I have been slipping majorly with my reading list lately…why did I have to be in Costco last night in line behind someone to discover that Toni Morrison had just released a new book, A Mercy! I literally jumped on the poor man and asked him all of the deets: when, where, why, how, and what. Where was I when this was announced?
I then had to surf the ‘Net to find out more. From New York Magazine:
Those millions of readers familiar with Toni Morrison’s work, in particular her novel Beloved, won’t be surprised at the numerous instances of brutality and deprivation in her new book, A Mercy, the Nobel Prize winner’s ninth novel and her first since Beloved to depict American slavery—albeit in a very early, seventeenth-century form. What may well throw them for a loop is the redemptive tone: a pristine landscape, a compassionate white Northern farmer, and a notable absence of racial animosity—felt even more keenly in an election year with a full deck of race cards. In A Mercy, Jacob Vaark’s collection of laborer-charges (a Native American, a black child, an orphan, and two indentured servants) are united by and against a spreading culture of servitude that has little to do with skin color.
“I really wanted to get to a place before slavery was equated with race,” says Morrison. “Whether they were black or white was less important than what they owned and what their power was.” She speaks from her home on the Hudson River in Rockland County, as an “inconvenient but exciting” summer thunderstorm rages outside. At 77 and preparing for her last year of teaching at Princeton, she has a high, soft, almost timid voice—perhaps the result of having just recorded the audio version of A Mercy (“three days of complete misery”). But her stated purpose—defining an America where race isn’t everything—couldn’t be clearer: “There is no civilization that did not rest on unpaid labor—not Athens, not Russia, not England, no one,” she says. “The exoticism came with race.”
I have read every Toni Morrison novel and short story published…. I can’t wait to “A Mercy!”
Keep it strictly stylish!
