Tar Baby, Toni Morrison. 0606019626)

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Tar Baby
Author: Toni Morrison

The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones--of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of ...  more »the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.

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 remote 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.

Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power.

From the Hardcover edition.

ISBN-13: 9780606019620
ISBN-10: 0606019626
Publication Date: 9/1987
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Publisher: Demco Media
Book Type: Turtleback
Other Versions: Paperback, Hardcover, Audio Cassette, Audio CD
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Kimberly H. (kstar) reviewed Tar Baby on 3/28/2007 + 73 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

this book is a great read about how relationships between blacks and blacks, whites and blacks and men and women ..it includes raw intensity and raw emotion///a must read

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Mary (grammyteach) - , reviewed Tar Baby on 3/25/2009 + 192 more book reviews

A great read.

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Dawn M. reviewed Tar Baby on 2/20/2007 + 13 more book reviews

In 1981's Tar Baby, Morrison deals with a different set of cruelties. The six major characters are her most diverse, and the conflicts are both realistic and symbolic, embodying the opposition of wealth and poverty, youth and age, male and female, black and white, in a microcosm of society found on a Caribbean island.

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Katie K. reviewed Tar Baby on 7/4/2006 + 7 more book reviews

Tar Baby is a magnificent novel from one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. It is a story of the love affair between a blavk model molded by the whit culture,and a black man who represents everything she fears and desires. Toni Morrison probes deeply and sensitively into relationships between black and whites, blacks and blacks, and women and men, achieving a raw emotional intensity and over whelming narrative drive. A novel by hynotiv, lyrical beauty, Tar Baby, reveals all the shades of feeling as it explores the full spectrum of choices facing women and men in a black adn white world.

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Missi R. (nightpoet) reviewed Tar Baby on 12/1/2006 + 47 more book reviews

"Full of sex, violence, myth, wit, and wry wisdom, and the extraordinary sense of place... Keeps you turning pages. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature."

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