Jazz

Rating:
Summary: The beat of the Dance
Review: Toni MOrrison's book Jazz, is amazingly complex. The character Joe Trace, is a person searching for something more in his life. I wonder if maybe he thought he didn't have "the best person," as i he might have thought he could do better. The interesting thing that I found was the narrator. The narrator hides his or her identity until the very end. The identity was left to the reader's imagination, I myself thought that the narrator was Dorcas. When Morrison describes Dorcas's death, she puts the description in the point-of-view of a young lady. Also, when the narrator longs to be with Joe, and she says all she can do is wait. In my opinion, I take that as Dorcas being in heaven, and looking down on Joe. The setting of the story takes place in the early 1900's, in Lenox Avenue. The author sets the story in such a rural place that you wouldn't think anything crime wise would happen. That changes as Joe kills Dorcas. Joe kills Dorcas because at the time he was so happy with her, and others he was so sad. He killed her just to keep the feeling going. Joe shot her, which shocked me in a way because Violet, Joe's wife forgives him. How could Violet forgive him after he had sexual affairs with someone young enough to be their daughter? Also, when Violet is upset about Joe's affair why does she need to know about Dorcas? Is it the thought that Violet wasn't good enough for Joe? This book was relatively good, but confusing at times. To my suprise I learned that Toni Morrison's Jazz was second in a trilogy. If you like a book that is challenging, read Jazz.

Rating:
Summary: Another satisying read
Review: Toni Morrison is one of the greatest living authors in the United States today. "Jazz" holds up to my expectations. This is a book that explores the 1920's New York scene, as well as the great migration North. Trying to encapsulate everything in this review would be too hard. On the surface, this story would seem to be one of a love triangle, and the tragic ending. However, Morrison goes much deeper, and echoes Forster with the credo "only connect". This is a story of connection, of sex, and list, and emotions veering wildly out of control. The connection comes from making sense of tragedy, as well as the reader connecting with the characters. It's so hard to dislike those characters you have made moral judgements on, only to find their weaknesses and their humanity outweighs their actions. This is a beautiful novel, and only furthers Morrison's greatness. I will never listen to Jazz music the same way again (and it's a good thing. I also need to read this book again, as one reading is just not sufficient enough to be able to take it all in.

Rating:
Summary: Rereadable
Review: Toni Morrison's novel "Jazz" features one of the most initially inscrutable narrators in recent history. While the story itself is compelling (and is, according to the author herself, based on an actual Harlem murder circa the 1920's) and the language is liquid, poetic and wholly engrossing, it is, I think, the point of view from which this story is told that will make this particular Morrison work immortal. Is it God telling the tale, or is it, as Morrison herself has also suggested, the simple, oft-unheard inner voice of a universal "me" that can never achieve physical contact, being unembodied? Is it an omniscient neighbour listening in, putting the pieces of the tale together for himself/herself?
"Some people find other people's chaos very inspirational."--Toni Morrison

Rating:
Summary: The beat of the Dance
Review: Toni MOrrison's book Jazz, is amazingly complex. The character Joe Trace, is a person searching for something more in his life. I wonder if maybe he thought he didn't have "the best person," as i he might have thought he could do better. The interesting thing that I found was the narrator. The narrator hides his or her identity until the very end. The identity was left to the reader's imagination, I myself thought that the narrator was Dorcas. When Morrison describes Dorcas's death, she puts the description in the point-of-view of a young lady. Also, when the narrator longs to be with Joe, and she says all she can do is wait. In my opinion, I take that as Dorcas being in heaven, and looking down on Joe. The setting of the story takes place in the early 1900's, in Lenox Avenue. The author sets the story in such a rural place that you wouldn't think anything crime wise would happen. That changes as Joe kills Dorcas. Joe kills Dorcas because at the time he was so happy with her, and others he was so sad. He killed her just to keep the feeling going. Joe shot her, which shocked me in a way because Violet, Joe's wife forgives him. How could Violet forgive him after he had sexual affairs with someone young enough to be their daughter? Also, when Violet is upset about Joe's affair why does she need to know about Dorcas? Is it the thought that Violet wasn't good enough for Joe? This book was relatively good, but confusing at times. To my suprise I learned that Toni Morrison's Jazz was second in a trilogy. If you like a book that is challenging, read Jazz.

Rating:
Summary: A lyrical, brooding, rumbling, passionate, epic jazz poem
Review: As a child of artists and a classical and jazz musician, I had no idea or understanding as to why many of the churches- from the turn of the century to almost the present day in many areas- consistently referred to jazz as the devil's music, or dangerously secular, until now. Toni Morrison becomes the metaphor herself along with her invented characters as a story of love and passion, anger and rage, sorrow and grief, hunger and lonliness, acknowledgement and quiet, earhty epiphany unfolds as uncontrollably as the tides, with all the simple complexity of a jazz riff, and with as much freedom from judgement. The power of the emotions and events sweeping across the landscape of history and the landscape of the individual character's lives is frightening in its ability to overwhelm, and she brings it all out with such lyricism and painful joy. The novel can at times feel like a giant apotheosis or denoument, yet its slowly building climaxes are what make it more than readable; it makes it exciting and sublimely predictable and unpredictable simultameuosly. It almost makes one understand better why the story of Christ is called a "Passion"; passion, as exemplified in this novel, is not just a sexy or damaging thing, but also the way to come to know God.

