Have you ever felt like your life is an unsolved mystery, full of dispersed, broken parts that need reassembling? Have you ever felt like a sense of truth and order – indeed a sense of God – was far away and like chaos was all too near? That’s the situation that faces the main character in Morrison’s masterpiece.
Milkman Dead – yes, that’s his real name – is confronted by a world in which everything seems like a paradox. His grandfather jumped out of a window on the day he was born. His relatives are named after randomly chosen words out of the Bible (Corinthians, Magdalene/Lena, and Pilate, of all things). His family name is Dead, and his given name (Macon) is shared by his father. Everything is out of order and a seeming contradiction.
However, Milkman never strays far from his home environs. He is a black man living in Michigan in the early twentieth century. He has few, if any, friends because none of them understand his relative wealth. He is held hostage and imprisoned away from the world in this weird bubble of life.
Fortunately, as this story evolves, Milkman comes closer to understanding who he is, who his family is, and what makes the real world work. He becomes alienated from his past and for the first time, embraces what an emancipated, enlightened life looks like.
The action in this book grows and grows all the way to the last sentence. It helped to win Morrison a Nobel in Literature. Any reader who spends the couch change to buy this book and the hours necessary to make sense of the piece will be bountifully rewarded by understanding herself or himself better as they embark on the journey with Milkman.
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Copyright (c) 1977
ISBN13: 9781400033423
Page Count: 337
Genre: Fiction, Coming of Age
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