A Mercy
by Toni Morrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Toni MorrisonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-08-11
ISBN: 0307276767
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780307276766
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of A Mercy
Book Review: A New Approach to Slave Narratives
Summary: 5 Stars
In her 2008 novel A Mercy author Toni Morrison presents characters that challenge previously held notions about who participated in the slave trade. Set in a time when America was still a new land waiting to be explored, the novel follows the Vaark family and their three serving women as they learn to bond together to survive in an untamed world. Morrison writes about more than just African slavery, and I believe this book is worth reading because Toni Morrison invokes a hierarchy of whiteness that asks the reader to rethink any previous ideas he or she had about slavery and race.
Set in seventeenth century America, an unforgiving new world full of possibilities, A Mercy plunges the reader directly into the novel, starting at the end where the reader has no idea what is going on or who is speaking. The main characters find themselves tied together as a family to survive in a land that is harsh with people who are sometimes harsher. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch farmer who also lends money and trades goods while living in Virginia with Rebekka his wife that traveled from England to marry him.
Vaark experiences the slave trade in the Americas, but does not necessarily wish to participate in it. Although he ends up with three servants, they occupy a different place in the household than traditional slaves, becoming a part of the family and proving that while the family holds together, it is strong. In the raw natural beauty of the Americas a loneliness prevails without a close-knit group of family and friends, and the Vaarks discover that more than needing the servants to help on the farm, they need them for the feeling of protection that comes from human contact, something that many times transcends race and status boundaries.
The three serving women in the household who also find their way into the Vaark family are Florens, Lina and Sorrow. One of the two true slave girls, Vaark accepts Florens as payment for a loan that could not be repaid; Florens believes she was abandoned by her mother to the Vaark family and cannot understand why. Lina is a native who becomes enslaved when her tribe dies of smallpox. Lina is very suspicious of the strange girl Sorrow, a white indentured servant who seems to have little memory of her past other than being shipwrecked. Jacob Vaark is the first character that is introduced in the plot as he rides to collect payment for a loan and ends up with Florens despite his misgivings about the slave trade. Vaark is presented as a hardworking man trying to build a home, a farm and a family for himself with Rebekka. Through flashbacks the characters reveal their pasts as Rebekka relates her journey from England and how she made the choice to become Vaark's wife, while Lina tries to understand what happened to her tribe.
Like Virginia Woolf, Morrison writes using stream of consciousness in some chapters, which sometimes makes the novel difficult to read. The chapter by Florens is supposed to come from an uneducated slave, and yet she is the only character that ends up with a distinct voice. In giving Florens a distinct voice Morrison does set her apart, but the voices of the other characters seem to blend together simply by virtue of the fact that they are not Florens. The rather flat voice of any character that is not Florens combined with the spare plot can mean that this novel is difficult to finish for some readers.
Although the novel has its faults, the language is easy enough to deal with, as it is neither overly poetic nor so hard as to take away the enjoyment of reading. Florens has the only voice that is hard to understand sometimes and there are passages that are beautifully written. Once the initial confusion generated by the first chapter has cleared, the sparse story unfolds in some grammatically interesting sentences that move Morrison's writing like waves over a beach: they flow rhythmically in the chapters that are based on characters other than Florens. A Mercy is really a novel that deserves a second reading to fully appreciate the writing and ideas the author presents.
Morrison treats her subject with the greatest of serious care and proves that she is invested in portraying several dimensions of slavery by including multiple races and situations of enslavement. Care is taken to ensure that the writing reflects the raw and untamed wilderness of the Americas at this time while emphasizing the human bonds that are necessary to survive in a harsh climate. This serious treatment combined with stream of consciousness composition in some chapters may turn many readers away from this novel. What may be the redeeming quality of this novel for some readers is how Morrison incorporates the stories of multiple characters, relating the plot through several angles. Each character has his or her own chapter in the novel, and this approach may appeal to readers who enjoy reading novels where they can engage with an individual character through a chapter that relates that character's history and is in that individual's voice.
There are many slave narratives available for reading, but Morrison attempts to create something different by writing not only about African slaves, but also about white indentured servants and even two different kinds of slaveholders. This novel provides different characters that defy the typical white slaveholder as tyrant model, and it is precisely Morrison's success at relating different dimensions of slavery that makes the novel special. Novels like A Mercy are important and worth reading because they hold the typical notion of history up to the light and examines it further to place very human characters into an historical time period in a way textbooks and lectures cannot. In creating a hierarchy of whiteness, Morrison is examining what constitutes a slave and challenging the commonly held views that all slaves were of African descent and all slaveholders were evil.
Summary of A Mercy
National BestsellerOne of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in ?flesh,? he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter-a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.African American Books
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