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Search - Tar Baby (Large Print)

Tar Baby - Large Print
Author: Toni Morrison

The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years -- the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remo...  more »te wife -- who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them -- a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant's dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian's expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art.

Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian's perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret's delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him -- he calls himself Son;  he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege.

As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward--to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of  the separate worlds that have formed them -- she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him -- all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart.

ISBN-13: 9780816132935
ISBN-10: 0816132933
Publication Date: 11/1981
Pages: 456
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: G. K. Hall & Company
Book Type: Hardcover
Large Print: Yes
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> General >> Literary
Literature & Fiction >> World Literature >> United States >> Black & African American >> General
Literature & Fiction >> World Literature >> United States >> Black & African American >> Morrison, Toni
Literature & Fiction >> Authors, A-Z >> ( M ) >> Morrison, Toni >> General
Literature & Fiction >> Authors, A-Z >> ( M ) >> Morrison, Toni >> Hardcover
Literature & Fiction >> Authors, A-Z >> ( M ) >> Morrison, Toni >> Large Print

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