Blå blå øjne (1970)

I can't imagine the devastation of being an 11 year old girl and believing I am so ugly that no one even wants to look at me. And I certainly can't imagine being an 11 year old black girl who believes the only way to become pretty is to get some blue eyes.

This story is full of such sadness and heartache. There is so much in The Bluest Eye to ponder that I wish I could teach this to a class of high school students. I would love to hear the thoughts of young people and what they think of Pecola and her ingrained ideas of being ugly and worthless. Pecola doesn't believe anything bad about her that everyone else doesn't already think. She inherits or absorbs the idea that she is ugly from her interactions with her family and everyone else. So Pecola comes by her negative opinion honestly, and where these terrible ideas come from are the main focus of this story. This amazing debut by Morrison will stay with me for a long time. ( )

I didn't love the structure and surely thought parts of the book were weak, but a lot of the prose was really beautiful, and it was sobering to inhabit briefly a viewpoint of the world so very different from the privileged viewpoint I've been afforded. ( )

This was a solid four-star read for me right up until the introduction of Soaphead Church near the end that's written in homophobic language. Also, by the end Morrison is fairly beating us over the head with obvious imagery and symbolism. I can't help but think the work would be stronger if it had been molded with a lighter, defter touch. ( )

**

After being totally bowled over by Beloved, The Bluest Eye came as a bit of a surprise, and, dare I say it, a bit of a disappointment.

It's a difficult, uncomfortable and desperately sad book focused on the poverty and violence at the heart of the black families portrayed and the subconscious learnings of the black children that being white, blonde and blue-eyed is the dream and that they are somehow lesser for not being this.

I don't think Morrison was ever setting out to make this a a book that would be 'enjoyed', but rather aimed to throw out a stick of dynamite and blow open some difficult truths. I admired what she was trying to achieve in this novel, but it didn't properly work for me on a number of levels. Firstly, it felt very over-written, and it wasn't surprising to learn that this was her first novel. The language felt contrived and overworked at times, and for me it got in the way of the points she was aiming to get across. This was in complete contrast to Beloved, which was written with such a deft hand that I never once contemplated how it was written but simply fell headlong into the story. Secondly, as Morrison acknowledges herself in the afterword, the fragmentation of the story into sections didn't work for me. I kept picking up and dropping the thread of the story, and it felt an unnecessary literary device. When it was flowing I enjoyed it, but just as I was starting to connect with how the characters she'd break off to come back around to the tale from another direction and that connection was broken.

In the end I felt frustrated that this book could have blown me away but instead left me turning every which way as a reader, and as a result I didn't feel the emotion that I wanted to feel from it.

3 stars - Noble yet unnecessarily over-written which got in the way of the truth of the novel. ( )