The Bluest Eye

I still have an urge to read classic books. And after I had managed to get through the rather practical book about running and breathing, I started one again. The Bluest Eye. I figured I should really read a Morrison, and this one seemed a good one to start. 

Spoiler alerts!

The protagonist is a nine year-old poor Black girl. And she basically reveals the big plot twist on the first page: there is another girl in their social circle, who ends up being raped by her father and pregnant because of it. The protagonist has a real child's perspective on everything.

You don't really get the perspective of the other girl, but you do get the whole life stories of her parents. And given that they are American, poor and Black, these are not uplifting stories. 

Quite early on the book, the protagonist says that she doesn't understand why dolls are always depictions of pretty blonde white girls, and that she hates them. She understands the social pressure to love them.

It is the girl that ends up pregnant that is the one that explicitly asks for having blue eyes herself. Does this end well for her? I'll leave that to your imagination.

This is obviously not a cheerful book. It is full of racism, poverty, domestic violence and alcoholism. But who said that books should be uplifting? What I did like was the big background you get of many of the characters in it. It is one thing to introduce someone who does monstrous things. It is another thing to show the life that someone has had before they did it. And I think it is a good idea to read more or less realistic depictions of awful lives. People have those. And if you're lucky enough not to have one yourself, it is good for the soul to sometimes step into the shoes of people who do. Or did.

It's not a big book; I read it entirely during my trip to the Netherlands. I can really recommend it! For those that don’t mind a bit of a battering…