Took all summer.

Started it three times. First in 2019, in Spanish, abandoned by the second chapter, and not because of the translation. I was reading at the wrong speed, on trains, ten minutes here and ten minutes there. This book will not be read in ten minutes.

The third attempt worked because of an accident. My mother broke her wrist in June and I went to stay with her for six weeks, and there is nothing to do in her flat in the afternoons except sit with the fan on and read while she sleeps. So I had four hours a day, every day, in silence, in heat, which turns out to be more or less the correct conditions.

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. You know from those two lines whether you can do this, and for a long time I thought I couldn't, because I like to know where I am and this book will not tell you where you are. Names arrive without introduction. Something terrible has already happened, everyone in the house knows what it is, nobody will say it, and you are in the house with them being managed, being kept from it. For two weeks I found that unbearable. Then it turned, and what had felt like withholding became something much closer to tact.

I'll confess to skimming. The section in the middle with the three voices, Sethe and Denver and Beloved, where the punctuation falls away and it becomes a kind of chant, I skimmed the first time through. Afterwards I went back and read it properly, out loud, quietly, so as not to wake my mother, and it is the finest thing in the whole novel. But I went straight past it the first time, and I think people ought to admit when they've skimmed.

Also I was wrong about something for years. I had it fixed in my head that Beloved is definitely the daughter, returned. Pilar in my book group said no, the novel will not confirm that, and I argued with her for twenty minutes and then went home and looked and she is right. There's the woman found in the shed. There's the story of the man who kept a girl locked up. There's the entirely ordinary possibility of a young woman with nowhere to go, walking into a household which needs her to be somebody else. All of it is held open at once. I had been reading a simpler novel than the one which actually exists.

On the Spanish. The title is a problem with no solution. Amada is the obvious word and it isn't wrong, but Beloved in English comes off a headstone, off the funeral service, dearly beloved, the words a preacher says over a hole in the ground. Amada doesn't carry the church in it the same way. Some Spanish editions leave Beloved untranslated on the cover and I understand the decision, and I still count it a small defeat. Iris Menéndez's sentences I have no complaint with at all. It's only that the word on the front is doing work in English which Spanish will not permit.

Baby Suggs in the Clearing is the passage I'd put in front of anybody who says they don't read novels. It isn't long. It's a woman standing in a wood telling people to love their own hands — and their own eyes, and their own neck, which is the bit that gets me every time. I read it four or five times that summer and my eyes went every time, in a flat in Alicante with a fan going, which is not a dignified way to weep.

Nine. The point I'm holding back is small and it concerns Paul D's chapters near the end, which felt like the book tidying, giving people somewhere to stand. Perhaps that's necessary after what comes before. Perhaps I wanted no comfort at all, which is easy to want when it isn't your history.

My mother, who has read nothing since the wrist except the newspaper, asked me what it was about and I said a woman who did something to save her child, and my mother said, well, was it the right thing, and I said nobody in the book agrees, and she said hm, and went back to sleep. Which is about the level of literary discussion I could manage in July.

It's lent to my sister now and I want it back. The copy has sand in it and I'm not going to explain how.