely, haunted and haunting works I’ve read in many a moon. It is one of the few books I can remember that sent me back to read key passages and even whole chapters after I finished it to get clues to its maddeningly vague denouement and sample the blood-soaked, well-seeded soil of its prose one more time. I didn’t reread anything in frustration, but in gratitude and admiration.
A Mercy is set ostensibly in the late 17th century, a fact I didn’t believe for a minute and yet strangely didn’t bother me in the least. While the book lacks the heavy weight of multiple and minute details that grant the usual work of historical fiction verisimilitude, it also doesn’t contain any howling anachronisms that hurl the reader out of the spell being cast. I feel more than a hard scrabble colonial era farm in an America barely shed of its birth caul, A Mercy is instead set in a place called ‘Morrisonland’, a gothic, sinister place suffused with lust, longing, confusions of identity and thwarted passions and improbable fates. It is a place that exists simultaneously only in the mind of its author and is a perfect representation of one aspect of America’s fucked up soul. It is a pagan place, not a Christian one, full of dark ritual, demons and a sprit-infused geography that telegraphs well impending tragedy for those with eyes to see.
As in all Morrison books, race is central, skin colors of all grades on display throughout in a mad dance of slavery, ownership, parent and discarded child, victim and potential killer. But Morrison is too canny and wise to write a book that is a straight up indictment of the huge festering wound that is the American subjugation of African and Native American people. Everyone wrestles with their own slavery in this book, whether it is to ideas of mercantile ascension and social respect, loveless marriage, or thralldom to a land that will break bones before it yields anything that offers anything remotely resembling sustenance.
Morrison plants a few seeds of traditional romance within the narrative that point to the possibility of one character, the slave girl, Florens, escaping to a better fate via a freed African blacksmith and their intense physical relationship that develops. But once again Morrison is too true to her own darker gifts for any fairy tale ending where the princess is rescued and taken to some magic kingdom free of bitterness and strife. Instead, as in real life, a lesser fate and shadow identity is assumed where one that was hopefully headed for an upward trajectory is cast down utterly into blank confusion through her own befuddled mind and over-attachment to the lures of the body and a fantasy future that was always unlikely at best.
It’s a tough ending, one if written by anyone other than Morrison might sparks of racism and sexism but the hard ending is foreshadowed with great effectiveness and anyone expecting all to end well in this stretch fly infested swampland wasn’t reading the text closely enough or else read too many Harlequins when they were younger. And while the ending is bitter and hard there are also grace notes of redemption, of life merely going on, of other wounded ones becoming ‘Complete’ that offer partial recompense for this harsh vision, making not wholly bleak, but tinged with small sweetness, like a flower bloomed in shadow. -
Short, tragic, beautifully written book set in the late 17th century in the American Colonies. It speaks of slavery, indentured servitude, patriarchy, exploitation, superstition, disease, and child mortality. Prominent themes include fear of abandonment, lack of agency, and unintended consequences. The author elucidates the seeds of issues that still have repercussions today.
Morrison focuses this book on an ensemble of characters. Jacob Vaark finds slavery abhorrent but, at the urging of her mother, accepts Florens as partial payment of a debt. She joins Lina, an indentured servant from a native tribe, and Sorrow, a mixed-race orphan that survives a shipwreck, in laboring at the Vaark’s farm. Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, arrives from London as what we would call a mail order bride. Scully and Willard are two male indentured servants whose servitude keeps getting extended by dubious means. A free African blacksmith plays a key role. Through this dream-like narrative, the reader learns the backstories of these characters.
Morrison explores oppression based on gender, race, and class. She shows the heartbreak of mothers unable to protect their children. She writes expressively and packs a great deal into a slim novel. The sense of time and place is vivid. This is my first experience in reading Morrison’s work, and I look forward to reading more from her catalogue. A Mercy is an impressive book that conveys a powerful message in an artistic way. -
This is only my second Toni Morrison after reading Song of Solomon last year, I guess I am tiptoeing cautiously towards her major works.
It is extraordinarily impressive what Morrison manages to do here in this slim novel (167 pgs). The text rapidly immerses you in late 17th century America and almost all the characters are either orphans or foundlings. Essentially, one might classify this as a character study, each chapter tells one person's story of how they came to be alone in the world, and as the novel progresses, you begin to see what traits might allow them to survive.
It is so cleverly done. So much packed into a small space and, as I found with Song of Solomon, there is something quotable on almost every page.
