Reviews for A Mercy

The average rating for A Mercy based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-01-01 00:00:00 Rikke Larsen This is a devastating look not only at the slave experience in the 17th century, but of various forms of bondage and of the place of women in that world. While skin color may have defined one sort of servitude, gender and class define others. Yet there are ways to find space between the bars. Toni Morrison - from The Telegraph Set in the late 17th century, this is an ensemble story. Florens is a young, spirited slave girl. She speaks in the first person giving us a look from inside her skin. Except for one chapter by Florens' mother, the rest of the book is third person. We see Florens' experience with owners, families and yearnings old and new. Jakob is a kindly merchant/farmer, eager to help the unfortunate, always recalling his own humble, even desperate childhood. Rebekka is outwardly a free white woman, but truly was sold by her parents to be Jakob's wife no less than any black slave. Lina is the eldest of three helper women on Jakob's farm, a mother and friend to Rebekka. She is a Native American, a survivor of a small pox outbreak and the subsequent torching of her village. Sorrow is a black-toothed, somewhat addled woman who washed up on shore after a shipwreck. She holds conversations with an imaginary twin. Morrison also shows us two indentured servants. Despite having fixed terms to their indenture, their bosses find or concoct excuses to prolong their indebtedness and thus their servitude endlessly. the original seven years stretched to twenty-some, he said, and he had long ago forgotten most of the mischief that kept extending his bondage. One cannot but think of today's extension of tours of duty in the military. Religion comes in for a beating here. Religion, as Rebekka experienced if from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred. In one scene, Florens is suspected by a bizarre woman of being a witch and is forced to strip so she can be checked to see if she has a tail. Later, she attaches herself to a free black man in another form of devotion, only to have that work out badly. Lina had been taken in by a group of fundamentalists, who, unkindly, named her Messalina, seeing her as cursed by God. A curate is guilty of buggering a young boy. The 17th century is a cruel, harsh world …it was clear in her household that execution was a festivity as exciting as a king's parade. Brawls, knifings and kidnaps were so common in the city of her birth that the warnings of slaughter in a new, unseen world were like threats of bad weather both in the old world and the new. Jakob offers a relatively safe place, a fenced-in peaceful community where orphans collect. But even with all the horror of the world we still define for ourselves who we are, maybe by paring crusted misery from our memory, maybe from holding some part of our true self separate from the harsh world. Solitude, regret and fury would have broken her had she not erased those six years preceding the death of the world. The company of other children, industrious mothers in beautiful jewelry, the majestic plan of life: when to vacate, to harvest, to burn, to hunt; ceremonies of death, birth and worship. She stored and sorted what she dared to recall and eliminated the rest, an activity that shaped her inside and out. By the time Mistress came, her self-invention was almost perfected. Soon it was irresistible. While maybe not the masterpiece that Beloved was, A Mercy is a very dense novel, a torte of a work, covering a range of subjects rich in significance, in language that is moving and penetrating. =============================EXTRA STUFF Morrison's Facebook page - Morrison passed in 2019. The page is maintained by Knopf. Reviews of other Morrison work -----2014 - God Help the Child -----2011 - Home -----1987 - Beloved Read but not reviewed -----1977 - Song of Solomon -----1973 - Sula

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-10 00:00:00 Jesse Hillis "It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song- all of it cooked together in the colour of my skin." - Toni Morrison, A Mercy It's the 17th Century, and slavery is still relatively new in the Americas. The people living there have either been brought there by force or have voluntarily gone there to start a new life. They are people with no roots in their new country, no family either. And in such a small space, Morrison manages to pack away so many stories, so many emotions. This was definitely a satisfying read and, as is always the case with Morrison, we are rewarded with poetic and perfectly crafted sentences. Morrison paints the New World as a place of hope, but also very different from the Old World: "Right, he thought, looking at a sky vulgar with stars. Clear and right. The silver that glittered there was not at all unreachable. And that wide swath of cream pouring through the stars was his for the tasting." "Unlike the English fogs he had known since he could walk, or those way north where he lived now, this one was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream." What's common among the women in the story is that they are all victims. Regardless of colour or station, be they slave or free, they are reliant on men and their situation is precarious. They are in many ways pawns; their role in the New World is only slightly above cattle. How do people displaced from their homes try to come to terms with this separation? How do they try to save their cultures and traditions? "Relying on memory and her own resources, she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world." Slavery is never easy to read about but this line was especially poignant to me: "The two men walked the row, inspecting. D'Ortega identifying talents, weaknesses and possibilities, but silent about the scars, the wounds like misplaced veins tracing their skin." This book has a lot of sadness in it, then again Morrison's books are never cheerful. What I love about her chronicles is that she gives voices and feelings to people who are often ignored. Morrison always seems to adds a new layer of emotion to her characters.