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Nov
03
Thoughts on A Mercy by Toni Morrison
2008 at 3pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
I read Toni Morrison’s new novel A Mercy, her first in five years, over the weekend and thought it was simple and beautiful and complex and deep all at the same time. The senior seminar I took in college, in which we read all 7 of her published novels, was a highlight of my educational career, and I’ve loved and admired her work ever since.
Date of publication: November 11, 2008
A Mercy is set in 1690 in the American southeast, where slavery was alive and well but was not yet equated with race. Slaves were black, white, and Native American; some were working off a debt, and others were bought and sold as commodities.
Morrison focuses the story around four women. Rebekka is white, the wife of Jacob Vaark, a landowner and trader who bought Lina, a Native American woman, to work as a servant for her. Despite their initial distrust and dislike of each other, Rebekka and Lina forge an unlikely partnership and quickly come to depend on each other. Out of kindness, Rebekka and her husband have taken in Sorrow, a poor black girl who has been raped and abused, and later Florens, the daughter of a slave, who comes into the master’s care when her mother begs him to take her daughter from their current master as payment for a debt.
The narrative alternates between these characters without warning or notation and switches between first- and third-person perspectives. The action centers on Florens, who has left the farm on a mission to find the blacksmith, with whom she is in love, and who she believes can help cure the Mistress of illness she has fallen into. Morrison gives us chapters from Florens’s perspective, as she expresses her love and desire for the blacksmith and narrates her journey to find him, and I found those to be the most compelling parts of the book.
Morrison also gives us Rebekka’s perspective and Lina’s point-of-view, both of which are interesting, but neither of which compares to the chapters on Sorrow, who, after giving birth, becomes Complete. Morrison’s use of symbolism and her trademark depth of meaning are at work in A Mercy, and she succeeds in telling a powerful story that at only 169 pages packs quite a punch.
I am so in love with Morrison’s writing that I’m finding it difficult to summarize the plot of the book, so I’ll skip the full-length book review and simply say that this is a fantastic read and an excellent exploration of the issues of race, class, color, and gender that Morrison always consistently handles with insight, intelligence, and precision. Not a single word is wasted.
A Mercy is much more accessible than Beloved, Morrison’s first book about slavery, and it will be a solid introduction for the uninitiated reader who enjoys plumbing the depths of a text and who appreciates that what is not said is often just as (if not more) important as what is said. This is not a casual read. It deserves time and attention, and you won’t regret it. 5 out of 5.
This book has been getting a lot of press (as it should), and here are some of the highlights I’ve found:
- An NPR special featuring Morrison reading from A Mercy and discussing the work
- The Guardian profiles Morrison and discusses A Mercy
- Michiko Kakutani’s review for the New York Times
- Morrison interview from The Guardian
- a detailed review from The Guardian
- a short review in New York Magazine
Have you read A Mercy? Share your thoughts or leave a link to your review in the comments. Read anything interesting about the book or Toni Morrison? Please leave a link.
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Great review…I’m looking forward to reading this one!
Great review, as always. I love Toni Morrison. I read “Sula,” “Beloved,” and “The Bluest Eye” in college, and I’ve been a fan ever since. Glad to hear she has a new book. I’ve added this one to my list.
I had the honour of hearing her read from (and speak about) this book last week when she visited my home town of Norwich. She read the last two and a bit pages to close the event and that brought tears to my eyes. Such a wonderful, lyrical use of language. A copy of A Mercy is high on my reading list. What a wonderful woman and what I heard of the book certainly wet my appetite.
I’ve read her book The Bluest Eye a couple of years ago but I haven’t read anything else by her. Have you seen this interview with the author about this book?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IZvMhQ2LIU
I’ve only read Beloved, but I loved that book. This one looks absolutely wonderful!
[...] this has been a busy one. Because of that, it’s also been a slow reading week. I only reviewed one book this week, Toni Morrisons A Mercy, which comes out on Tuesday, and I finally finished In [...]
I just finished reading this book, you can read my review here. I really enjoyed this book for the same reasons you did.
