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A review by leahtylerthewriter
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
5.0
"She was too insubstantial, too shadowy for love. But it was her vaporishness that made her more needful of defense. She was not a maternal drudge, her mind pressed flat, her shoulders hunched under the burden of housework and care of others, brutalized by a bear of a man. Nor was she the acid-tongued shrew who defended herself with a vicious vocabulary and a fast lip. Ruth was a pale but complicated woman given to deviousness and ultra-fine manners. She seemed to know a lot and understand very little."
A deeply interwoven family saga about a young man's quest to free himself from the constraints of his parentage, only to discover the richly buried truth of his hidden ancestry.
You know those books where the characters insidiously infest pockets of your brain, and stay there, and the author is generous enough to give you all you need to glom onto them for the rest of your life, if not theirs? Yeah, this is it.
This book tells the story of a few men, the women who round out their lives, and the experience of race and class and hierarchy and friendship and obsession and survival. Told with a deep, unflinching peak into one painfully tangible American family.
Morrison's skill in pointing a lazer directly at the soul and busting it wide open is nothing short of mesmerizing. She meanders from each character's subconscious while revealing their internal churnings with pinpoint precision. She dives into the most carnal and raw parts of humanity with startling honesty, all the while softening the truth around the yearnings each person holds deep inside. Morrison's writing, and encapsulation of life, is pure magic.
Not one single plotline was wasted. If she was generous enough to take you there, she took you all the way there. Everything had an ultimate point, even the most innocuous story at the beginning came full circle and her commitment to honoring every character's subplot blew my mind wide open.
The story is told with no deference to either the male or female experience, just an unflinching peeling back of the ugliness, and tenderness, contained within all who exist in this world.
A deeply interwoven family saga about a young man's quest to free himself from the constraints of his parentage, only to discover the richly buried truth of his hidden ancestry.
You know those books where the characters insidiously infest pockets of your brain, and stay there, and the author is generous enough to give you all you need to glom onto them for the rest of your life, if not theirs? Yeah, this is it.
This book tells the story of a few men, the women who round out their lives, and the experience of race and class and hierarchy and friendship and obsession and survival. Told with a deep, unflinching peak into one painfully tangible American family.
Morrison's skill in pointing a lazer directly at the soul and busting it wide open is nothing short of mesmerizing. She meanders from each character's subconscious while revealing their internal churnings with pinpoint precision. She dives into the most carnal and raw parts of humanity with startling honesty, all the while softening the truth around the yearnings each person holds deep inside. Morrison's writing, and encapsulation of life, is pure magic.
Not one single plotline was wasted. If she was generous enough to take you there, she took you all the way there. Everything had an ultimate point, even the most innocuous story at the beginning came full circle and her commitment to honoring every character's subplot blew my mind wide open.
The story is told with no deference to either the male or female experience, just an unflinching peeling back of the ugliness, and tenderness, contained within all who exist in this world.