A review by dyno8426
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

5.0

There is something wonderful that I always find with books with extraordinary character names (Macon Dead, Pilate, Hagar, Guitar Bains, First Corinthians, Magdalena called Lena, to name a few). This is the coming-of-age story of Macon Dead Jr., born into a rich African American family, who goes on a quest for his family’s lost treasure and finds his own ancestral origins in the journey through South America. With a Gabriel Garcia Marquez type brilliance in narrative style and a similar genre, Toni Morrison has created a rich dense work, with a lyrical quality and extremely vivid description for all your senses. Within the plot lies memorable characters rich with the flaws, passions and pursuits of human spirit. The story, being set up post the American Civil War when slavery was abolished, was expected to carry the plasma of the troubled dynamics of their societies and the rise of the long enslaved and discriminated to assert their power and capabilities. But within this plasma, the blood which renders life to this historical fiction is the idea of baggage that humans carry with themselves, sometimes under complete oblivion. It’s not only genes that we pass on but also the burdens shared and borne by our ancestors. And the heaviest and most accumulating of it is the time, the mistakes which sometimes leave their imprints exponentially. The awareness of being the product of the decisions of our forefathers while make us feel powerless and threaten our sense of identity, it also puts the reins of our future generations’ destiny right in our living fingers. Macon Dead’s name is the very beginning of how this story makes us realize the baggage that time forces us to carry. As his own life is unraveled, we see him being weighed down by people in his life who leave him only with a sense of being used. He decides to leave them behind with the purpose of starting afresh, but his assertion of his own identity comes only with the understanding and acceptance of his past. And only then does his present begins to make sense to him and he is able to leave, not the baggage, but its sense of weight behind. I absolutely loved this crazy melancholic story.