Genre Fiction
![Toni Morrison - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APT7NQ.jpg)
![Durthy Washington - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001IOFJ8A.jpg)
Song of Solomon
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey's "The Books That Help Me Through" selection • With this brilliantly imagined novel, the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez.
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.
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.
Editorial Reviews
"A rich, full novel. . . . It lifts us up [and] impresses itself upon us like a love affair." -The New York Times Book Review
"Exuberant. . . . An artistic vision that encompasses both a private and national heritage."
"A rhapsodic work. . . . Intricate and inventive." -The New Yorker
"Stunningly beautiful. . . . Full of magnificent people. . . . They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever." -Anne Tyler, The Washington Post
"If Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man went underground, Toni Morrison's Milkman flies." -John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review
"It places Toni Morrison in the front rank of contemporary American writers. She has written a novel that will endure." -The Washington Post
"Lovely. . . . A delight, full of lyrical variety and allusiveness. . . . [An] exceptionally diverse novel." -The Atlantic Monthly
"Morrison is a terrific storyteller. . . . Her writing evokes the joyful richness of life." -Newsday
"Morrison dazzles. . . . She creates a black community strangely unto itself yet never out of touch with the white world. . . . With an ear as sharp as glass she has listened to the music of black talk and uses it as a palette knife to create black lives and to provide some of the best fictional dialogue around today." -The Nation
"A marvelous novel, the most moving I have read in ten years of reviewing." -Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Toni Morrison has created a fanciful world here. . . . She has an impeccable sense of emotional detail. She's the most sensible lyrical writer around today." -The Philadelphia Inquirer
"A fine novel exuberantly constructed. . . . So rich in its use of common speech, so sophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner . . . it is also extremely funny." -The Hudson Review
"Toni Morrison is an extraordinarily good writer. Two pages into anything she writes one feels the power of her language and the emotional authority behind that language. . . . One closes the book warmed through by the richness of its sympathy, and by its breathtaking feel for the nature of sexual sorrow." -The Village Voice
"Exuberant. . . . An artistic vision that encompasses both a private and national heritage."
"A rhapsodic work. . . . Intricate and inventive." -The New Yorker
"Stunningly beautiful. . . . Full of magnificent people. . . . They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever." -Anne Tyler, The Washington Post
"If Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man went underground, Toni Morrison's Milkman flies." -John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review
"It places Toni Morrison in the front rank of contemporary American writers. She has written a novel that will endure." -The Washington Post
"Lovely. . . . A delight, full of lyrical variety and allusiveness. . . . [An] exceptionally diverse novel." -The Atlantic Monthly
"Morrison is a terrific storyteller. . . . Her writing evokes the joyful richness of life." -Newsday
"Morrison dazzles. . . . She creates a black community strangely unto itself yet never out of touch with the white world. . . . With an ear as sharp as glass she has listened to the music of black talk and uses it as a palette knife to create black lives and to provide some of the best fictional dialogue around today." -The Nation
"A marvelous novel, the most moving I have read in ten years of reviewing." -Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Toni Morrison has created a fanciful world here. . . . She has an impeccable sense of emotional detail. She's the most sensible lyrical writer around today." -The Philadelphia Inquirer
"A fine novel exuberantly constructed. . . . So rich in its use of common speech, so sophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner . . . it is also extremely funny." -The Hudson Review
"Toni Morrison is an extraordinarily good writer. Two pages into anything she writes one feels the power of her language and the emotional authority behind that language. . . . One closes the book warmed through by the richness of its sympathy, and by its breathtaking feel for the nature of sexual sorrow." -The Village Voice
Readers Top Reviews
CarmillaRYAN FIEN
One of the most beautiful books I have read. A son is conceived, by magic, into a strange and strained middle-class black family. An outcast from the moment he is born, hated by his father and held too close by his mother, he dreams of flying away. Macon Dead, named after his father and grandfather, survives numerous attempts to his life, which begin while he is still in the womb. When he leaves home in search of gold he finds and loses something far more precious - his people. Song of Solomon is an enchanting and beautifully told story. A well deserved classic of 20th century literature.
