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“Story of a sick woman who leads a weird life in order to help the poor.”
Mary F wrote this review Monday, July 25, 2011. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Second time reading this book. It was a good read. ”
Belle wrote this review Thursday, February 3, 2011. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“it's been too long, but I recall loving it!”
Ellen C wrote this review Monday, January 24, 2011. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Though Alice Walker has worked in a variety of genres, including children’s literature, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting, she is best known for her novels, which give voice to the concerns of an often doubly oppressed group: African American women. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple, which extends and solidifies many of the themes she first touched upon in her early work, which includes Meridian. In many ways, Meridian anticipates and paves the way for Walker’s future preoccupations: it focuses on women’s lives and examines how the past and the present interconnect and construct the future. Meridian, Walker’s second work of long fiction, is set against the turbulent backdrop of the civil rights movement, which gained force in the 1960s, triggering sit-ins, demonstrations, and protests against the racist and segregationist policies that controlled and shaped the lives of African Americans in the South.
Rowland Bismark Fernando wrote this review Saturday, June 5, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Meridian is in some respects autobiographical, but Walker and Meridian Hill, the novel’s protagonist, differ in many significant ways. Both Walker and Meridian were raised in rural Georgia and became pregnant as young students, though Walker, unlike Meridian, did not have the child. While Meridian’s relationship with her mother was fraught with problems, Walker blossomed under the influence of her mother, Minnie. Minnie bought the young Walker three pivotal and symbolic gifts: a sewing machine to encourage self-sufficiency, a suitcase to nudge her curious and errant spirit, and a typewriter to nurture the gifted wordsmith and budding writer in her daughter. Additionally,Meridian’s Saxon College is loosely based on Spelman College, the all-black women’s college in Atlanta where Walker started her formal education in 1961. At the time, Atlanta was a hotbed of civil rights activism, but like the young women of Saxon, Spelman’s students were viewed as ladies in training, too refined and upstanding to throw themselves into the fray of social protest. Walker resisted such rigid control of her life and transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, north of New York City. Walker returned to Georgia during the summer of 1965 to canvass voters in Liberty County. When she sat down to write Meridian almost a decade later, she drew from these experiences walking the dusty roads and encouraging residents to register to vote.
A tireless crusader on behalf of women, Walker in her later career defended her work against censorship and continued to speak out against the horrors of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and genital mutilation, a ritualistic practice employed by several native African cultures. Not precisely aligned with broad feminist concerns, Walker has often labeled herself a “womanist,” establishing her primary goal as a writer and individual to free women from oppression in all of its forms. Walker is also a student of history, and she strives to create a dialogue in her work between the past and the present in an attempt to elucidate eternal truths as well as eternal struggles and hardships. Like Meridian’s father, Walker has an abiding love of and respect for Native Americans and sees their plight as instructive and an important correlative to the black experience in the United States throughout the centuries.
Walker’s various aesthetic and social concerns are harmoniously combined in Meridian, an exploration of a young woman’s coming of age and her journey from loneliness, guilt, and self-doubt, to self-acceptance, empowerment, and love. Like Walker once was, Meridian is set on a path to greater self-realization and endures the hardships of firmly and irrevocably establishing her identity amid the chaos of social upheaval, sexual alienation, and people who are not always approving or supportive of either the woman or the cause.
Meridian is energized by a younger generation coming into its full power and raising its voice in dissent against the institutional racism that prevailed through the 1960s. Through occasionally violent protests and demonstrations, Meridian and other activists attempt to institute change and alter perceptions. Idealistic as they are, they ultimately find various degrees of satisfaction with the goals and ideals of the civil rights movement. Meridian feels that she will always stand on the fringes of the movement since she is unprepared to take her dissent to a radical, if not murderous, level. Lynne struggles with adapting and applying her own idealism to meaningful change in the lives of southern blacks. Truman eventually sours to the movement, having lost sight of its intentions in his self-absorption. In the end, Meridian realizes the fatuousness of dying or killing for the movement, concluding that the battle is won in small ways, such as getting blacks registered to vote and improving the lives of people victimized by the unchecked expression of racism.
In Meridian, young activists attempt to break with tradition by bringing an end to the racism and segregation that had overshadowed black Americans for centuries. Walker shifts her focus from the present to the past to explore the lives of people who helped pave the way to the present moment. The experiences of Louvinie and Feather Mae, for example, frame the issues that Meridian and her father face. The serpent mound also evokes this powerful historical precedent, serving as a vital connection between Meridian, her father, and the ancestors who came before her. Throughout Meridian, Walker stresses the universality of the human experience and suggests that no one has cornered the market on suffering. Rather, many individuals from a variety of groups and backgrounds share a common history of exploitation, guilt, suffering, violence, and, ultimately, freedom, triumph, and acceptance.
