"If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple (this color that is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature) is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field." [Alice Walker, Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition]
i reached the last page of her novel this morning, still snuggled up under my duvet in the warmth of my bed... tears streaming down... i love it, every bit of it... the Open University Press publication of her novel i found for ?5 at Fopp (the cheap CD store that caters to those who know what they want but doesn't barr anyone who doesn't know what they want from entering also stocks stacks of books at reduced prices... i was browsing a picture book about Frank L. Wright's fascinating buildings the other day while ruth popped in to get a CD she wanted... discovered that many of his masterpieces are in Wisconsin... the state next to Minneapolis, after you cross the Mississippi ...) is dog-earred on some of the last pages... i do that to my books... "sacrilege" you might gasp but i think it's forgivable... (this is by no means disrespect... but i guess it's just me personalising them, i suppose... anyways i digress).
i don't always find myself captivated from the first instance when i pick up a book... but The Color Purple did it... it was shocking... very painful... and it was also disturbing because you feel like you are prying into someone's journal... now that's sacrilege. but it is really an amazing work, at least to me -- the na?ve, amateur literature appreciater... overwhelmed by awe actually... because there's so much in there that's not said but resonates... the language -- the 'black english' that Walker used, the growth of the epistolary diaries in form and in expressions and in length... you see some transition of the way the diaries were written (including the use of language) as you infer the changes that manifest in the characters, their ordeals, their acquired experiences and 'self-enlightenments'... it is also beautiful how, at the very crux of it, we are who we are because of others...
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