M. DowdenCarmilla
Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel is still a great read and one more people should become acquainted with. As you start reading this you can clearly see that inspiration has come somewhat from the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, which certainly gave Morrison more freedom to enlarge her tale and increase its scope. And after all, you cannot dislike a tale about a man called Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead, his family, including women called Pilate and First Corinthians, and his friend Guitar. Critically acclaimed and bringing the author fame when first published, this is a tale that is extremely readable, whilst also giving us some quirkiness. We open with a black insurance salesman who jumps off his roof wearing a pair of wings and hoping to make it to the opposite side of the lake that he resides on. With this a black woman starts to go into labour, becoming the first non-white to give birth in the local hospital. This book though having predominately black characters thus being African American literature is also one that bridges the gap between that and standard American literature, because although we have racism as a subject here the characters all have their own individual problems and dreams, and they all have to live cheek by jowl and have a lot of the same problems as white people, and here also Native Americans. This then gives the book a universal appeal, which has helped it become as popular as it has. We thus follow our main character Milkman as he tries to make his way through life, taking in family responsibilities, love and the usual elements, although it does have to be admitted that he is rootless as such and only thinks of himself and what others can do for him. Taking in the loss of a collective identity and the confusion and remorse this can cause so we see as this book progresses that Milkman actually tries to reconcile different aspects and become someone who is centred and has grown to full manhood and is able to accept different and difficult situations. We even have a gang here, who when a black person is killed retaliates by killing a white person, which shows some going down an eye for an eye route, but with no concept of how to stop things from happening in the first place. Here then we have a tale with more than just slavery and racist undertones, but also a story of the dispossessed and those isolated and afraid due to the new society, and so touches on not only those forcibly transported due to slavery, but also those who have immigrated to somewhere completely different. Incorporating folk legends and multiple myths from different sources, so there is a lot to take in and enjoy with this, as well as making you think. But at the end of the day this can be seen as a story of someone making a personal odyssey and becoming rooted in the present world.
FictionFanP. G. H
Macon Dead III has grown up in Michigan, the son of a harsh, property-owning landlord and the local black doctor’s daughter. In the course of the book, he will travel to the South, to Virginia, where he will learn more about the history of his family, his metaphorical roots, and to some degree, find his own identity and the meaning of his life. Sometimes it depends when we read a story how much we connect to it, and unfortunately I read this at a time when I probably wasn’t giving it the attention it requires. I’m not therefore going to try to write an in-depth review – these are simply my feelings about the book, which I found disappointing. The prose is very good, of course, sometimes excellent, though never with the power of some of the prose in Beloved in my view. The story takes forever to kick off, well into the second half before I felt I had any clear idea of what the book was attempting to be about. The last third or so was considerably more interesting and enjoyable than the rest of the book which dragged along at a snail’s pace replacing narrative drive with heavy-handed and yet still obscure symbolism. Most of the characters have Biblical names and I assume that’s supposed to have some significance. I freely admit that, as a lifelong atheist, my knowledge of Bible stories is sketchy, but I couldn’t tie what little I knew about the Biblical originals to the characters at all. Maybe this was a failing on my part, but I can usually cope with religious symbolism well enough. Here I found the names and my attempt to see their relevance a distraction. The symbolism regarding flight and African folklore worked rather better for me. The other thing that bothered me may well again say more about me than the book; namely, that the lives of the people in this black community seem full of self-created ugliness and near bestiality. Everything is about sex or bodily functions – no-one seems to even try to lift themselves above the animal passions, intellectually or morally. Is urinating on other people normal in black American communities? I wouldn’t have though so, but it seems to be in this one. Maybe that’s symbolic too, but of what? Necrophilia, incest, women suckling their sons in a highly sexualised way, women wanting to kill or die for the loss of lovers, men beating women and each other – I longed for at least a couple of characters to connect on a rational rather than a physical level. To a degree in the early part of the book, Macon and his childhood friend Guitar achieve this, but their friendship gradually distorts into a strange and unconvincing kind of violent hatred. I wondered if perhaps Morrison was trying to show how the history of slavery and subjugation had brutalised black culture, with perhaps even a call to arms for black people to support and lift each other rather than submitting to the c...