Suddenly Jacob felt his stomach seize. The tobacco odor, so welcoming when he arrived, now nauseated him. Or was it the sugared rice, the hog cuts fried and dripping with molasses, the cocoa Lady D'Ortega was giddy about? Whatever it was, he couldn't stay there surrounded by a passel of slaves whose silence made him imagine an avalanche seen from a great distance. No sound, just the knowledge of a roar he could not hear.
An impressive novel from one of America's greatest authors. -
Krenuvši s ovom malom i tankom knjigom očekivala sam pročitati ju u jednom dahu. Što inače i bih ako gledamo samo na broj stranica (158). Ovaj put sam se baš prevarila. Nije ovo jedna od takvih knjiga, ovoj se morate posvetiti. Iščitavati i razmišljati, povezivati i zaključivati, proživjeti svaku priču ispričanu kroz svaki od četiri ženska lika.
Cijeli osvrt pronađite ovdje:
https://knjige-u-svom-filmu.webador.c... -
Maybe it's the bitter taste Beloved left me with; Maybe it's that she comes off as the poor woman's Maya Angelou; Maybe it's just that no matter how much I want to like her writing, I just can't.
The first four chapters were confusing as hell and the remaining ones were disorienting. The POV's from chapter to chapter were so intertwined, I could barely remember who was talking and found myself constantly going back to the beginning of that particular chapter to double check. Not only that, but the timeline from chapter to chapter was muddled. Add to that nausea the style of writing. While the narrative was meant to be abrupt and disjointed, it actually came across as a sophomoric attempt to show a world that the writer herself stereotyped.
With all that said, I did enjoy the ending of the book; the bird's eye view into the lives of the cast as it were to unfold and the purity that it conveyed. Though it felt like it took blood, sweat, and tears just to get there. -
By the end of this novel I felt as though I had finished reading a collection of character sketches that could be used to form a much larger and perhaps more coherent text. Each chapter skips around from one character to another, and from first to third person narration, which in itself is not a problem, and if done well can make an interesting and eclectic whole. In this case, the text simply became frustrating; a puzzle that is frankly not interesting enough to put together.
The characters in this novel are diverse and could be very interesting if they were given the pages count they need. The characters consist of a Native American slave woman, a black slave woman who has a reputation of "madness," a young black slave girl whose sale to another man was urged on by her own mother, a pair of white atheists (who seem nice at first, but are really like all other whites, bad), a freed young blacksmith, and two indentured men. We learn bits and pieces about each of these people, but never enough to truly care about them. The small histories we are given whet the appetite for more details that are never delivered. After reading Beloved one gets spoiled by the closeness that we can have with characters like Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, but in A Mercy it felt that the characters were being held away from the reader, forcing them to be impersonal. Even in Paradise a novel filled with dozens of characters, the individuals at least seemed more alive than those in Morrison's new text.
Now for the Narrative. I simply do not know what to say as there is so little there. What is the point of the novel? Where do the characters end up? There is little development, and the heart of the story spans perhaps a few days with backlogs giving us a little information about how these people ended up where they are, but the sparse journey and the little history given do not add up to an interesting whole.
Sorrow gives birth to a baby-girl and finds wholeness within that event, but we don't know her. The white woman Rebekka turns violent and cruel, but her betrayal means little because we hardly get to know the good in her which her cruelty is supposed to contrast. And yes, the young woman who was urged to be sold off by her mother is able to pick her sexual partner as her mother intended, but that freedom is so curtailed by the failure of her relationship and the reader's lack of personal connection with her that it barely matters.
I wanted to love and adore this book as I do Beloved, but there is so little that the two books have in common. The utter intimacy that Morrison had to have developed with her characters in Beloved is not even attempted in this book. It is that distance that tears at my heart and makes me wonder if she will explore, and allow us readers to experience, that gut-wrenching sadness, anger, betrayal, again. -
اگه پیش فرضتون راجع به این کتاب موریسون یه داستان کلیشه ای از برده داریه در اشتباهید. داستان در امریکای قرن هفده میگذره .کتاب رو میشه به خاطر چهار شخصیت اصلی فلورنس، ربه کا، سارو و لینا زنانه به حساب آورد ولی همزمان به خاطر صحبت کردن راجع به مفاهیم عمیق انسانی به مردان هم توصیه ش کرد. شاید ضدکلیشه ای ترین قسمت داستان ، ارباب شریفشه که از تجارت انسان بیزاره و با دیده حقارت و پستی بهش نگاه می کنه. اربابی که چهار دختر داستان رو در قالب همسر، خدمتکار، برده و یا حتی چیزی شبیه دختر خوانده دور هم جمع کرده. آدم هایی که سرنوشت اون ها رو به هم رسونده و چاره ای جز این براشون باقی نگذ��شته
داستان فصل به فصل جلو میره و هر فصل به یک شخصیت اختصاص داره. داستان فلورنس روایت اول شخص و سایر اشخاص، راوی دانای کل دارند که شاید به نوعی تاکید موریسون بر تفاوت فلورنس با سایرینه. فلورنسی که در عشق پایداره، برخلاف عرف به عنوان یک برده عاشق کفش پاشنه داره و باسواده و به دنبال جواب سوالی از مادرشه: که تو فصل اخر بهش می رسیم.
