Editorial Reviews
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In Sula, Toni Morrison,
winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the story of two
women--friends since childhood, separated in young adulthood, and reunited
as grown women. Nel Wright grows up to become a wife and mother, happy to
remain in her hometown of Medallion, Ohio. Sula Peace leaves Medallion to
experience college, men, and life in the big city, an exceptional choice for
a black woman to make in the late 1920s.
As girls, Nel and Sula are the best of friends,
only children who find in each other a kindred spirit to share in each
girl's loneliness and imagination. When they meet again as adults, it's
clear that Nel has chosen a life of acceptance and accommodation, while Sula
must fight to defend her seemingly unconventional choices and beliefs. But
regardless of the physical and emotional distance that threatens this
extraordinary friendship, the bond between the women remains unbreakable:
"Her old friend had come home.... Sula, whose past she had lived through and
with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula
had always been a conversation with herself."
Lyrical and gripping, Sula is an honest
look at the power of friendship amid a backdrop of family, love, race, and
the human condition. --Gisele Toueg
Book Description
Toni Morrison's first novel,
The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent,
written--as John Leonard said in The New York Times--in a prose "so precise,
so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel
becomes poetry."
Her new novel has the same power, the same
beauty.
At its center--a friendship between two women, a
friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel--both
black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town--meet when they
are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes.
Through their girlhood years they share
everything--perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime--until
Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the
sporting life of the men hanging around the place in head rags and soft felt
hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving
insurance men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be
overstepped.
Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America
for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a
wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She
accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in
it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after
folks--where you deal with evil by surviving it.
Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give
pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the
others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that
she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take
her leg for the insurance)...that a child drowned in the river years
ago...that there was a plague of robins when she first returned...
In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison
brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh,
loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of
the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their
bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah,
they needed her.
About the Author
Toni Morrison is Robert F.
Goheen Professor at Princeton University. She has written seven novels, and
has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
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