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Book Reviewed by:The story of a black girl in America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize. Republished 2000.
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Selected as Oprah Winfrey's April 2000 Book of the Month. Republished by Random House in April 2000
In her introduction, Morrison writes that the book is an exploration of "the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze" — how outside opinions and "casual racial contempt" can "take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female." She shows this beautifully through the tragedy of Pecola's existence, demonstrating that self-hatred doesn't arise in a vacuum; nearly every character with whom she interacts thinks of her as "ugly" (a word Morrison uses repeatedly to reinforce the concept, rather than employing synonyms). The Bluest Eye has been recognized as a classic, and in my opinion, it deserves that label because its message remains every bit as relevant now as it was when the book was published in 1970. There's little in the narrative that places its action in the 1940s; almost every aspect of it is still common today...continued
Full Review
(754 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
.jpg "Toni Morrison's author photo for The Bluest Eye, first edition")
Toni Morrison is the author of 11 works of fiction as well as a number of books and essays. She's best known for her novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 (the first Black woman to win the award) and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian honor of the United States — by Barack Obama in 2012.
Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, the daughter of working-class parents. At the age of 12, she became a member of the Roman Catholic church and took "Anthony" as her confirmation name (for St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of the poor). This led to her lifelong nickname, "Toni." She...
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