Jazz

I liked Beloved, Paradise, and The Bluest Eye, so I’m acquainted with her lyricism, which I love. However, in this book it seems lyricism is used as a tool to mimic the improvisation of Jazz (each character has its own “musical” voice as part of the ensemble), and they ebb and flow and lean back and pitch forward....all of which leaves me as confused and disconcerted as when I listen to jazz (I'm not a fan). The sudden changes in voice and narrative did not for me...maybe someone with a more refined musical “ear” can appreciate the swift shifts, but I’m found them off putting.

But I still felt compelled to finish....the dialogue (brilliant in its conciseness), the pathos, the characters themselves, the evocation of show more “slavery, city, and spirituality,” and the potential of how it would end...so I did and I'm glad. She is a gifted writer and although this one was too “displaced” for me, I’m looking forward to reading Song of Solomon. show less

Set predominately in 1920s New York City, Jazz follows Violet and Joe, a middle-aged couple who left the South for the City twenty years earlier. The book opens shortly after Joe kills his teenage lover, and Violet attacks her body during the funeral. Toni Morrison then takes readers into the past to understand the forces that shaped Joe and Violet and led them to that fateful day.

Jazz was Toni Morrison’s sixth novel, published five years after her previous work, Beloved. Each novel portrays a period in the history of Black people in America, with emphasis on culture over historic events. Beloved is set during slavery and its aftermath; Jazz during and after The Great Migration. In writing about the Jazz Age, Morrison very effectively show more imitates the jazz genre itself: the narrative can be lyrical, sometimes percussive, and subplots spin off like soloists in a jazz combo. The technique is mostly effective, although the novel faltered over one protracted “solo,” despite its satisfying resolution. This was followed by the denouement which, instead of tying up loose ends, seemed disjointed.

Only a writer of Morrison’s calibre could successfully produce two back-to-back experimental works like Beloved and Jazz. While I consider Beloved the better of the two, both are rewarding for those interested in literary form and the themes she chooses to explore. show less

A short, challenging read, but a very good book. This time Morrison sets her story in 1920s New York City, a place that, while it's not exactly perfect, lacks some of the Jim Crow South's obvious menace. It's somewhat surprising, then, that her story revolves around Joe and Violet Trace, a black couple who'd migrated up from Virginia, and the violent fallout from Joe's sudden infatuation with Dorcas, a young girl of high school age.

The writing is up to Morrison's standard — which is to say that it's fantastic — but she chooses here to tell her story bit by bit, in connected segments that range from a paragraph to a page-and-a-half or so in length. While I generally like the author most when she goes on long, easy storytelling show more riffs, this structure forced me to focus my attention. I had to backtrack a few times just to make sure that I hadn't missed too much. Also, despite the book's title, this stylistic choice seemed more cinematic than musical to me: a constant fade-in and fade-out that added up, over the long run, to a complete story. Or perhaps the author's intention was just to reflect modernist modes of storytelling: her descriptions of New York's black residents playing jazz and jazz records are lovely: beautifully observed and irresistibly sensual. And, in this novel, jazz is presented as a straightforwardly avant-garde art form, always informed by the body but not always tethered to bloody personal or social histories. Even so, she doesn't forget the fact that the rhythms invented in this book's settings went on to be heard far beyond New York's black neighborhoods, and her description of couples dancing to jazz is suffused with pleasure. There's still a lot of music here.

Honestly, one of the things that really set this book from Morrison's other works is its wholehearted commitment to sensuality. Music isn't the half of it. Morrison was well into retirement age when she published this one, but you would hardly know it, as it's filled with Dorcas and Felice's excitement, Joe Trace's easy, attractive masculinity and Violet's rage. Along with the music, hot New York summers and the stuffy air of crowded parties and nightclubs where illegal booze flows freely help set the scene. Heck, Joe even uses his easy manner and big country smile to help sell his beauty products.

