The Bluest Eye

Synopsis: Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity – and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her characteristic subtly and grace.

In Morrison’s bestselling first novel, Pecola Breedlove – an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others – prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful so that people will look at her so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Writing a review is always a difficult task. As a writer myself, I know how hard it is to make that perfect idea to work on paper. More than that, I know that it doesn’t matter what you do, the idea will always be better than what you wrote. And this review is even harder! Because I’m a nobody, while Morrison is a Nobel Prize Winner. But I have to be true to myself.

The main reason that makes me dislike the book is how confusing it is. I could only understand the story by reading the Wikipedia page. While reading, I didn’t know what was past, future and present. I didn’t even know who was who. Pecola, Claudia, Frieda, Polly… there are lots of characters, and I couldn’t tell them apart.

I wanted to like, to enjoy this book. Toni Morrison was a gifted and incredible writer. And The Bluest Eye probably is, like most first books are, her rawest book. And usually, I find this attractive. But this time, it didn’t work. This is unfortunate because by reading about the novel, I could see that there’s a great and important story that I missed.

I wanted to like it, and I wanted to be touched by the book. But I just felt confused and bored. It’s painful for me to write all this, but as I said at the beginning: I have to be true to myself.