Love

De: Toni Morrison

Narrado por: Toni Morrison

From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire.

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida -- even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces -- a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

This audacious vision of the nature of love -- its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread -- is rich in characters and striking scenes, and in its profound understanding of how alive the past can be.

A major addition to the canon of one of the world’s literary masters.

This is coast country, humid and God fearing, where female recklessness runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence -- a kind of pitty-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two-seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like Presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can’t hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart. -- from Love©2005 Toni Morrison; (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"It's a dense, dark star of a novel, seemingly eccentric, secretly shapely, and with Morrison writing at the top of her game."
—David Gates, Newsweek

"Haunting. In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals the glories and horrors of the past. Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel."
—Publisher's Weekly

"Love is a profound novel. As a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric but comfortably open style."
—Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred and boxed review)

"A gorgeous deployment of enigmatic flashbacks, Love is an elegantly shaped epic of infatuation, enslavement, and liberation: a rich and heartening return to Nobel-worthy form."
—Kirkus (starred review)

“Love seduces with Toni Morrison’s signature lush prose and colorfully complex, textured scenes of human longing, suffering, and loss. She long ago claimed a place at the apex of American letters; her latest outing adds another darkly sparkling layer to that literary luster.”
—Elle (US)

Praise for Toni Morrison:
“There’s no escaping love in Toni Morrison’s novels: it’s a difficult, complicated, ferocious force that runs like a deep and turbulent river through all her fiction, sometimes transporting and sometimes destroying people. It’s no wonder her own characters cry out against it.”
—Catherine Bush

“To read [Paradise] is to be pulled into a passionate, contentious and sometimes violent world and to confront questions as old as human civilization itself. . . . It is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power.”
—Time

“In each of her six novels she excavates the past, tunnelling through atrocities and griefs to reach back into an American history that has been long buried. The denied past becomes a ghost that haunts the present; old bones won’t stay safely underground.”
—Toronto Star

“In [Morrison’s] landscape, ghosts mingle with runaway slaves and wild men and women of the forest. Nothing and no one is ordinary, and perceptions shift as she reinvents the world.”
—The Globe and Mail

“In her novel Beloved. . .Ms. Morrison restores to the collective memory a particular strand of its emotive past, turning a story of former slaves into what amounts to a national epic. . . . She offers everyone — not just those injured — the chance to feel the pain, the injustice and the need for healing.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“The suppleness of her language verges on poetry. . . . The intensity of carnal love and the intensity of affection among strangers make for a kind of paradise.”
—The Financial Post

Narration

I love Toni’s voice and had an easy time reading along with the audio. Due to the fluid perspective changes in certain parts of the text, I definitely recommend having the book to read along with it.

Brilliant

Where does Love rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This is the best book I have read so far. It is a very close tie to Beloved.

What did you like best about this story?

Morrison's ability to steadily build a concept, both from the beginning of a story to the end, as well as from the end back to earlier places in the story is excellent. It has taken me a few tries to become accustomed to her writing style. It is definitely a labor of love. But this book as well as the others of hers that I have read, manage to hold my interest.

What does Toni Morrison bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

The author's extremely fluid use of language make it, in my opinion, virtually impossible for anyone else to accurately narrate her writing. Often the true meaning of a phrase lies in the inflection with which it is read. And since the ability to express inflection in what the narrator reads aloud is so very limited, the only way to know Toni Morrison's true intention in saying one thing or another is to hear her read it.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

There were a few light chuckles, but no tears. I was however extremely excited to get back in the car to hear another 45 minutes of the juicy story on my way to or from work every day.

Any additional comments?

It will probably take me a 3rd or 4th read through this book to fully understand all the symbolism and subtlety. However, it is very much worth the effort.

Excellent

This novel takes you on ride of Language and the challenges of defining love during those decades. Some of what is defined as love in This book are relative and taboo today. Excellent Journey

Fan of Toni Morrison!!

I love this book!!! Started reading the hardcopy and never finished it. Loved the audio more!!!

Love (or Hate)?

While this is my second (third if you count my readings from college) time reading through this selection, I still deeply appreciate this book.

It is very much a book I have to sit with and take my time getting through because the character jumps and jumps in the storyline, gets a bit tangled, which I fullheartedly believe is intentional, based on the book's subject matter. One of the biggest overarching themes is an inappropriate relationship with a grown man and a young female child whom he ultimately makes his child bride. That decision leads to the fracture in a friendship as well as an even deeper chasm in the family tree. It is a tangled web of a story of betrayal and heartbreak, molestation, r*pe, p*dophilia, family and friend dynamics, gender roles, motherhood, fatherhood, and, as the namesake of the book goes, LOVE. It explores how the actions of one person in a family affect all those in the family and all those associated with that family. Again, a tangled web.

It is a book, like many of her other works, that brings light and life to the very taboo topics that black families (and families in general) historically ignore or brush under the rug or struggle to make sense of because how can you HATE the very people you are supposed to LOVE? It's a tale as old as time, sadly, but a tale worth telling, nonetheless. If you have yet to dive into this book, it's worth it, even just once.

Insightful poetic

Thank you, once again Toni Morrison, for offering new and better, deeper and richer ways of seeing the world.

She does it again!

Morrison knows how to hook a reader, fill them with questions and then put it all together in a way that makes you have to go back and read the book all over again! I love it!

Beautiful novel!

This novel is beautiful though I had to rewind it a couple of times only because Toni Morrison’s wording is so eloquent and elaborate. Overall, it was a great listen!

Toni Morrison is the consummate storyteller!

The story was a little difficult to follow at first. However each chapter became revealed another intriguing layer of the story and its complicated characters and their secrets/truths.

EXQUISITE.

I love good literature, I put Morrison up there with Shakespeare, Rodney Hall, or Steinbeck (and many others of course) She lays down words like music, and to hear her read her own work is indescribably beautiful. This in itself is a worry because after listening to her narration I wonder how I can listen to any other narrator and not long for the sound of her voice. The melody as she weaves characters you grow to love despite their faults. I can't wait to read another book narrated by her but I'm afraid I could become addicted and one must do day to day work. I sat up half the night with this book because I could not bear to turn it off. Bravo Toni, you get a standing ovation, and thank you so much for the experience.