I watched Charlie Rose interview Toni Morrison about her latest novel. This is an excerpt from Seattle Times book review:
[Morrison's book, "A Mercy," examines what might be called a "pre-racial" America, the formative years at the end of the 17th century when our forebears still had a chance of turning their collective backs against slavery. As the 1993 Nobel Prize winner shows in this slight but powerful story, many forces — economic, sociological, psychological — combined to reinforce racism and sexism before they were institutionalized.]
I think I blew an opportunity last night of sharing with my class years of cumulative research into pre-colonial American History that I was so vindicated to learn I now share with Toni Morrison.
I no longer feel so alone !
Her novel describes the climate of 17th century Jamestown-era Virginia and the London Company.
During this period, free blacks flourished and many owned slaves.
There may not have been many of them, but their legacy and families remained powerful and independent all through the subsequent centuries of war and turmoil despite governmental efforts and they produced great and learned Americans as they sustained agrarian and commercial dynasties that lasted even through reconstruction to today.
You never hear about them. Why?
I think it is a damning message we give to children that all they are is descendents of human chattel when in fact, their “race” despite momentarily having come from a technologically different universe, immediately joined the new world as equals and were never “inferior”–in fact, they were respected and treated as such, UNTIL:
The early democratic Jamestown colony became ruled by a tiny minority of elites appointed by the King.
Poor white and black indentured servants (separate from the independent merchant/farmer/shipping class of free blacks) were truly equal and racism had no part in their lives. Intermarriage was normal because they were of the same “class”.
An uprising (detailed in Toni’s book) resulted in the minority of ruling elites recognizing they were dangerously outnumbered— and theirs was a government solution: manipulating social behavior through draconian laws that demonized color so that blacks and whites would no longer join against them.
Its the institutionalization of racism and prejudice through government and laws that we continue to suffer from today. I believe our schools and students suffer from a continuation of not viewing people as united against ruling elites.
My message has always been that we as educators, are constantly reminded of principles like
to avoid ” not expecting high expectations” and avoid the “self-fulfilling prophecy of labeling” our students but we support policies that continue to divide us and discourage us based on race, and only serve that purpose for those in power as plainly as when they were first devised in Jamestown colony.
The timing of this book is propitious with our new president.
The condescending lies (or at best, omissions) perpetuated in our history textbooks that I have tried to point out over the years have been met with utter confusion, rejection, and calling me a racist!
I hope this book finally means I won’t have to keep silent and suffer ostracization.
My hope was that through education of real history, Americans would come to the conclusion that the roots of hatred are top-down and were never bottom-up and that truth would unite us in common against our rulers who only pretend to “left/right” fight among themselves in order to distract us.
If history shows governmental power is the cause of racism, then lessening its sociological and economic impact will bring us to back to the natural harmony we naturally had as equal people.
History education has failed us in this, because of wanting to preserve the same kind of power imbalance tnat started in pre-colonial government, only today it is a bureaucratic, political, and academic one–more nuanced and involving way more people than the simple Royal governors, but the evil principle and destructive human effects are the same.
I only hope that Obama doesn’t perpetuate divisiveness in our country. I really hope he hasn’t truly joined with those in power to continue to bamboozle us.
Hopefully the “change” his presidency represents isn’t merely that the power elite have now welcomed a more effective tool to perpetuate themselves, but instead reminds us that we don’t need anyone but ourselves—I hope that becomes his overt message, and if it doesn’t, the results will guide us to see it for ourselves as a nation.
Toni’s book might just open our eyes to how ‘ one ‘ we Americans once were and really should always have been, had we not accepted racial difference to seduce us into unjust power.
Education gurus preach about the teacher’s role of guarding against “social injustice”.
Top-down polices have always been its cause, they cannot be its solution. Education is the key.
Thank you Toni Morrison– I cannot wait to read this book.
I wonder if she was among he supposed 4-6% of blacks who did NOT vote for Obama.
I would like to see Oprah interview those educated blacks. —-I hope history proves them mistaken; only time will tell…I would just like to learn their motivation
Sincerely,
A New Teacher
booklady, I just purchased this today at Target and cannot wait to read it. It sounds wonderful.
A New Teacher might benefit from the ongoing discussion on another blog:
http://www.historiann.com/2008/10/28/a-mercy-the-new-novel-by-toni-morrison/