Song of Songs – Toni Morrison

Song of Songs by Toni Morrison it is a song for all ages. This is the first Toni Morrison book that I discovered, and for more than two decades I have repeatedly returned to it. It has cast a magic spell on me ever since and it has been my best introduction to modern literary works. His narrative never fails to invigorate and captivate.

The language is rich, apt, deliberate, uninhibited, and seductive. The novel is a reflection on family, community and nationality. It is about the torment of dispossession, boundless power and the ugly face of fanaticism. It is also about survival, human resilience and the indestructible search for identity. The narrative is carefully crafted and wonderfully lyrical, a song that is almost without equal.

We traveled with the main protagonist of the story, Macon (Dairy) Dead Jr, from birth, through the empty, brutalizing and even lurid terrain of his teenage life. Finally we witness his life or death encounter with a world, a disgusting landscape, that sought to drown him when he wanted to find a purpose in his life. Its history, its metamorphosis and its flight are the foundations of the song.

Dairy He is the son of Macon Dead Sr, a rapacious, irascible but successful entrepreneur. The father suffocates and poisons his family and his son with his anger, his contempt and his disappointments. His tormented spirit becomes the swamp that the Dead family enters on a daily basis. Your success is not a balm for your bitterness. His wife, Ruth (ForsterDead, the main object of her indignation is reduced to a pathetic creature that only exists in the shadows, reproached, maligned, despised and humiliated daily by the husband she loves.

Magdalena Dead and First Corinthians Dead of their daughters wither from the isolation that their locked life grants them. Their father’s wealth, tainted with his contempt and pomposity, engenders a life of loneliness and disappointment. Her friends are afraid to even touch her silk stockings and expensive dresses. Like their mother, Ruth, their souls are emptied of all emotion, leaving them unable to love or be loved. They are frustrated and complaining spinsters whose fury for their father roars like a flooded river.

His contempt for his selfish brother, Dairy, it is unstoppable. ‘You’ve been laughing at us your whole life, Corinthians. Mother. Me. Using us, ordering us and judging us: How we cook your food; how we maintain your house … Who are you to approve or disapprove of someone or something? … When you wanted to play, we entertained you and when you grew old enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-tone Ford everything in this house stopped for you.

The world Toni Morrison describes is bleak. At Dante’s Hell The gates of hell are thrown wide open, and in the Song of Songs the reader is immersed in a world that smells of haunting slavery, with depravity floating menacingly in the background. It is a pernicious domain that produced men and women whose souls were warped by loss and suffering.

Dead milkman narcissism is juxtaposed with the nihilism of his friend Guitar. Guitar responds to the chaos that surrounds him with rage. Throughout the book it sizzles, like a piece of bacon burning in its own fat. With violence he tries to regain his own freedom. The guitar possesses all the destructive feelings that an organically dysfunctional society imposes on its inhabitants. But nevertheless, DairyTo go beyond his father’s drive for more wealth, he embarks on an odyssey to his ancestral home of Shalimar. It is the discovery of these roots that ultimately leads you to discover your inner self.

Professor Morrison raises the bar very high again with this novel. The reader is delighted with the characters in the story, and even with the minors. There are long passages of vernacular dialogue unique to the time and people it describes, and it is mostly written in simple but jarring language. This book is a portrait of the world, a time that may be hidden but not forgotten, through his gaze and that of his clan.

Song of Solomon it is a work of extraordinary beauty and integrity … a true masterpiece.