A Mercy by Toni Morrison Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of A Mercy
Book Review: So perfectly written
Summary: 5 Stars
Toni Morrison has once again created a work of gorgeous, delicate beauty. A Mercy is told from the perspective of a new World farmer in 1690, Jacob Vaark, his wife, and their slaves and indentured workers.
Each of them has in some way been set adrift at some time in their lives. There is a sense that a good community has been built among them, in a way. But it is really just a thin illusion, since Jacob's death displays all too well the dependence on his mercy. Women, women of color, poor men, all of them are powerless. And the point of the book is spelled out well with a commentary about the kinds of slavery we set for ourselves.
This is a wonderful book that sets one to thinking about the consequences of acts of mercy and the sometimes hidden motives behind those acts. Dr. Morrison continues to write beautiful books that nonetheless make one take a hard look at both history and the human heart.
Book Review: Superb as all Toni Morrison literature...
Summary: 5 Stars
As always, Toni Morrison left me wanting to know more about what eventually happens to each character! Although each woman was very different, she managed to illustrate how strong they were, in their own unique way.
Wonderfully written!
Book Review: Superb, concise, and great depth.
Summary: 5 Stars
"A Mercy" is Morrison's latest masterpiece and explores the relationship among its primary charters during the early formation of America. A farm in early Virginia is the main setting; its laborers - white, black, native, and a combination of all three - comprise the primary characters. Florens, a slave whose narrative carries the story, is offered up by her mother to the owner of the Virginia estate as payment for a debt owed by the mother's master. "Please, Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter"; a minha mae begs, the urgency of her pleads insinuating a rationale not revealed until much later in the story.
Sorrow also lurks among the inhabitants of the farm. A child of mixed, perhaps unknown, ancestry spends her time on the estate trying to gather up the pieces of herself; pieces lost somewhere between the sinking of a ship and her rescue from drowning. Lina, a native who has learned to integrate her native customs with those of her Christian captors, seems to hover above the routine struggles of her counterparts; her connectedness to earth, sun, moon and stars elevating her. The estate is also peopled with indentured white Europeans, race being the only difference between them and the others; and the Mistress Rebekka purchased from her family in England to serve as wife to Jacob and mother to his heirs.
My previous two reads (see all my reviews) were specifically selected in preparation for a trip to Peru. The novels were written by a Peruvian writer set in various Peruvian locals. The intent of those novels was to provide a feel for the country that would trigger a sense of familiarity with the place upon my arrival. "A Mercy" is what I actually took to Peru and found that the recognition, the familiarity experienced there was not related to the texts by the Peruvian but the story by Morrison. Immediately recognizable were the consequences of conquest - land and people - throughout the country. The sequestering of land and the annihilation of the Inca - their Gods and temples - by the Spaniards is very similar to the Native North Americans' encounter with the "Eurpoes." In this manner, "A Mercy" was an excellent tool that connected me to Peru. As I plowed through the novel at night, and learned of the Inca by day, I found myself wanting to extend the experience of both indefinitely. Well, I've returned from my hiatus in Peru and extended my encounter with "A Mercy". After finishing the last page I turned another and restarted with the first. I'm certain that an entirely different story awaits me. Highly Recommended!
Book Review: The World of A Mercy
Summary: 4 Stars
In her latest work, A Mercy, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison details the experiences of one family (albeit, a family lacking in shared genetics) during the 17th century in eastern North America. Morrison uses the story of this one family, the Vaarks, to examine the reality and the notion of slavery (reality referring to the actual trade of humans for currency, notion referring to the ways in which the characters are enslaved by their situations) and the notion of alienation in a familial context. In particular, Morrison focuses on the mother-daughter relationship
Upon beginning A Mercy, the reader is immediately confronted with Morrison's stream-of-consciousness narrative style, which generally persists (with slight alterations in the vocabulary used depending on the speaker and occasional portions of third-person-omniscient narration) throughout the work. Being heretofore unfamiliar with Morrison's work, this critic is unaware if this mode of narration is a recurring theme in her work; regardless, in the instance of A Mercy the choice of stream-of-consciousness is altogether appropriate, adding realism to the work that probably could not have been acquired otherwise. The narrative stream is complemented by Morrison's rather capable descriptions of setting, leaving the reader with a clear image of the circumstances, both physical and mental, in which the work takes place. In A Mercy, one gets an impression of the text as a collection of primary source material, perhaps diary entries, rather than a piece of historical fiction. This impression is accentuated by a general lack of elaboration regarding precise historical detail, a feature that in less capable hands could detract from a reader's experience with the work. However, Morrison does not leave the reader blind to the historical circumstances in which the work is set, rather she gives the reader just enough information so that one can understand the work in its historical context without shifting the attention from the work's primary focus, the story of the Vaarks. Morrison's style in A Mercy reminded me at times of works as disparate as McCarthy's Blood Meridian (due to the evocative descriptions of environment) and Joyce's Ulysses (due to Morrison's willingness to play with conventions of language).
