mark monday's Reviews > Beloved

into the past, into the darkness. it was a sweet home back then, as sweet a home as slavery could have allowed, a refuge surrounded by cancer. but that cancer is no benign tumor, to be kept at arm's length, condescended to; it is malignant, always. it will invade, kill the body, each of the parts dying one by one. out of the past and into the present came the cancer, and it made itself a new home. a cancer is not so easily removed, even if the doctors say: the surgery was successful, it was cut out, it is officially no more! it changes shape, it metastasizes into something different. it reconstructs itself. Morrison knows this, so do Sethe and Paul D; it will take generations to cure this sickness.

a child dies, a child is reborn: Beloved. she is the fog of memory, of regret, of violence, made solid, no longer a recollection or abstraction, come from the past to destroy the present. she is what happens when the body and mind are broken down: a symptom of the cancer, not the cancer itself. she will hurt the worst those who love her the most...

the story has no storyline, the movements of past and present overlap, combine, become one. the stories and memories bleed into each other, in the mind and in the flesh, the blood flows in all directions. a tree of scars, a longing for colors, all the tragedies still alive. what was then what was now, what will be, what can be. can the body survive this cancer? one can only hope, or pray. the last few pages of Beloved hint at survival, at a new life, new paths, new hopes. perhaps the prayers have worked? keep praying.