Meridian is plagued by a mysterious inherited illness, much like epilepsy, which parallels and triggers her spiritual and physical transformation. The sickness renders her unconscious, episodes she refers to as “falling down,” and it subjects her to paralysis, blindness, and hair loss. On one hand, the condition connects her directly with her father and great-grandmother, who suffered the same burden. The illness is also the physical rendering of Meridian’s deep emotional and spiritual angst, the grief and sadness that have marked and gripped her throughout her life. The illness becomes a means for Meridian to suffer, to perform penance for this ambiguous wrong she felt she has done. It also offers her atonement and, ultimately, self-acceptance. When she is well again, rising out of her sick bed and heading full force into the future, she can finally forgive herself and love and accept herself for who she is.
Walker prefaces her novel with a lengthy list of definitions and traditional usages of the word meridian. A total of twelve different meanings are included for both the word’s noun and adjectival form. This alone signifies the fact that Meridian resists easy definition or simple categorization. She is a complex and capacious character whose presence and identity cannot be reduced to a simple phrase or formulation. The term also sets up a comparison between Meridian and the growing civil rights movement. One of the most common definitions of the term is “zenith, the highest point of power, prosperity, splendor.” Not only does the novel trace the rise and growing power of social activism, united in the face of racist and segregationist policies, but it also tracks the ascent of Meridian from her spiritual and physical pain to a newly whole being in full charge of her capacities and inner wealth. An alternate meaning, “distinctive character,” applies just as well to the novel’s protagonist and namesake.”
“warm, darn good story, good male and female charaters”
Tony L wrote this review Monday, January 11, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“This novel depicts the insurmountable difficulties that faced many uneducated and oppressed African Americans of the 1920s through the early 1960s–people whose hope faded and whose rage flared as each year's injustices fell upon them. Amidst the strife and struggle of life within a society dominated by racism, fear, and rage, three generations of an African American family struggle to survive.
Wendy wrote this review Friday, April 24, 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
The title character, Grange Copeland, is a sharecropper who beats his wife, Margaret, and has an extramarital affair with a prostitute named Josie. His son, Brownfield Copeland, is a child whose father abandons him and whose mother commits suicide. At fifteen, Brownfield begins a search for his father that leads him into a world of lust and forbidden sex. At the Dew Drop Inn, he finds the beds of both Josie and her daughter, Lorene, are open to him. This sex triangle is broken, however, when Brownfield falls in love and marries Josie's niece, Mem.
Unfortunately, Brownfield follows his father's footsteps into the mire of the white man's sharecropping system. Feeling defeated and trapped, he turns his rage against his wife and children. Eventually, Mem grows tired of Brownfield's abuse and the unhealthy conditions in which they live. She forces Brownfield, at gun point, to get a factory job and returns to her profession as a schoolteacher. Mem succeeds in raising the family's standard of living until her health fails and Brownfield drags her back to the rat-infested shacks she despises. She takes a second step toward change but is defeated when Brownfield, jealous of her and fearful of any future she might be able to create, kills her.
Meanwhile, Grange returns from the North, marries Josie (for her money), and buys a farm. Together they raise Ruth, Mem's youngest daughter. Unlike his son, Grange has discovered that a cycle of hopelessness can only be broken if mistakes are faced with courage and life-building sacrifices for others are made. Based upon this belief, a bond of love develops between Grange and Ruth that distances Josie (who finds comfort in Brownfield's arms). Later, Brownfield gains legal custody of Ruth. Knowing that Brownfield's only objective is to destroy the possibility of wholeness within the child, Grange stops him. As the novel ends, Grange is hunted and killed for the murder of his only son.
This novel was not received with thunderous applause. Critics objected to the savage-like characterization of Brownfield. But like many African American women writers of the 1970s, Walker's purpose in telling this story is not to pick the sores of the African American male image. Her objective is to remove the blinders from the eyes of history so that the “real” stories of African American women's strengths and weaknesses can reveal themselves.
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“loved it”
veronica t wrote this review Sunday, June 1, 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“The theme of extreme compassion fatigue is very engaging to me. The first time I saw Walker read, she had Lyme disease, and it was causing her a great deal of pain. She was walking with a cane, and very cranky. I think that heavily informed my reading of this book. It's not her most graceful book, but the voice is oddly distant, which goes perfectly with the characterizations: the brave civil rights workers facing daily dangers and dehumanization, accomplishing so much, but being utterly exhausted by the effort. Feeding the world, and not being fed in return. ”
Claudstinia wrote this review Tuesday, November 13, 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“For anyone interested in reading Meridian, I suggest being prepared to read it twice. I enjoyed it during the first reading, but absorbed it on second reading. The book is a brilliant account of American black women's search for identity and history when history in America has traditionally been written about white men by white men. ”
Raul Duke wrote this review Friday, November 2, 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
