The Color Purple (Book Review)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An epistolary novel.

It's set in the southern USA in the 1930s & 1940s. and is about the life of a poor black family there.

Celie is raped by her stepfather and has a couple of children who disappear. She is then more or less forced to marry a man, Albert ____, who doesn't love her and treats her badly. Celie is gay and doesn't love him. Initially the story is told in a series of letters she writes to God.

Celie's sister Nettie goes to Africa as an au pair with a couple of missionaries and their adopted children, and writes to Celie, with descriptions of what is happening in the place where they live. This, for me was the best part of the book, reminiscent, in a way, of The Poisonwood Bible. It describes how an overseas rubber plantation company dispossesses the local people, forcing them to move off their land, and destroys their way of life -- "expropriation without compensation" is the latest political buzz-phrase for that kind of thing. Though the book is set in the 1930s and 1940s, it is the kind of thing that could still happen in South Africa 80 years on.

Celie, however, doesn't at first receive her sister's letter, because her husband hides them, but nevertheless switches from writing to God to writing to her sister. Celie eventually leaves her husband, finds someone who loves her, and starts a business, but things go wrong again.

In many ways it is a very sad book, all about people's messed up relationships, and how they manage to cope with them. I also found it quite a complex book, and had to read the first few chapters again when I was halfway through, just to keep track of the characters' relationships.

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