S. BusonikAsher A
My two stars have nothing to do with the content of this novel, which is probably the most important American work of fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. Others praise it cogently, so I refer readers to their reviews. But the Kindle edition is full of inexcusable mistakes. I'm around 150 pages into it and have already found too many. The most egregious so far appears on page 154 (location 2723), where Guitar says to Milkman, "I suppose you know that white people from time to time, and most folks shake their heads and say, 'Eh, eh, eh, ain't that a shame?'" Well, as it turns out, the sentence ought to read "I suppose you know that white people KILL BLACK PEOPLE from time to time. . . ." (my emphasis). This kind of sloppiness is inexcusable. I wouldn't buy this edition until you learn that it's been corrected. How you're supposed to know so is perhaps murky. Just buy the print edition.
Scott J PearsonS.
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.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock. Two days before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house:
At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.
(signed) Robert Smith,
Ins. agent
Mr. Smith didn't draw as big a crowd as Lindbergh had four years earlier--not more than forty or fifty people showed up--because it was already eleven o'clock in the morning, on the very Wednesday he had chosen for his flight, before anybody read the note. At that time of day, during the middle of the week, word-of-mouth news just lumbered along. Children were in school; men were at work; and most of the women were fastening their corsets and getting ready to go see what tails or entrails the butcher might be giving away. Only the unemployed, the self-employed, and the very young were available--deliberately available because they'd heard about it, or accidentally available because they happened to be walking at that exact moment in the shore end of Not Doctor Street, a name the post office did not recognize. Town maps registered the street as Mains Avenue, but the only colored doctor in the city had lived and died on that street, and when he moved there in 1896 his patients took to calling the street, which none of them lived in or near, Doctor Street. Later, when other Negroes moved there, and when the postal service became a popular means of transferring messages among them, envelopes from Louisiana, Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia began to arrive addressed to people at house numbers on Doctor Street. The post office workers returned these envelopes or passed them on to the Dead Letter Office. Then in 1918, when colored men were being drafted, a few gave their address at the recruitment office as Doctor Street. In that way, the name acquired a quasi-official status. But not for long. Some of the city legislators, whose concern for appropriate names and the maintenance of the city's landmarks was the principal part of their political life, saw to it that "Doctor Street" was never used in any official capacity. And since they knew that only Southside residents kept it up, they had notices posted in the stores, barbershops, and restaurants in that part of the city saying that the avenue running northerly and southerly from Shore Road fronting the lake to the junction of routes 6 and 2 leading to Pennsylvania, and also running parallel to and between Rutherford Avenue and Broadway, had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street.
It was a genuinely clarifying public notice because it gave Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please the city legislators as well. They called it Not Doctor Street, and were inclined to call the charity hospital at its northern end No Mercy Hospital since it was 1931, on the day following Mr. Smith's leap from its cupola, before the first colored expectant mother was allowed to give birth inside its wards and not on its steps. The reason for the hospital's generosity to that particular woman was not the fact that she was the only child of this Negro doctor, for during his entire professional life he had never been granted hospital privileges and only two of his patients were ever admitted to Mercy, both white. Besides, the doctor had been dead a long time by 1931. It must have been Mr. Smith's leap from the roof over their heads that made them admit her. In any case, whether or not the little insurance agent's conviction that he could fly contributed to the place of her delivery, it certainly contributed to its time.
