The purpose of evil is to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing that they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn’t stone sinners for the same reason they didn’t commit suicide – it was beneath them.

Read for a bunch of different reasons (including Black History Month and to fill in a year in my on-going Century of Books project), Sula was a great read once you got into it. It’s not the easiest book to read as it flips back and forth between an experimental style and a more straightforward narrative arc, but once I let go of any notions of expecting the traditional format, it became a really good read. It features two women, both very different from each other and the others in their small community. They meet when they are twelve, and from then on, they float in and out of each other’s lives as they get older and their lives change.

It’s a rather uncomfortable friendship with both friends choosing to be rather direct with each other (and crossing over into mean at times). The dichotomy between the two is around what the book revolves: Sula and Nel are frenemies for most of their years on earth, and it’s not a gentle read at times.

Having both grown up in a small community called The Bottom (although it’s up in the hills), their childhood overlaps and they are inseparable for their adolescent years. It’s not until both are young women that Sula leaves their home town and then disappears for years. Not until much later in their lives, does Sula return to her childhood home changed herself and bringing a tornado of memories and unpleasant truths with her to disrupt the Bottom’s own balanced little world.

It’s a good read with a lyrical tone to the writing – almost sultry and dream-like in places – and the structure of each paragraph reflects what’s happening in the characters (similar in some ways to Zora Neale Hurston and as things get complicated, the sentences become longer and longer and run on — similar to how dreams don’t really start or stop or have a logical arc to them. At first, I was wondering what was going on, but as with other experimental writing I’ve read, I found that the best approach was to just go with the flow and see where you end up. (It’s not even that experimental, really, when you compare this writing to others, but it’s not a straight-up A-Z narrative arc for sure.)

Morrison has written a lot of books, including The Bluest Eye (pre-blog) which I read years ago about a small girl who gets bullied by her school friends due to the color of her eyes. Similar to this read, it’s an uncomfortable and slightly edgy read but it’s really good all the same.

I recently read Morrison’s Beloved, and am looking forward to reading that whole trilogy. I’ve already ordered Jazz from the library. Squee.

Loved it. Highly recommend Morrison’s work.