toni morrison releases 9th novel

November 12, 2008 by ksolo
Filed under dinner and a book

Toni Morrison has a solid position among the ranks of the the most influential African – American authors of modern times. And if her Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes weren’t enough evidence of that, the fact that our President-elect named her 1977 book, Song of Solomon, as one of his favorites ought to do it.

In every Morrison novel to date (and I’ve read them all) you can be sure you’ll find her unmistakable literary trademarks, namely:

- rich verbal imagery that’s often so complex and intricately detailed as to leave fans’ heads spinning or to cause casual readers to denouce her works as impossible to follow or understand.

- intimate, emotionally compelling black folk stories that illuminate a period or place in black history as it was lived, not a condensed version made to fit within a history book, and

- her effortless blending of everyday life occurences with the supernatural

With all of that to bake into a single tome, I can only imagine that it must take a hell of a lot of crafting and sculpting for Ms. Morrison to come out with a finished work. Each of her 8 previously published novels had a span of no less than 3 years between them, and it’s been about 5 years since she released her last novel, Love.

So it goes with out saying that I’m as pleased as punch that Toni’s 9th novel was just released yesterday. Entitled, A Mercy, the book goes further back into history than any other of her novels – all the way back to the 1600s. Here’s the synopsis:

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.

There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.

A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.

Slide on over to NPR.org to listen to Toni Morrison reading excerpts from A Mercy.

You can purchase your copy of the hardcover edition of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy on Amazon.

cheers,