Morrison does take us back a generation or so to the desperate poverty of rural Virginia that helped drive many of this book's main characters north. In the character of Golden Gray, I recognized a bit of Absolom, Absolom!'s Jim Bond: I'm a reader who loves watching Morrison in conversation -- or perhaps competition -- with William Faulkner. And I loved how Morrison helped bring the rural South to the urban North by describing how Joe Trace's tracking skills still served him in the big city. But, in the end, sometimes this historicizing, albeit necessary, feels less than completely necessary: the setting of this book is relentlessly modern, and its biggest questions seem to revolve around how human beings can live human lives in a place that doesn't always seem designed for human life. In the end, the book's characters more or less manage to do it, but only after going through the sort of gargantuan personal struggles involving quiet resistance and baseline self-acceptance that make Toni Morrison's books so unforgettable. This probably shouldn't be anyone's first Morrison novel, but it is real quality. show less

I’m slightly unsure what to say about this novel. It is not destined to be a favorite of Morrison’s for me, but the writing is so damn good I don’t want to turn people off of it. It’s a fairly straightforward story about a marriage and an affair but told in a non-linear way. I don’t know much about jazz music, but I think it has a lot to do with a central melody and then instrumental and vocal riffs off that center - which perfectly describes the novel. This is Joe and Violet’s story, but then a lot comes off of that – about the city, about their pasts, about their origins, about slavery and the unfulfilled promise of the post-Civil War South and the post-World War I North... It all comes together in a sort of chaotic show more whole that can be disorienting at times, but then Morrison returns to Joe and Violet, and the reader finds that center again. It is really remarkable as a piece of writing, even if as a story it didn’t fully engage me.

3.75 stars show less

"In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse."

And that's how the story's first few pages begin. Love, obsession, and black urban life. The plot line is discordant, jumping between storylines and past and present. It beats with ugly remembrances of violence and broken families, torn lives. Yet the writing in this book is simply beautiful, the unnamed narrator haunting. The book seems to echo the music of Jazz itself, saying listen to me! I have very mixed emotions after finishing this book. Read it and judge for yourself.

Alguien nos cuenta una historia a modo de narrador omnisciente. Finalmente descubrimos que esta narradora fue asesinada por su amante, cuya esposa además, intenta destrozarle la cara durante su funeral. Así comienza esta novela, en la que Morrison vuelve a envolvernos en su mundo hasta hacernos comprender la vida de hombres y mujeres negras en una gran ciudad norteamericana, nunca nombrada pero sí descrita, la Nueva York de principios del siglo XX.
Una historia terrible que deben solventar los protagonistas porque a ninguna autoridad le interesa lo que pueda ocurrirle a los negros. Parece que esto sigue siendo así.
Conocemos los hechos en las primeras páginas y pasamos el resto de la novela intentando conocer a un coro de personajes show more entre los que destacan los tres protagonistas principales, la joven Dorcas, su amante Joe Trace y su esposa Violet, con los que explora temas como la locura ("los locos tienen sus razones"), la desesperanza, el destino o los celos, junto con la historia de las migraciones del campo a la ciudad o del propio jazz, que ambienta toda la novela.
Como siempre, el lirismo y la presencia de esa mitología que Morrison usa para rescatar la memoria histórica de su gente, recorren un texto que no te deja escapar. show less

Joe and Violet are in the business of beauty. Joe sells cosmetics door to door and his wife is a home-visiting hairdresser. Usually a straight up and dependable man, Joe falls in obsessive love with a teenager named Dorcas. His passion for Dorcas forces him to kill her. At her funeral, in a fit of jealous insanity Joe's wife, Violet, attempts to slash the dead girl's face while she lay in her coffin. Violent Violet then goes home to free all of her pet birds. Her rage makes her human. The smartest character in the book is the City. I like the way the City makes people think they can do whatever they want and get away with it. The culture is full of passions, both right and wrong. Jazz will also take you back to July 1917, a time when show more Grandmother True Belle (great name) was afraid of Springfield, Massachusetts. Morrison's vivid descriptions of culture are breathtaking. show less