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The Bluest Eye
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780452287068
ISBN: 0452287065
Label: Plume
Manufacturer: Plume
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: September 06, 2005
Publisher: Plume
Studio: Plume
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Editorial Review:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.
Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear: 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.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.
This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus
Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe 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.
The Bluest Eye 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The Worst Book I've Read in a Long Time
I decided not to finish this book after reading about two thirds of it, and realizing that every page was filled with filthy descriptions and the story was jumping around way too much. It nauseated me to read and I saw no necessity to go into such graphic detail about many things. I kept wondering when I would start to like it as much as the other people did who raved about it, but never got there and was so relieved when I decided to put it down and give it back to Goodwill and find a better book ... Read More
Rating: - A Story Everyone Needs To Read!
This is my first Toni Morrison novel. At times difficult, at times you have to put the text down and think about what you have just read. A beautifully written story that really hits home and really makes you think. As a white man, reading this book at this time (a time when we are close to electing a black man as president), it made me realize how far we have come as a country; and yet it made me think about how far we have yet to go. This is an important "don't miss" novel. If at all possible try to ... Read More
Rating:  - The Bluest Eye
I still remember the quote I heard that first fueled my desire to start reading The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. "If my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn't so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me-times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without `a thin di-I-ime to my name.' I looked forward to the delicious time when `my man' would leave me, when I would `hate to ... Read More
Rating:  - Powerful, masterful
Toni Morrison is a tremendous writer who really makes me think, and this book was no exception. The details of the story are absolutely tragic- a young girl is raped by her father and bears his baby, who dies. Meanwhile, she's so full of socially-created self-hatred that she wishes for blue eyes, which she comes to believe she's been given. The writing in this book is astonishing. Morrison has managed to produce something more than unmitigated sadness, even though so many details of the story are tremendously ... Read More
Rating: - A Fantastical, Yet Disturbing, Read
I have read many excellent books in my time, including modern novels and disturbing novels. But never have I read such a disturbing piece of splendidly crafted modern literature. William Faulkner is splendidly crafted, but not particularly disturbing. Charles Dickens is disturbing, but he is not modern. Toni Morrison, though, is the only novelist I have ever had the pleasure to read who has managed to combine both characteristics to create something fresh, if not pleasantly so.
One of the aspects of the ... Read More
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