📚 24 - December
Starting with the October 2024 post, I'm putting the book blog on partial hiatus. (Though it seems functionally I'm actually still making posts; just shorter.)
On my little holiday in the Rhineland, I brought two books that, I realized later, I had read the summer before I moved to Berlin when I was living in my car. I picked up Song of Solomon at a used bookshop in Marfa, and I read The Odyssey (maybe the Fagles translation?) sitting for hours in a Colorado hot spring. That wasn't a great idea; was itchy all over for the next day or two.
Both, in their own way, books of transition and travel.
Homer (~700 BCE). The Odyssey. [trans. Emily Wilson]
I love this book!
Toni Morrison (1977). Song of Solomon.
What I remembered from this book was Part III—Milkman's journey to find his people down south, the rotten witchhouse filled with beautiful dogs, the archetypical or mythic hunts and songs and encounters wherein Milkman loses everything, including his watch.
Parts I and II have more a conventional novelistic structure—characters with secrets slowly revealed who behave in ways that conform to their ever-deepening personality; misunderstandings finally resolved in monologue that reveal to both the characters and the reader. This novelistic thatchwork seems to come loose in Part III and fly away in the wind.
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