50books_poc | #36: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

#36: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

You know what? I give up. I finished this book days ago and I've been straining for the words to describe it, and I can't find them.

God, how amazing is Morrison? The more I read of her, the more convinced I am that she is one of the greatest novelists ever to write in the English language. Or, hell, any language. I mean, there are novelists who can write beautifully, but have no sense of place; and there are novelists with a highly-developed sense of place who can't create believable characters; and there are novelists who can create amazing characters who can't plot their way out of a wet paper bag; and there are novelists who write beautiful well-plotted stories set in well-realised places and peopled with three-dimensional characters... and you finish the story, and you think to yourself "well, that was nice, but what was it about? What was the point of it all?"

And then you have Toni Morrison, who makes most novelists look like children playing house.

This was her first novel, and she got better; and that's astonishing in itself, because most novelists would take thirty years of false starts and throat-clearing to create anything half as good as The Bluest Eye. And yet The Bluest Eye is flawed, as Morrison notes in her foreword and afterword (in my edition, at least), and... she got better at it.

Toni Morrison exhausts my superlatives.