Tar Baby

Zusatztext “Deeply perceptive. . . . Return[s] risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel.” —John Irving, The New York Times Book Review “Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability.” — New York “Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language . . . One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison’s story.” — The Washington Post “Wrenchingly good. A terrific book.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer “Hypnotic, stunningly alive.” — The San Diego Union-Tribune “That rare commodity, a truly public novel. . . . Morrison’s genius lies in her uncanny ability to immerse you totally in the world she creates.” — Newsweek “Powerful. . . . A stunning performance. . . . Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers.” — Kansas City Star “It takes one to the sheer edge of human relationships.” — Vogue “Wise, beautiful, astonishing, absolutely breathtaking.” — St. Louis Globe-Democrat “Reminds us again that Toni Morrison is one of the finest writers in America today.” — Louisville Courier-Journal “ Tar Baby is stupendous. Morrison is a writer of amazing skill.” — Roanoke Times & World “Its scope is grand and the interplay complex. But Morrison has the control of a skilled choreographer, with a careful eye pinned on pacing, suspense, grace, and frenzy. . . . She has an awesome lyric flair.” — The Charlotte Observer Informationen zum Autor Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from  The Bluest Eye  (1970) to  God Help the Child  (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019. Klappentext The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones--of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people. The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years--the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife--who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them--a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant's dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian's expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art. Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian's perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret's delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him...

Product details

• Authors: Toni Morrison
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 12.03.1981
• EAN: 9780394423296
• ISBN: 978-0-394-42329-6
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 147 mm x 218 mm x 30 mm
• Subjects: Children's and young people's books; Fiction > Narrative literature