Song of Solomon (Vintage International) - Softcover

Morrison, Toni

Softcover

ISBN 10: 140003342X ISBN 13: 9781400033423

Publisher: Vintage, 2004

Synopsis

New York Times Bestseller

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. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

"You can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else -- they're transcendent, all of them. You'll be glad you read them."--Barack Obama

About this title

Review:

In an effort to hide his southern, working class roots, Macon Dead, an upper-class northern black businessman, tries to insulate his family from the danger and despair of the rank and file blacks with whom he shares the neighbourhood. The plan leads his son, "Milkman"--a named he earned after his mother nursed him well past the proper age--onto a path exactly opposite the one his father had hoped. Milkman is driven into the arms of a violent, lower-class woman, into a clandestine circle of blacks who repay white violence in kind and into an awareness that he can fulfil his own potential by understanding the mistakes of his ancestors as they relate to his own.

Review:

"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

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 140003342X
• ISBN 13: 9781400033423
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352