I’m reading Toni Morrison’s latest book A Mercy.
It’s the large print edition because the publishers have only released a hard back normal font copy and a paperback large font copy. I’ve never read a large print book before and it is such a bizarre experience because I’m so used to reading lines that contain a complete sentence. In this large print edition, one sentence can sometimes take up to four or five lines. I had to read the first couple of pages a few times so that my eyes could get used to scanning at a faster rate and my brain could get used to remembering what I’d read a few lines back.
A Mercy hasn’t been released in Australia but I managed to find a copy in Oxford Books, Leederville. I was quite surprised to find it there because the store has a relatively small fiction section. People mainly go there to buy coffee table and gift books.
I put it on my reading list for uni because I’m interested in learning more about the slave trade in America, the American colony and how a writer uses multi-perspectives to tell a story with many a back story. Set in the late 1600s, there are six perspective as a freed black man, a reluctant slave owner – farmer, his English mail order bride and their three female slaves tell their stories in a mix of first and third person narrative.
You can listen to the first four parts of the story at here at the NPR website. Will let you know what I thought of it when I finish.
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UPDATE
I finished reading the book last night and it has stayed with me today. There are 6 – 7 narrators with the last one being the most powerful and surprising. What impressed me about the book is how the narrative was so tightly woven even with so many points of views and how each character gave us his or her backstory, without meandering too far from the core of the story. I enjoyed Sorrow’s story the most.
I was sobbing by the last chapter.
The reader does get a little lost in the first chapter of the novel, and I don’t think it’s only because of the large print, but stay with it. You shall be rewarded.
One point that confused me a little is that the farmer, and later sugar plantation owner, Jacob Vaark mentions that he hopes there will be a return to Protestant rule in England which is now under the Stuarts. If this is the case then it is not 1690 because by 1690 William of Orange, a Protestant, was King. Of course it was Lina the native American slave who suggested it was 1690 and she probably had no idea.
It is just wonderful that Toni Morrison has recreated the voices of those whose lives were considered so insignificant and that their stories live on. This is why I love literature so much.
I love being back at university. I have permission to read so many great books.
