Product Description

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes: Jadine, a graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian - an American black now living in Paris and Rome and Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous - an American black from small-town Florida. He is a threat to her freedom she is a threat to his identity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #155221 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Mordecai Richler
...enormously moving...From the opening pages, I sat bolt upright, aware that I was in the presence of a major talent.

About the Author
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize fro Literature in 1993. She is the author of seven previous novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and most recently Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She is Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.

Customer Reviews

TAKES YOU TO A PLACE YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO GO
the start was a bit slow but as with all Toni's books once it picked up I couldn't put the book down till I'd finished. Usually if a novel is crammed with over 5 issues it will not work. But with this novel racism, class issues, money, crime, with a hint of voodoo, took nothing away from my enjoyment. I have to say if you do want to read this book it must be in a quiet enviroment and be prepared to let your brain do the work. Not a lighthearted read but worth the work!

"No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence."
Toni Morrison's fourth novel, published in 1981, between Song of Solomon (1997) and her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (1987), experiments with some of the techniques and themes which make the latter novel such a powerful achievement. Set, unusually, on Isle des Chevaliers, a Caribbean island owned by a white man who made his money manufacturing candy, the novel uses the small population who live and work at his house as a microcosm which illustrates themes of racial identity and culture. Valerian Street, now retired, lives at his island estate with his wife Margaret, a former beauty queen from Maine who hates the isolated island and can hardly wait to return to her "real" home in Philadelphia.

Two house servants, Sydney and Ondine, who have traveled from Philadelphia with the Streets, are also anxious to return to their more comfortable surroundings in Philadelphia. Their niece Jadine, a Sorbonne-educated fashion model who is visiting the island from Paris, straddles black and white culture. Valerian Street has paid for her education, and she stays in a guest room at the house, not in the quarters occupied by Sydney and Ondine. Jadine's decision about whether to marry her white boyfriend in Paris becomes significantly more difficult when Son, a black renegade from Florida, is discovered hiding in their house after jumping ship.

The passionate affair between Jadine and Son complicates the island's domestic life and leads to the intense development of the racial themes. Valerian insists that Son sit for Christmas dinner with the family, since his own son does not arrive for the holiday. Margaret is frightened by Son's flagrant sexuality. Sydney and Ondine find him uneducated and "uncultured," at least by their standards. Other blacks with whom Sydney and Ondine must deal in their day to day life take the blame for some of Son's actions, and Valerian is often cruel in his "discipline." The conflicts between black and white, between blacks living in a white world and blacks living in a black world, and the economic dominance of whites who live among blacks take center stage. Jadine traverses both worlds, but she finds that she is bored when she is in an all-black community of people uneducated in the white world, whereas Son finds that he, from rural Florida, cannot relate to blacks who live in New York City.

Morrison's style takes on tones of magic realism, as ghosts of the chevaliers, for whom the island is named, and spirits known as "swamp women" all participate in the action. Her shifting points of view, the overlapping narrative, and swirling, sometimes impressionistic, action all presage the style of Beloved. Symbols, especially of the tar baby, emphasize the themes, with much of the story being told through (occasionally tedious) dialogue. The conclusion is enigmatic, as Morrison leave the reader to decide whether important decisions made by various characters are the "right" ones and whether they indicate triumph or failure in this powerful story of racial identity. Mary Whipple