Beloved. Menschenkind, englische Ausgabe

I



124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny band prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present--intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can t imagine American literature without it. John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

A triumph. Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review

Toni Morrison s finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent. Chicago Sun-Times

Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work. The New York Times

A masterpiece. . . . Magnificent. . . . Astounding. . . . Overpowering. Newsweek

Brilliant. . . . Resonates from past to present. San Francisco Chronicle

A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble. People

Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature. New York Review of Books

A work of genuine force. . . . Beautifully written. The Washington Post

There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you. The New Yorker

A magnificent heroine . . . a glorious book. The Baltimore Sun

Superb. . . . A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . . . Exquisitely told. Cosmopolitan

Magical . . . rich, provocative, extremely satisfying. Milwaukee Journal

Beautifully written. . . . Powerful. . . . Toni Morrison has become one of America s finest novelists. The Plain Dealer

Stunning. . . A lasting achievement. The Christian Science Monitor

Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction. . . . One feels deep admiration. USA Today

Compelling . . . . Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out. The Village Voice

A book worth many rereadings. Glamour

In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists. St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Heart-wrenching . . . mesmerizing. The