Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows

I finished reading Beloved, and... *shudders.* It's not that it's badly written (it ain't), it's just very unlovable; and why wouldn't it be when it so aptly illustrates the horrors/consequences of slavery?

The inhabits of 124 (Sethe and her daughter Denver) are ever-accompanied by the ominous presence of Sethe's dead baby's (whose tombstone bears one word: Beloved) ghost until Paul D., an ex-slave who worked on the same plantation as Sethe, arrives, drives the ghost out, and settles down with Sethe. Everything is ominously okay until a black woman... named BELOVED.... mysteriously shows up on their doorstep one day. The moment she enters the home, she herself and her presence are as irremovable as a mile-deep root in soil. We eventually learn that Sethe tried to MURDER her children (succeeded in murdering 1) to free them from the horrors of slavery, and that Beloved is the ghost of this murdered child, the same ghost that haunted 124 before Paul D., the emblem of reality and anti-supernatural-elements in this novel, rid the house of it. Denver initially loves Beloved, partly because Beloved is the sister she never had; however, before dissipating (to Lord knows where?), Beloved almost kills Sethe, has sex with Paul D., and by the end, I'm sure, has pretty much freaked the shat out of/severed her arguably-never-was-existent bond with Denver, who evolves into a working woman, not the lonely child she was at the beginning of the book.

Toni Morrison whips this all out in a 324-page novel with fluid and masterful prose; Denver's character development is relieving to witness in the midst of all cray plot turns, Sethe's dedication to Beloved (compensation for killing her... *shudders again*) is haunting, and Beloved's silent eeriness is... terrifying.
Below are 2 quotes from this CHILLING story.

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

All the Pretty horses

I finished All the Pretty Horses, and I LOVE IT and I've collected a swarm of quotes that I've decided to upload in batches whilst reading The Crossing which is also stunning. I've finished Part 1 already.

So, here's how the procedure should progress in terms of writing a review of ATPH and updates for The Crossing; they are going to overlap. Here's the official in retrospect review for ATPH:

If William Faulkner and Toni Morrison had a love child, he'd go by the name of Cormac McCarthy. He executes a similar style; writes of harsh truths, a loss of innocence, wry dialogue... yet McCarthy whips in his own input into these qualities. There is something about his writing, that despite however the story may end, one does not aspire only to curl up in a blanket and weep, but more strongly so a push to seize a horse (or wolf) and gallop away to the mountains, to the acacia, the lake, the moon...

That is precisely what ATPH succeeds to do. It tells the story of a boy, John Grady Cole, who runs away from home in hopes of finding himself and the country, and he soon winds up in Mexico. John and his friend Lacey find work as cowboys. They also encounter a curious young man: Blevins, who brings them a fair amount of trouble later, yet later showcases a deeper -- or more necessary -- understanding under his layer of juniority. John meets Alejandra and this is where the fiery romance starts, unlike all his previous works. However, before their match can succeed, John is taken to an entirely new country... only after all his experiences does he eventually comprehend that one does not really know a country until one's down there in it.

It is this revelation that makes it such a beautiful book to me despite the evils in it. Also, it does begin and end in a similar way, wrapping the story up nicely and reminding us of where John began.

Apparently, Marcus Mumford loved it too! He rambled about it on his book blog here.

The title of the book most likely comes from this familiar lullaby (an extract below):

Hush-a-bye, don't you cry, 
Go to sleepy little baby. 
When you wake, you shall have, 
All the pretty little ponies. 
Blacks and bays, dapples and greys, 
Daddy's boy Mama's joy 
Go to Slumberland my baby 
When you wake, you shall have, 
All the pretty little ponies. 
Hush your cries 
Close your eyes 
Dream of pretty little ponies 
Darkness falls and man calls 

Oddly seems to be referencing death and the heaven that awaits; given the love for horses shown in the book, I see how McCarthy may have transformed this childhood lullaby into a harsher concept: proof that his book is, after all, a bildungsroman.

The quotes I shall later upload will explore the themes he wanted to portray. This is a strongly recommended read.

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morisson writes beautifull, bitterly and powerfully, but in a different way than Ayn Rand. Whereas the beauty of the ideas conveyed in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged astounded me, the words and descriptions in The Bluest Eye were so beautifully tuned it was painful to read.

All worth it.

“Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.”

“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 a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. the lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glance of the lover’s inward eyes.”

“Lonely was much better than alone”

"Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, 'They are ugly. They are weeds.' Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth."

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. but its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anonymous. It is not, after all, where you live.
When you no longer need it, you pay a little something for its use; say, “Thank you, sir,” and when your business in that town is over, you go away from that room. Does anybody regret leaving a hotel room? Does anybody, who has a home, a real home somewhere, want to stay there? Does anybody look back with affection, or even disgust, at a hotel room when they leave it? You can only love or despise whatever living was done in that room. But the room itself? But you take a souvenir. Not, oh, not, to remember the room. To remember, rather, the time and the place of your business, your adventure. What can anyone feel for a hotel room? One doesn’t any more feel for a hotel room than one expects a hotel room to feel for its occupant."

“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.”

“They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.”

“Jealousy we understood and thought natural...but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

My favourite:

"These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall she peered into. And owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her"

"But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer."

“When all us left from down home and was waiting down by the depot for the truck, it was nighttime. June bugs was shooting everywhere. They lighted up a tree leaf, and I seen a streak of green every now and again. That was the last time I seen real june bugs. These things up here ain’t june bugs. They’s something else. Folks here call them fireflies. Down home they was different. But I recollect that streak of green. I recollect it well.”