Product Description

A novel set in a small town in Ohio, focusing on two girls, Nell and Sula, both black, both poor, who share their dreams until Sula escapes to live a vagrant city life for ten years. When she returns, the bond of their friendship is broken.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102846 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Toni Morrison's highly acclaimed novel Sula is as gripping on audiotape as it is on paper. The Nobel Prize-winning writer narrates the unabridged version of the book in a rich, soothing voice that mesmerizes listeners with its relaxed and methodical cadence. Sula revolves around the relationship between two little girls growing up in a poor, black neighbourhood nestled high in the hilltops. "The Bottom", as the barrio came to be known, is brimming with eccentric residents but sadly deprived of human warmth (the town actually takes pride in celebrating National Suicide Day). However, out of this bitter, abrasive environment grows a beautiful friendship between Sula and Nel. Their shared secrets and dreams blossom through childhood, but their special bond suffers after the two separate. Sula leaves the Bottom to conquer the unknown cities of America, while Nel becomes a homebody, settling down as a wife and mother. When Sula returns to her hometown, she feels like a stranger; she repels everyone, even the only true friend she ever knew. Morrison's vocal range evokes an extraordinary atmosphere of survival in a harsh and unforgiving world.

Customer Reviews

Dark, Intense, Uncompromising Portrait of Hard Life
The central themes that Toni Morrison tackles in this work are relevant today and wonderfully executed, although very dark and in rough territory. Friendship, death (of more than the physical kind), a hard life, and little regard for morality comes across in this novel. Her primary characters are women, featuring her as an important writer in any Women's Lit class worth its salt. She holds a mirror, making us, forcing us to look, to reinvaulate American Society, to learn from our past so we do not repeat it in our future. However, younger readers should not be allowed this, because the language is harsh and there is some descriptive sexual scenes.

Morrison in detail develops the relationship between Sula and Nel, and show, in this short novel, how each move into different paths and how each must cope with the other's decisions. Sula becomes a seductress whilst Nel becomes a housewife. This woman who so loved Nel she cut off part of her finger to protect her later destroys Nel's family. Sula finds it difficult to stay within proper boundaries, apt to be irresponsible, whereas Nel counteracts her. Morrison also shows the product of the slave mentality: black men who did not feel responsible for their children. She keeps this consistently thruout her works. In the slave nightmarish world, black men did not have to provide for them, because that was the owner's job, and because the white man treated them as stock the black's family structure suffered very extensive damage which that is reflected even today in present society. The men would, when they wanted too, just disappear (Jude and BoyBoy here, Paul D in Beloved). The sins of the men are very great indeed.

Shadrack, who you find in the opening section, plays an important part with his National Suicide Day (January 3). Traditionally, water symbolizes life, but in this novel it harkens death, and Shadrack is linked to the water, being a fisherman. One of the central elements Morrison allows us to perceive is the black community's desire to better themselves, and the white community setting them back. The whites give the blacks hills for farmland, saying it is prime farm land. In one central scene, Shadrack, leading people like a pied piper, go down, and try to cross over a bridge unfinished. On the symbolic level, the blacks, want of work, wanted to cross over to the white man's land that the white man had unfairly dominated. Shadrack, although none follow him for years (National Suicide Day deals with Shadrack's disgust of being alive in a society that has a good deal of racial injustices), which culminates, with everyone following him down to the bridge, and he, like the Pied Piper (although Shad has a better cause) watch as death comes upon them. Water is important here in another scene as well, as illustrated in another scene involving Nel and Sula when they are children.

Over all, an ugly novel about harsh and bitter things. The situations are mean, but Morrison gives us a view into a dark part of life that many of us did not know about - I daresay we wish we didn't, either, because when she holds the mirror up to our face, we are quite repulsed what we see.

Originally issued August 5, 2000 on Amazon.com

Intriguing, haunting
This is a complex novel, despite the ease of its reading. The novel isn't just about a friendship between two deprived black girls in Ohio: there is always something sinister lurking under the writing, in the community, in people's relationships, and the reader is left peering at something beneath the water that never quite takes shape, wondering what is going on beneath the surface. Its quite depressing in places, and brutal to read in terms of how it is preoccupied with definitions of evil and peoples motivations, but it is beautifully written and crafted. Well worth reading.

Deep, thought provoking and excellent!
Sula is a complicated novel which explores the themes of friendship, identity and the relationships between Blacks and Whites. The language used by Morrison is lyrical in places and the characters presented are complex. However, i would reccommend this boko for the serious reader who can appreciate the depth of the characters and story.