میشه گفت تو همون فصل اول ، خواننده بمباران اطلاعاتی میشه. تقریبن کل داستان تو همون فصل اول برای خواننده روایت میشه بدون این که بدونه از چه کسانی و چه چیزهایی صحبت میشه. کم کم جلو میره و داستان مثل پازل کامل میشه و شاخ و برگ میگیره و وارد جزئیات میشه.به نظرم ایده آل راجع به این کتاب،دوبار خوندنشه
و چرا یک ستاره کم دادم؟ نویسنده در انتقال فضای قرن هفدمی به من مخاطب چندان موفق نبوده به اضافه ی این که شاید موریسون،من رو بیش از حد توانم، سرگردان یافتن تکه های گم شده ی پازل خودش کرده و حتی گاهن اتفاقات زایدی رو هم به تنه ی اصلی داستان اضافه کرده
البته خود موریسون در توضیح این سردرگمی مخاطب در فضای داستان گفته تلاش داشته تا حس خواننده رو به شخصبت ها نزدیک و همراه کنه.شخصیت هایی که مثل ما تو فضای خانه ی اربابی، غریبه و جدید و سرگردان هستند -
This was definitely not one of my favorites. I am usually a die-hard Morrison fan, but this one just wasn't up to par with her earlier works. Many people have compared this to Beloved, but I find that comparison unjust. This book, while it had its moments of brilliance, was inundated with dense, incomprehensible prose. At times, I was unable to decipher who was speaking and when. It just wasn't a good read for me.
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Dear Ms. Morrison:
I just want you to know that I think you are a wonderful writer. I remember picking up a copy of
The Bluest Eye back in 1990 because I was taking a stupid college course and we were required to read a book by a female author written after WWII. I chose your book because it was really short and I didn't want to put a lot of time into that assignment. I remember crying while reading it and wanting to take that little girl out of her miserable life and make her feel better about herself. When my son was a baby, I read
Beloved and was equally horrified and sympathetic to Sethe's predicament. I loved the depth of emotion that book brought out in me. Later, I read
Jazz and was so impressed by the way the language echoed the theme. The rhythm of your words was so, well, jazzy.
I really, really wanted to give
A Mercy more than three stars. I wanted to be blown away. I was looking forward to really feeling something, even if it didn't feel good. Unfortunately, the only things I felt were confusion and disappointment. It took me half of each chapter to figure out which character the chapter was about and what time frame the chapter was set in. It felt flat and pointless. I never got to really know any of the characters. Honestly, 167 pages is not enough to cover the number of characters and ideas this story is trying to convey. It's more like a draft than a finished novel. It's an epic story that's been condensed and abridged. I wanted to know more about these characters and the 17th century American colonies in which they lived. I liked that nobody was either a hero or a villain, but human. I just would have liked to know these humans better.
Frankly, the reason I do give your book as many as three stars is that the prose is absolutely beautiful, as usual for you. The imagery and the rhythm is both poetic and musical. I just wish there had been more of it.
Sincerely,
Sandi K. -
I needed this. Morrison is always fascinating for me to read; I'm paying attention to the structure, the themes, the tone, and every nuance she wrings out of her perfect sentences.
This is one of her easier novels, one featuring a swirling ensemble of voices, all gazing at the harsh reality of a group of women living in 17th century America.
The whole novel is one fluid tapestry, quite intimate, with a subtlety that is rare for Morrison but which works so well here. She questions how, in a world where one is inevitably owned in some way, do you form a self that is free of dominion?
Through the novel's incredibly strong female characters, she answers this question in several intense and surprising ways. I was especially moved by the final chapter, which I think really explains the entire point of the novel. -
I love Toni Morrison, the way she holds out the dark truths of Americas past and forces the reader to look and while the themes here are the same as much of her other work this one is a bit more raw, not the writing which is beautiful as always, but here she just lays it all out in plain sight, here it is motherfuckers, And oh man does she really give it to Christianity good for its part in the oppression of women, slave trade, all around evilness, etc, so you know I was into that and I probably should write a decent review for once, but fuck it, I'll just say Toni Morrison is a total badass and leave it at that, really, the amount of effort some of you put into your reviews, jesus christ.
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"Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan"..."Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way..."..."As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family--not even a like--minded group. They were orphans, each and all."
A short but densely packed story, told in prose that is impossible to skim or read quickly. Lines heavy with meaning and speculation, as though they bore the unspoken luggage of all mankind. Narrative voices that lose nothing in the short, clipped statements and thoughts. Several women, the spokes around the hub of one man, fractured as the wheel founders. A treatise on the fragility of the ties that bind.
"There had always been tangled strings among them. Now they were cut. Each woman embargoed herself; spun her own web of thoughts unavailable to anyone else."
Life marches, events occur, reactions pull or repel, and delicate tendrils of connection lose themselves to the winds as the assertion of individual spirits emerge from the depths. -
Percebi que as personagens são escravos, fazendeiros e comerciantes. Do resto, nada...
_____________
Prémio Nobel da Literatura 1993
Toni Morrison (Chloe Anthony Wofford) nasceu nos Estados Unidos da América em 18 de fevereiro de 1931.
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Brilliant.
A little way into reading, I had to pause and go back to the beginning, because this story is told not in a linear way, but in a spiral and with multiple perspectives that to me didn't relate to what the blurb says this book is about.
Florens is the only voice we hear more than once as she sets out on her quest, her chapters are interspersed by those she is growing up around, each one of those is told in the third person, but for their chapter stays with their perspective and views the others. And the last chapter circles back to the beginning and is given to the mother.
Without looking at the structure, and trying to understand the author's intention by it, I can see why one might struggle with this, I went back and reread the first chapter countless times as I read forward, because it reveals so much that is understood as we progress. I benefited so much from each time I circled back and reread that beginning. And felt the excitement of realising what Morrison was doing.
This man Jacob gets one chapter, but the first person narrator is the little girl Florens who we see at 8 years and at sixteen years and we only understand why when we read the very last voice, that of her mother, and whose intention it was, who spotted that opportunity, A Mercy.
Just wow.
A simple telling of a complex novel in the hands of one of the greats.
To use my own symbolism, which at the end I draw in the back of the book, to capture it immediately it comes to mind, it's like learning about how trees live in communities and support each other, there is what you see above ground, what lies below that connects them, and then there is the environment in which they grow, are nurtured, or might wither. And the small mercies.It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.
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From my youngest sister, who reads often and prefers "Austenish" lit: "It was confusing and hard to get into and I didn't like the ending, but I did like that we heard every person's side of events. I still like my picks "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and "The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society" best."
From my middle sister, who is not a big reader and likes "family smut" (aka divorcee single mother who has had it hard and then finds love in the shape of a Tarzan woodsman living alone and horny in the Rockies) and books like "the Shack" and "the Notebook": "This was the worst pick I have chosen so far. It took forever to know who was speaking and in the end nothing happened. This wasn't what I thought it would be based on the synopsis on Amazon...I thought it would be about a slave girl and her life. I liked my picks "
The Shack" and "The Memory Keepers Daughter more than this."
From me, the literary hungry hippo who has read only "The Bluest Eye" from Toni in addition to "A Mercy": "Gave it almost 80 pages to really get going...chock full of things to analyze and the descriptions and format of the different voices provided early confusion but left a very layered tableau. I loved the ending- the last third of the book was great and really pulled together like strings twisting around and then forming a tight braid. Many similarities to "Bluest Eye"."
I would love to discuss this book with you if you choose to read it...I have a theory snowballing around in my head about what the turning point of the story concerning the slave girl Florens.If you still have the book, look at the part where Florens escapes the cabin with the white girl's help- I think there is a line or two where Florens asks her if she is taken with the devil and the girl smiles and says yes and then Florens feels a spirit or wind or something follow or watch her through the fence. That part is where I thought she fully embraced her darker self, and then from there on she was a primal being, intent on embracing a heady darkness she couldn't control. The indulgence of herself in herself- the selfishness of it all (the blacksmith addresses this) was breathtaking and sudden.
My younger sister thought the boy was just hurt. I thought she might've killed him, and my middle sister wasn't sure- she thought maybe both boy and man were killed or none were killed. What do you think?
