Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garc�ia M�arquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully ...
Read More
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garc�ia M�arquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
Read Less
Add this copy of Song of Solomon to cart. $39.10, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brownstown, MI, UNITED STATES, published 2017 by Books on Tape.
Add this copy of Song of Solomon to cart. $39.10, fair condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2017 by Books on Tape.
I loved this book Toni Morrison is a great writer.
rejoyce
Aug 1, 2007
Recovering Names
Toni Morrison's 1977 epic masterwork is underpinned by a myth of flight, an image of transcendence, and a return to the ancestral homeland. Milkman Dead's journey to the South to recover his aunt Pilate's ancestral bones becomes one of self-definition and discovery, and the novel is an effort to recover the "real names of people, places and things. Names that had meaning." In its reclamation of a past expunged by slavery, Song of Solomon prefigures Beloved's exploration of that "peculiar institution." Among the novel's themes are race and class, sexual sorrow and predation, retributive violence and all-embracing love. Milkman has his opposite in the character Guitar, but they define each other as well, and represent the ideological conflicts that marked the fragmentation of the civil rights movement. Pilate (whose homonym is pilot) is the female ancestor-figure whose generous, loving spirit presides over the novel, guiding Milkman in his search for lineage and home. Rich with rose petals, a bag of bones, characters named Circe, First Corinthians and Hagar, Not Doctor Street, and a children's riddle-song, this is the most Marquezian of Morrison's oeuvre. Throughout Song of Solomon sings, and in the end surrenders to the mythic air. So will you.
