Vintage Paradise

TRIGGER WARNING: novel contains some references to infanticide, mental illness, child neglect, sexual assault, statutory rape, alcoholism, forced abortion, self-harm, and femicide.Paradise is set in Ruby, a small, all-Black town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by nine families recently descended from freed slaves, Ruby has remained vehemently patriarchal since its inception. However, it's the five women who reside in the Convent on the outskirts of town and shun the town's traditions who will forever change Ruby. In lyrical prose steeped in magical realism, Toni Morrison tells a story of women — of their joys, heartbreaks, triumphs, regrets, trauma, and healing — finding themselves and finding peace in a town that turns out to be anything but paradise.Be mindful that the novel is divided into chapters (primarily named after the women of Ruby), in which the eponymous woman's story is told. However, the events are not arranged completely linearly, and at times, vacillate between past and present day, so the style can be slightly confusing. That being said, I became accustomed to the style after the first chapter or so.The last few pages are so heartbreakingly beautiful that I sobbed for several minutes after closing the book. Toni Morrison ends the novel, not with a "happily ever after" but with something much better — a catharsis for lost souls. Paradise is irrefutably one of Toni Morrison's greatest masterpieces.

Bought it because I was looking for the older vintage covers which are issued no longer. However, I was delivered the new red vintage version. Disappointed with the cover but oh well, another Toni Morrison to my collection.

Super

Beautiful hardback copy. Delighted with that.Then the actual story itself, complex and interesting and a little disturbing of the calibre one would expect from a writer of Toni Morrison's stature.

The story is at first terrifying. Unlike its title, Paradise begins by describing how a group of men conduct a mass slaughtering of a group of women. The women had been living in an abandoned mansion/convent near the all black town, Ruby, in rural Oklahoma. Then the story backtracks to show why the tragedy happened.　　　Ruby was founded by ex-slaves who traveled from Louisiana after the Civil War. They originally founded the town, Haven, however, the next generation moved away from it and founded a new town, Ruby. Since these people were oppressed by whites and even turned away by the light colored of their own people, their community had become solid and didn't like outside people and the outside world. To protect their community, they despised change. It seemed like they segregated themselves to create their own paradise.　　　But the change came from the outside world in the wake of the citizens' movement for black people. Inwardly, they also changed themselves. The younger generation was changing, as is often the case in any community. Another change occurred when some unhealthy babies were born, because some marriages were against the "blood rule" of such a small community. Being threatened by changes that they were unable to cope with, they needed something to blame.　　　In the convent (which use to be a school for Indian girls), several women with traumatic pasts caused mainly by men, came to stay one by one from the outside world. They were very different from Ruby's people, for they were from the modern world of the 1970s. The men in Ruby decided that those women were the cause of their misfortune, so they decided to evict them from the convent. So, they found scapegoats. Even though those women were oppressed by society, the same as the original founders of Haven and Ruby, the men became their new oppressors.　　　With this terrible tragedy, Morrison starts to talk about the lives of the women of the convent, one at a time. Alongside of it, she introduces the complicated history of Haven and Ruby and the conflict of the people in the community. "They shoot the white girl first," is the first line of the novel. But in the convent, women didn't care about the color of their skin. They were battered women, that was enough for them. Morrison describes when one girl reached the convent, "The whole house felt permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too."　　　While reading I often felt I was lost and later found what the author was talking about. Her writing style is an unusual one, more like verse than ordinary sentences. So I had to concentrate on reading, or I'd be lost.　But reading this novel is rewarding, though it is a little hard. I like the author's intellectual and warm attitude toward people, and I felt her deep understanding for humanity.