The Bluest Eye (Oprah’s Book Club)
November 14, 2008
The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different.
Customer Review: Exceeded my Expectations
This is the first Toni Morrison experience for me and I was floored by this book. It tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, her tumultuous family-life and her dreams of being blue-eyed and blond-haired so that she would be loved. Her story is one that is at times difficult to get through (I had to put the book down a few times to catch my breath). Her thinking that blond hair and blue eyes will make her loveable is just heartbreaking at times, but it shows just how unjust life was during this time.
Customer Review: Masterful First Novel, Terribly Sorrowful Tale [166]
Written in the 1960’s, and published in 1970, this book delivers a perspective of the victim to a horrible rape. Way ahead of its time. If the topic, even 37 years later, is too chillingly graphic a topic, stay away.
As Morrison’s first novel, it features some stylistic edges which are not as evident in her later works. First, the prose seems more majestic and incredibly tight. She reminds me more of Zora Neale Hurston in this book than in any other - but in each there is a Hurston-like style to her prose. Secondly, the story line is not as harsh about the white man - there is a rape of a man by white men and some bitter words - but the depths of the white man’s evil upon the black man is not as resoundingly elicited here. Lastly, she delivers the narrative through the eyes of children - none even teenagers - which she never does in subsequent novels.
The eye color is merely symbolic of racial self-loathing. The sexually molested protagonist, Pecola, is the party asking for eye colors not established by others of her race. She amazingly sees her request for the eye color to come true, a sign of her mind’s betrayal to her psyche while living through the impregnation of her young body - a product of a rape committed by her now incarcerated father. Her happiness resounds when delivered the new eye color, a symbol or signal of her mental break down.
Sexual deviation rings as a common thread. A self-proclaimed minister, Soaphead Church, enters the book in the last quarter to describe his thoughts to us in diary form. He is a sick person whose thoughts reflect what we see too often in our morning papers in regard to the Catholic Church’s agents - but at least Soaphead loves little girls and does not touch them.
Twisting us through the town of Lorain, Ohio, Morrison reveals the skeletons of many closets. Most are apparently good people. All are full of love. We concentrate mostly on poor Pecola and her demon father Cholly - each who are loving, but not necessarily receiving or giving in a good manner. As Morrison states, “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.” This sentence could be included in all of Morrison’s other novels.
No comedy in these pages, just great prose and tremendous story telling. Among all of the American novelists of the last 50 years, I believe none can tell a story more articulately, nor more prophetically. As bitter as this tale may be, it was a delight to read. Buy from here…
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