The central themes of A Mercy are the notions of slavery and familial abandonment, slavery dealt with primarily in terms of trade but also with a sense of enslavement to a situation. The patriarch of the story, Jacob, is opposed to dealing in the slave trade, yet A Mercy begins with the main character, Florens, describing her sale to Jacob by a delinquent debtor. Jacob is initially offered a young male in exchange for a debt that the debtor cannot account for in currency, the "mercy" of the work occurring when the mother of Florens convinces Jacob to take her instead. The mother abandons Florens in this manner in an attempt to provide her daughter with the most livable conditions feasible, an attempt that Florens fails to understand. The mother sees Jacob as someone capable of seeing Florens "as a human child" (Morrison 195) instead of something inferior, whereas Florens cannot help but see the sale in terms of matriarchal abandonment. Following Jacob's death, Florens and her compatriots (Rebekka, Sorrow, and Lina) become enslaved by their situation, able to rely on one another for emotional support but characterized by a complete lack of upward mobility and a lack of external assistance from their societal peers.
In addition to the tale of Florens, the story of Rebekka, Jacob's wife, is illustrative of A Mercy's central themes of slavery and abandonment. Rebekka is abandoned after maturation, as it is depriving of resources for her parents to continue to feed her, arriving in Virginia as Jacob's mail-order bride. Her slavery is of a peculiar sort, not necessarily malevolent in nature but enslavement nonetheless. Rebekka desperately desires the type of familial bond of which she was seemingly deprived, however her attempts at child-rearing perpetually end in failure (death). Jacob acquires Florens in part as a replacement child for Rebekka, complicating the relationships of all who live with Jacob. This complication is accentuated once Florens begins to mature and look for attention elsewhere, most notably from a traveling blacksmith. Despite this, all four female characters establish some level of bond with one another, primarily through their shared sense of abandonment from loved ones.
It is my sincere hope that this review is in some way helpful and has kept you captivated up until this point, however I am also quite aware that it would be daft for me to delay any longer answering the main question that is almost certainly on your mind: "should I read A Mercy?" In a word, yes. The work has many positive qualities with which to recommend it, most notable to this reader Morrison's use of lush imagery, her narrative style, and the manner in which she illustrates the predicament of her characters (that of female enslavement) and allows, at least in my case, the reader to better comprehend the world in which people like Morrison's characters existed. Trust me, the world of A Mercy is one well worth visiting.
Book Review: There are magic and confusion in learning
Summary: 3 Stars
Toni Morrison, whose accolades include a Pulitzer Prize attached to her 1987 Beloved and a Nobel Prize for Literature, returns to the subject of slavery in America, in a historical prequel to Beloved as well as predating the most convenient face of American slavery. A Mercy portrays a culture of slavery instead of its immediate aftermath, and again pokes at the tenuous relationship between mothers, daughters and motherhood.
Divided primarily into chapters that focus on the individual tales or tell a specific viewpoint from a group of people connected to one farm: the wife, slaves, and hired help of a farmer-turned-trader, Jacob Vaark; the novel tells different tales of paths to slavery. The slavery on Vaark's farm comes in many colors; he purchases for help the Christianized Lina, a Native American and sole survivor of a pox that killed her clan, and takes in Sorrow, a girl who was given her name after being found as the sole survivor of a shipwreck. In another form of what may be slavery, Jacob had taken a wife, not out of any romantic notions but in search for a farmhand. Rebekka's father heard of Jacob Vaark's search and sent her- a hearty young woman whose options for the future, without a dowry and with a ruined occupation in domestic service, were limited. Other examples of non-African slavery appear with white men Willard and Scully, who join the farm's realm during construction in their indentured capacity.
Most central to the problems that arise later, Jacob accepts a slave girl as payment on a debt from Senhor D'Ortega, a man whose deceptively and inappropriately extravagant estate repulsed Vaark during his visit. After his decision to invest in rum and overseas labor force when he had just before winced at Ortega's display of slaves because "flesh was not his commodity," Jacob Vaark convinces himself that an unnecessary house with an unnecessary second floor and unnecessary elaborate decoration is precisely what he aims to build in life. The house is built, only to bring about Vaark's figuratively just and foreseeable demise. His daughter, the only child to survive infancy, dies from an accident connected to the construction, and Jacob falls ill after the completion, demanding to be carried so that he may die on the floor of the finished work. The construction of the house also introduces more men into the female-dominated sphere; Florens becomes infatuated with the blacksmith, a free African man Jacob hired to create a snake-adorned gate for his dreamt paradise.
The varied viewpoints in the novel create a confused, rather than concerted and harmonious, effect. Chapters featuring Florens' feverish prose are interspersed with the narratives of the other characters. Florens' chapters account her travels to retrieve the blacksmith, a mission spurred formally by her mistress's illness, which he may be able to cure, and physically by her all-consuming desire for him. Florens addresses her chapters to some "you," who is the blacksmith, whom she seeks, and neglects explanation further than her own selfish desires phrased poetically and description of immediate plights. She only articulates urge, covering up the plot that must be perceived beneath. Florens' tale is even more problematic as it reads like thoughts occurring as her journey happens, where by the end of the story it is revealed that these chapters may be what Florens actually carves-- "you can think...a confession"--on the walls and floor of Jacob's house. This temporal inconsistency serves to confuse all the while the explanation for Florens' journey is revealed painstakingly slowly through the other characters' stories that, when put together, finally explain the events leading to disease and neglect on the Vaark's farm.
What mercy the book contains is not revealed until the last chapter, when a disembodied voice begs to respond to the pain created during the confusion which led to a less-than-fully explained climax, with the assurance that it will never be heard or received by the one it is directed at, the one who deserves explanation.
While the book drags too much through a muddled exposition to be plot-driven, neither can it be accused of being character-driven. The flatness of characters may surprise where the novel relies almost exclusively on characters to tell the story through their own eyes. Characters are not fleshed out in part because their voices are not reliably consistent, a problem arising from Morrison's incomplete attempt to construct a believable language of this briefly educated slave. She succeeds with the original and unique syntax like, in Florens' voice, "My head is light with the confusion of two things, hunger for you and scare if I am lost," however, at other points breaks into beautiful prose that sounds too literary and contemporary to resonate as following the rules that limit the same character. The beautiful phrases do resonate as proof of Toni Morrison's skill with painting skillfully sensual sentences, but improperly place Toni Morrison speaking where the reader is expected to believe characters narrate.
A second problem stinting the growth of deeper characters is their allegorical repetition of characteristics. Many characters are orphans; many characters are somehow enslaved; enslaved characters are enslaved somehow too in their own minds. These parallels may reinforce the historical and cultural tale argued, but detract from the actual individuals written. It is disorienting when the author creates characters whose individual characteristics never feel relevant and developed.
The confusing narrative and devaluation of the individual characters in A Mercy result in a frustrating experience of a novel. Morrison's prose can still draw powerful images and emotion, and the characters, although not deeply developed as individuals, do contribute to a poignant theory of a still wild, and mixed heritage community, orphan of a country.
When the prose may be unbelievable from a character or actions are not fully explained, like in Jacob Vaark's pivotal and extreme turn from self-made and moral to luxurious, a quote from the novel may instruct how to regard these flaws: "What I know is there is magic in learning." Where a contemporary audience read Morrison's vision of 1690 America, there is some magic in her donation of vocabulary to those who might not historically possess it, but it is still a valuable donation of voice to help readers learn something. A Mercy ultimately meditates on its history and enjoys its own shimmering words, but fails to connect with memorable characters.