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Book De*ion
Toni Morrison's new novelis a Faulknerian symphony of passion and hatred, power andperversity, color and class that spans three generations of blackwomen in a fading beach town.

In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who woulddo almost anything to gain his favor. In death his hold on them maybe even stronger. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee,mistress: As Morrison's protagonists stake their furious claim onCosey's memory and estate, using everything from intrigue tooutright violence, she creates a work that is shrewd, funny,erotic, and heart-wrenching.

Amazon.com

Book De*ion Toni Morrison's new novel
is a Faulknerian symphony of passion and hatred, power and
perversity, color and class that spans three generations of black
women in a fading beach town. 
 
In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would
do almost anything to gain his favor. In death his hold on them may
be even stronger. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee,
mistress: As Morrison's protagonists stake their furious claim on
Cosey's memory and estate, using everything from intrigue to
outright violence, she creates a work that is shrewd, funny,
erotic, and heart-wrenching. 
 
Amazon.com 
The first page of Toni Morrison's novel Love is a soft introduction
to a narrator who pulls you in with her version of a tale of the
ocean-side community of Up Beach, a once popular ocean resort.
Morrison introduces an enclave of people who react to one man--Bill
Cosey--and to each other as they tell of his affect on generations
of characters living in the seaside community. One clear truth
here, told time and again, is how folks love and hate each other
and the myriad ways it's manifested; these versions of humanity are
seen in almost every line. Monsters and ghosts creep into young
girls' dreams and around corners and then return to staid ladies'
lives as they age and remember friendships and cold battles. Men
and women--Heed, Romen, Junior, Christine, Celestial, and the rest
of Morrison's cast--cry and sing out their weaknesses and strengths
in rotating perspectives. Sandler, a Cosey employee, is a brilliant
agent of Morrison's de*ions of human behavior, "Then, in a
sudden shift of subject that children and heavy drinkers enjoy, 'My
son, Billy was about your age. When he died, I mean.'" And Romen is
allowed to play hero by saving a young girl from a brutal gang
rape, while at the same time, he battles disgust like no superhuman
would be caught dead feeling. 
 
Though slim in pages, Morrison constructs Love with a precision and
elegance that shows her characters' flaws and fears with brutal
accuracy. Love may be less complex than others in the grand
Morrison oeuvre, but not because Morrison performs literary
hand-holding. Readers will experience in this smooth, sharp-eyed
gem another instance of the Toni Morrison craftsmanship: she enters
your mind, hangs a tale or two there, and leaves just as quietly as
she came. 
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--E. Brooke Gilbert 
 
From Publishers Weekly 
At the center of this haunting, slender eighth novel by Nobel
winner Morrison is the late Bill Cosey-entrepreneur, patriarch,
revered owner of the glorious Cosey Hotel and Resort (once "the
best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East
Coast") and captivating ladies' man. When the novel opens, the
resort has long been closed, and Cosey's mansion shelters only two
feuding women, his widow, Heed, and his granddaughter, Christine.
Then sly Junior Viviane, fresh out of "Reform, then Prison,"
answers the ad Heed placed for a companion and secretary, and sets
the novel's present action-which is secondary to the rich past-in
motion. "Rigid vipers," Vida Gibbons calls the Cosey women;
formerly employed at the Cosey resort, Vida remembers only its
grandeur and the benevolence of its owner, though her husband,
Sandler, knew the darker side of Vida's idol. As Heed and Christine
feud ("Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy:
it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself"), Junior of
the "sci-fi eyes" vigorously seduces Vida and Sandler's teenage
grandson. In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals
the glories and horrors of the past-Cosey's suspicious death, the
provenance of his money, the vicious fight over his coffin, his
disputed will. Even more carefully, she unveils the women in
Cosey's life: his daughter-in-law, May, whose fear that civil
rights would destroy everything they had worked for drove her to
kleptomania and insanity; May's daughter, Christine, who spent hard
years away from the paradise of the hotel; impoverished Heed the
Night Johnson, who became Cosey's very young "wifelet"; the
mysterious "sporting woman" Celestial; and L, the wise and quiet
former hotel chef, whose first-person narration weaves throughout
the novel, summarizing and appraising lives and hearts. Morrison
has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually
unearthed, while Cosey, its axis, a man "ripped, like the rest of
us, by wrath and love," remains deliberately in shadow, even as his
family burns brightly, terribly around him. 
 
From Booklist 
Despite the simplicity of its title, Love is a profound novel. A
Nobel laureate must feel considerable pressure to keep performing
on a higher level than other writers. With her latest novel,
Morrison slaps our face with the fact that she is better than most.
The book has the tone of an elegy, for it emerges as a remembrance
of and yearning for past times and past people in a black seaside
community. There were days, back in the 1940s and 1950s, when the
Cosey Hotel and Resort was the place for blacks to vacation, dance,
and dine. Bill Cosey, a charismatic figure greatly attractive to
women, ran the resort. But now Bill is dead, and the story is, as
we see, not only a paean to past good times but also a portrait of
Bill Cosey's power. Unusual for blacks at the time, Bill did enjoy
power, both economic and social, for as far as the boundaries of
his coastal town reached--his kingdom by the sea. Now, in his
absence, the women in his life jockey for their own power in the
vacuum he left behind; their world now revolves around his will,
scribbled many years ago on a dirty menu. The novel's section
headings tell the tale of the different roles Bill played in these
women's lives: friend, benefactor, lover, and husband, among
others. At least in her later novels, Morrison can stand to be
criticized for obscurantism, which is also the case, to a certain
degree, here; in fact, readers may want to compose a chart as they
read, to keep characters and their relationships to each other
straight. But as a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is
without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric
but comfortably open style. 
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Brad Hooper 
 
From AudioFile 
Bill Cosey's male magnetism attracts the women who inhabit
Morrison's pages. Some commanding, some flighty, all are drawn to
Cosey's passion. Once, Cosey's Hotel and Resort on the beach was
the place for "colored folk on the East Coast." Now, the run-down
structure is home to his contentious widow and granddaughter.
Through a series of retrospectives, the mystery of the questionable
circumstances surrounding Cosey's death and his role in each
woman's life gradually unfolds. Morrison confronts issues of race
in America, particularly the deep disappointment of many
African-Americans in the face of ineffectual civil rights
legislation. Aching with melancholy for another, better, time, a
time left in a troubled past, Morrison's novel combines elegance of
language with a lush, luxurious reading to make "must listening."
S.J.H. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award 
 
Book Dimension 
length: (cm)20.1 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)13.2

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