When the dead doctor's daughter saw Mr. Smith emerge as promptly as he had promised from behind the cupola, his wide blue silk wings curved forward around his chest, she dropped her covered peck basket, spilling red velvet rose petals. The wind blew them about, up, down, and into small mounds of snow. Her half-grown daughters scrambled about trying to catch them, while their mother moaned and held the underside of her stomach. The rose-petal scramble got a lot of attention, but the pregnant lady's moans did not. Everyone knew the girls had spent hour after hour tracing, cutting, and stitching the costly velvet, and that Gerhardt's Department Store would be quick to reject any that were soiled.
It was nice and gay there for a while. The men joined in trying to collect the scraps before the snow soaked through them--snatching them from a gust of wind or plucking them delicately from the snow. And the very young children couldn't make up their minds whe...
The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock. Two days before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house:
At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.
(signed) Robert Smith,
Ins. agent
Mr. Smith didn't draw as big a crowd as Lindbergh had four years earlier--not more than forty or fifty people showed up--because it was already eleven o'clock in the morning, on the very Wednesday he had chosen for his flight, before anybody read the note. At that time of day, during the middle of the week, word-of-mouth news just lumbered along. Children were in school; men were at work; and most of the women were fastening their corsets and getting ready to go see what tails or entrails the butcher might be giving away. Only the unemployed, the self-employed, and the very young were available--deliberately available because they'd heard about it, or accidentally available because they happened to be walking at that exact moment in the shore end of Not Doctor Street, a name the post office did not recognize. Town maps registered the street as Mains Avenue, but the only colored doctor in the city had lived and died on that street, and when he moved there in 1896 his patients took to calling the street, which none of them lived in or near, Doctor Street. Later, when other Negroes moved there, and when the postal service became a popular means of transferring messages among them, envelopes from Louisiana, Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia began to arrive addressed to people at house numbers on Doctor Street. The post office workers returned these envelopes or passed them on to the Dead Letter Office. Then in 1918, when colored men were being drafted, a few gave their address at the recruitment office as Doctor Street. In that way, the name acquired a quasi-official status. But not for long. Some of the city legislators, whose concern for appropriate names and the maintenance of the city's landmarks was the principal part of their political life, saw to it that "Doctor Street" was never used in any official capacity. And since they knew that only Southside residents kept it up, they had notices posted in the stores, barbershops, and restaurants in that part of the city saying that the avenue running northerly and southerly from Shore Road fronting the lake to the junction of routes 6 and 2 leading to Pennsylvania, and also running parallel to and between Rutherford Avenue and Broadway, had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street.
It was a genuinely clarifying public notice because it gave Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please the city legislators as well. They called it Not Doctor Street, and were inclined to call the charity hospital at its northern end No Mercy Hospital since it was 1931, on the day following Mr. Smith's leap from its cupola, before the first colored expectant mother was allowed to give birth inside its wards and not on its steps. The reason for the hospital's generosity to that particular woman was not the fact that she was the only child of this Negro doctor, for during his entire professional life he had never been granted hospital privileges and only two of his patients were ever admitted to Mercy, both white. Besides, the doctor had been dead a long time by 1931. It must have been Mr. Smith's leap from the roof over their heads that made them admit her. In any case, whether or not the little insurance agent's conviction that he could fly contributed to the place of her delivery, it certainly contributed to its time.
When the dead doctor's daughter saw Mr. Smith emerge as promptly as he had promised from behind the cupola, his wide blue silk wings curved forward around his chest, she dropped her covered peck basket, spilling red velvet rose petals. The wind blew them about, up, down, and into small mounds of snow. Her half-grown daughters scrambled about trying to catch them, while their mother moaned and held the underside of her stomach. The rose-petal scramble got a lot of attention, but the pregnant lady's moans did not. Everyone knew the girls had spent hour after hour tracing, cutting, and stitching the costly velvet, and that Gerhardt's Department Store would be quick to reject any that were soiled.
It was nice and gay there for a while. The men joined in trying to collect the scraps before the snow soaked through them--snatching them from a gust of wind or plucking them delicately from the snow. And the very young children couldn't make up their minds whe...
