Product Description

'for all its restraint...A Mercy is a furious novel, a volley of anger, contempt and sorrow'

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #965305 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

Review
`a series of bleakly beautiful vignettes that catch at the heart' --Marie Claire

'Morrison's prose is richly poetic' --Daily Mail

`Must Read' --Sunday Times

`Toni Morrison has done it again'
--TLS

'full of such scrupulous ... amplifications, Morrison's sedulous attention to details ... one measure of her sophistication as a writer.' --The New York Review of Books

`Morrison's prose is confident and secure, her language masterful...This is another penetrating and profoundly disquieting view of America's past'
--Historical Novels Review

Review
`Unsettling, exquisitely written, and deeply moving, it's an amazing piece of work'

Review
'A Mercy is a furious novel, a volley of anger, contempt and sorrow'

Customer Reviews

"I don't think God knows who we are. I think He would like us, if He knew us, but I don't think He knows about us."
(4.5 stars) Continuing themes that she has been developing since the start of her career, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison creates an intense and involving philosophical, Biblical, and feminist novel set in the Atlantic colonies between 1682 and 1690. Her impressionistic story traces slavery from its early roots, using unique voices--African, Native American, and white--while moving back and forth in time. The primary speaker is Florens, a 16-year-old African slave, who tells the reader at the outset that this is a confession, "full of curiosities," and that she has committed a bloody, once-in-a-lifetime crime. In a flashback to 1682, we learn that when Florens was only eight years old, her mother suggested to the Maryland planter who owned the family, that Florens be given to New York farmer Jacob Vaark to settle a debt. Florens never understands why she was abandoned by her mother.

Florens lives and works for the next eight years on Vaark's rural New York farm. Lina, a Native American, who works with her, tells in a parallel narrative how she became one of a handful of survivors of a plague that killed her tribe. Vaark's wife Rebekkah describes leaving England for New York to be married to a man she has never seen. The deaths of their subsequent children are devastating, and Vaark is hoping that eight-year-old Florens will help alleviate Rebekkah's loneliness. Vaark, himself an orphan and poorhouse survivor, describes his journeys from New York to Maryland and Virginia, commenting on the role of religion in the culture of the different colonies, along with their attitudes toward slavery.

All these characters are bereft of their roots, struggling to survive in an alien environment filled with danger and disease. When smallpox threatens Rebekkah's life in 1692, Florens, now sixteen, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous and ultimately proves to be the turning point in her life.

Morrison examines the roots of racism going back to slavery's earliest days, providing glimpses of the various religious practices of the time, and showing how all the women are victimized. They are "of and for men," people who "never shape the world, The world shapes us." As the women journey toward self-enlightenment, Morrison describes their progress in often Biblical cadences, and by the end of this novel, the reader understands what "a mercy" really means. An intense and thought-provoking look at various forms of slavery from their beginnings, this short novel has an epic scope, one which admirers of Morrison will celebrate for its intense thematic development, even as they may somewhat regret its sacrifice of fully developed characters. Mary Whipple

Sula
Beloved (Vintage Classics)
Jazz
Song of Solomon
Love
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Journey into American Past to Understand American Present
In her latest novel Toni Morrison takes us back to the late 17th century America. The plot gives her an opportunity to present America in the making, there is no US yet, there are colonies, each somewhat different in their culture, religion or attitude to slavery. Morrison adroitly shapes the plot in such a way as to give the reader at least an impression of the variety that once was America, sending her characters on distant voyages. The differences are the most clearly visible in the opposition between Maryland and New York yet the choice of character also helps Morrison to stress the diversity of American roots.
And yet "A Mercy" is not just a historical novel. The setting is important but Morrison seems much more interested in her characters. This concentration is reflected in the form of the book - we get to know about the events from the characters in a series of monologues which culminate in the final monologue of Florens' mother which ties some of the book's loose ends and answers some of its haunting questions.
Each of the monologues comes from a completely different character - a slave, a native American, a Dutch etc. - this variety is almost incredible but serves to add a depth to the book, broadens the view the reader gets.
As usual in Morrison's fiction the characters are mostly women. As a result the book to some degree fails as a HIStory book, it is much more of a HERstory book, offering the reader a selection of points of view usually missing in more traditional history writing both fictional and scholarly.
In short: another great book from a Nobel-prize winning novelist.

Admirable and mysterious
A small book by a rare writer, and yet a mysterious book because it is difficult to know and understand what the author wants to say, what's more prove with her story. Toni Morrison takes us to the end of the seventeenth century and confronts us to three generations of black Africans facing slavery. The first generation is a woman brought from Africa and experiencing the passage to America and then being a slave. She is accepting her position, the fact that she is a woman and hence a reproducing machine for all men around. But Toni Morrison makes her a fetishist of shoes, just as if she kept some kind of sanity and identity in the fact that she takes shoes from Europeans and wears them, no matter whether they are too big or just inadequate. This mother will offer her own daughter to some white man who has come to make the woman's owner pay a debt he has contracted and does not want to pay, and her offer is determined because her owner does not want her to go and she does not want to move to a new situation. Stability seems to be a desire to be satisfied at any price, and her own daughter does not seem to be important for her because she did not want her in the first place. It was more or less imposed onto her. That second generation is dissatisfied in the same way, submissive but with a deep and high level of anger and maybe hatred. And she turns from pure submission to rebellion because the man she gave herself to, a black smithy, turns violent when she by accident mistreat the young boy he has adopted. It is irrational and yet perfectly understandable. The girl wants some affective stability, especially from a black man, black like her, and she does not realize that she had been violent with the little boy out of some kind of jealousy. The third generation is just an infant who is seen as an animal by the whites, the masters, and yet an infant, a child by the mother. The book seems to identify these unbalanced and deregulated personalities to the trauma of the passage from Africa to America, from freedom to slavery and their incapability to die before the end of the passage. A trauma leading to a morbid desire to die that is not satisfied and then is turned into a morbid acceptance of slavery and some kind of eternal hatred against the world and life. At the same time Toni Morrison shows how some white people are also held in servitude for any reason imaginable and how their limited indenture is lengthened at will and for any cause imaginable too, but they keep the hope to be free one day, the hope and the certainty too that makes them keep some humanity, whereas the blacks do not retain that hope and that human level of existence. It is thus a very sad book because there is no hope, no hope for a future of freedom because there is no way to ever earn, deserve and win that freedom. The book is also sad because that's the very stake of the present situation. Can African Americans finally come out of that traumatic past and become full time and fully fledged Americans, today with a black President elect, and future President? The book seems to turn this traumatic past into an inescapable lot, destiny, curse that will live forever and ever, in spite of the kind words from a Catholic priest who clearly says the future of freedom is in an afterlife in which you must believe, like it or not. That religious preaching diabolically reinforces the fate of slavery.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Université Paris dauphine, Université Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines.