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This novel takes readers into a magical and richly peopled world which encompasses four generations of African American life.
Vintage
June 2004
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Featuring: Milkman Dead
352 pages
ISBN: 140003342X
EAN: 9781400033423
Trade Size (reprint)
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Multicultural African-American
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. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, a novel of large
beauty and power, creates a magical world out of four
generations of black life in America, a world we enter on
the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr. (known as Milkman),
son of the richest black family in a mid-western town; the
day on which the lonely insurance man, Robert Smith, poised
in blue silk wings, attempts to fly from a steeple of the
hospital, a black Icarus looking homeward...
We see
Milkman growing up in his father's money-haunted,
death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely
passive mother, beginning to move outward--through his
profound love and combat with his friend Guitar...through
Guitar's mad and loving commitment to the secret avengers
called the Seven Days...through Milkman's exotic,
imprisoning affair with his love-blind cousin, Hagar...and
through his unconscious apprenticeship to his mystical Aunt
Pilate, who saved his life before he was born.
And we
follow him as he strikes out alone; moving first toward
adventure and then--as the unspoken truth about his family
and his own buried heritage announces itself--toward an
adventurous and crucial embrace of life.
This is a
novel that expresses, with passion, tenderness, and a
magnificence of language, the mysterious primal essence of
family bond and conflict, the feelings and experience of all
people wanting, and striving, to be alive.
Comments
1 comment posted.
Re: Song of Solomon
This is one of the best books that I have ever read, and the characters will stay with me forever.
(Cat Delgado 9:06am September 28, 2011)
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