Recitatif

All that I knew about Toni Morrison is that when at college one of my teachers insisted - or otherwise we'd fail - that we had to read Beloved and The Bluest Eye. At that time, I could not understand much of what I was reading, but I searched for some summaries that helped me answer the questions on my test and deliver a very modest piece of writing.


A few years have passed since then and early in July, I decided I had to take up some more reading in English just to catch up with the years I had spent reading only very easy samples of English taken from grammar books or English learning methods.

Even though I have to devote most of my time to keep an eye on my child, we drove together to a nice book shop in town and I came accross a new collection of short stories that include translations of the hard words at the bottom of the page. In a nutshell, I was determined to read some good stuff and my choice was Recitatif.

It is a sweet story about two women who spend a period of time together in a shelter when they were children. They do not meet each other for years and they have five different encounters as time goes by. The author tries to show how racial, social and psychological changes play a particular role in people's lives and how they understand and interpret their own recollections of the past the their relationship with others.

There's not much much more I would like to say about the story, I just want to recommend people to read it. Follow this link if you really want to go deeper into it.