'Song of Solomon...profoundly changed my life' Marlon James Macon 'Milkman' Dead was born shortly after a neighbourhood 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. In 1930s America Macon learns about the tyranny of white society from his friend Guitar, though he is more concerned with escaping the familial tyranny of his own father. So while Guitar joins a terrorist group Macon goes home to the South, lured by tales of buried family treasure. ...
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'Song of Solomon...profoundly changed my life' Marlon James Macon 'Milkman' Dead was born shortly after a neighbourhood 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. In 1930s America Macon learns about the tyranny of white society from his friend Guitar, though he is more concerned with escaping the familial tyranny of his own father. So while Guitar joins a terrorist group Macon goes home to the South, lured by tales of buried family treasure. But his odyssey back home and a deadly confrontation with Guitar leads to the discovery of something infinitely more valuable than gold: his past and the origins of his true self. 'The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall' Salman Rushdie, New York Times BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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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.
