A Couple Aspects of the Realism In Beloved
First of all the background picture for this blog looks really weird.
But more importantly I loved our discussion of point of view in the excerpt of Beloved we presented. It’s such a beautiful effect having the lens shift from character to character and sometimes the point of view of two people or a group. I feel like that’s so true to life: there’s so many people and things and ideas involved in each moment, so much a writer should be capturing. I’ve never read a book that makes me feel an entire scene so vividly. Beloved really captures the complexity of real life.
Nabokov would have loved this book. In his lecture we read, he said an author should be building up a whole world in their writing, or at least that’s how I interpreted what he said.
I read somewhere Jonathan Franzen said that The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is the most realistic book ever written. It’s a short story about a man who turns into a beetle-like insect in his sleep. That’s how I feel about Beloved. All the ghosts and zombies don’t feel artificial to me. Somehow it makes the book realer--the non realistic images are making a statement more real than Morrison could be saying with purely realistic ideas. I wish I could explain that more but I can’t yet. That’s what’s gonna be on my mind as we continue reading.
I agree, Nabokov would love this book. It's very easy to lose yourself in the world that Morrison constructs. The detail is not only vivid, but poetic which I believe makes it more readable and fluid. In regards to the supernatural aspects of the novel, to me they are simple details of a world different from our own. I don't believe in ghosts, but I don't let that opinion (fact :) ) infiltrate my reading of Beloved.
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