Song of Solomon: A Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An official Oprah Winfrey's "The Books That Help Me Through" selection - The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author.
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
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. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.
"Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and revelling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs." --The New Yorker
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Community Reviews
That was my original thought, as I looked down to see that I was only 3% through the book when I could have sworn I was at least 20% through. If you would have told me at that point that I would end up really enjoying this book, I would have called you crazy. And a liar. And probably something that would need asterisks in place of letters.
It was a long (and sometimes exhausting) journey. It was a march through characters that I truly disliked from start to finish. It was a cruel vortex sucking me in and distracting me from things I should have been doing (Oh, the house is a disaster? Don't care. We're out of clean clothes and food and water? Don't care!).
I knew early on that I could not - and that I would not - identify with the characters. A couple small differences between us?:
1. I've never smoked pot and gotten sky high before a funeral.
2. I've never murdered anyone. Although I did once run over a family of raccoons that was crossing the road late at night.
The characters ARE the book. There is no real explanation for their actions, no "Mommy and Daddy didn't pay enough attention to me" excuses, but there really didn't need to be. I didn't want them to be someone that I could know. I loved that they were something so foreign to me. These intellectual, spoiled, trust-fund brats with no sense of consequence who loitered around an old East Coast campus and an old unoccupied estate because there really is nothing they need to be doing. I like my books to take me somewhere I'll never be. I don't read to be where I already am.
For a long time, I felt the book was inappropriately lengthy. Now I think it was necessary. Necessary to push what awful things were done out of your mind. Necessary to forget how callous, how EVIL words and actions were. Necessary to evoke some empathy for these characters you found to be despicable not-so-long ago. Not a LOT of empathy, mind you, but enough that you wonder what kind of witchcraft this Donna Tartt is practicing on you.
Except in the movies (Knute Rockne, All-American) I don't know if I've ever seen such a bravura performance.
That is this book. A bravura performance.
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