There are small pars of the novel that are a bit too detailed in the rendering of lesser character's lives. Yet her rendering of the time period, the 20's, and the community is incredible. This is more, or different, than a novel. It is an epic poem- an epic jazz poem that has you hearing the music as it mildly, painfully, poignantly and triumphantly ends. Toni will not let you down with this one.

Rating:
Summary: Rereadable
Review: Toni Morrison's novel "Jazz" features one of the most initially inscrutable narrators in recent history. While the story itself is compelling (and is, according to the author herself, based on an actual Harlem murder circa the 1920's) and the language is liquid, poetic and wholly engrossing, it is, I think, the point of view from which this story is told that will make this particular Morrison work immortal. Is it God telling the tale, or is it, as Morrison herself has also suggested, the simple, oft-unheard inner voice of a universal "me" that can never achieve physical contact, being unembodied? Is it an omniscient neighbour listening in, putting the pieces of the tale together for himself/herself?
"Some people find other people's chaos very inspirational."--Toni Morrison

Rating:
Summary: When prose is poetry
Review: The book is a kind of poetry. Every word of it is right. You have to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time in the city according to one of the characters. Violet and Joe Trace live on Lenox Ave. in Harlem. Violet went to Dorcas Manfred's funeral with a knife. This occurred in 1926. Later she acquired a picture of the girl so that she and Joe could look at it in their living room. Violet is an unlicensed beautician who works in the apartment or in the apartments of her customers. After the funeral Violet usually worked in other places where people took pity on her and permitted her to do their hair. Violet had listened to her grandmother, True Belle, tell Baltimore stories. After the funeral Violet threw out her birds. This left her without her routines, rituals.

Joe and Violet met in Vesper County, Virginia in 1906. Dorcas moved to the city from East St. Louis where her parents had been killed in the riots. She lived with her Aunt Alice who disliked the music and felt it was responsible for most social ills. By the time she was eleven her whole life was unbearable. Alice Manfred worked hard to make her niece private, but she was no match for a city seeping music. Joe met Dorcas at Alice Manfred's place. Alice tells Violet sometime after Dorcas's death that she does not understand women with knives. Violet's father and mother had been dispossessed, in a sense driven off of the land. Her mother committed suicide just before one of the four or so times when her father returned to the family with funds. The important thing learned by Violet was never to have children. She had met Joe when she was doing a bad job of picking cotton. Joe did not want children either. Later on, though, Violet longed for a child.

Dorcas was young but wise. She was Joe's personal sweet. People might say he treated Violet like a piece of furniture. He was born and raised in Vesper County in 1873. He was called Trace because his own parents had disappeared without a trace. When he went to school he told the teacher his name was Joseph Trace. His foster brother, Victory Williams, turned around in surprise and said the Williams parents would be mad. He told Victory that when his parents came back he would need a different name so they could pick him out among the seven or so children; but they never came for him. Dorcas had long hair and bad skin. When Joe was a teenager he encountered the person he believed was his mother, a wild woman, someone who was almost feral. This scared him. It made him work hard. Dorcas said that Joe made her sick. She had a new friend, Acton. Acton felt that Dorcas liked to deceive Mrs. Manfred, her Aunt Alice. Dorcas ws buried with a stolen opal ring on her finger.

Rating:
Summary: Phenomenon
Review: Morrison has done it again. The story of a twisted love affair gone awry, Jazz takes you through the streets of an up and coming Harlem in the 1920s. It bares the souls and psyches of Violet, a 50-something black woman going through a midlife crisis, and her husband Joe, who falls in love with a teenage girl in an attempt understand his disjointed past.

If you have read any of Toni Morrison's works, this book follows the exact same pattern of her others: no visible pattern at all, but somehow coming together throughout the various narratives in various times and places within history. Although many questions are left unanswered, you still feel as if you have been immersed in a dream, a fantastic journey into the past that you never want to end. Morrison's writing is both beautiful and complex. There literally are no words to describe it. There is no one else out there like Morrison.

I suggest that first-time Toni Morrison readers start off with Sula, which is her shortest and least complex work, but still one of her greatest, and then pick up Jazz after you have read a few others including Beloved, Tar Baby, and Song of Solomon.

Rating:
Summary: Jazz in Writing
Review: "Jazz" (1992) is one of the best works by Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman awarded Nobel Prize for literature.

The best way to read "Jazz" is to read it slowly, savour every line, every sentence, every mental picture it creates. It is a lyrical novel, where the story shifts back and forth in time -- expression of feelings, moods and thoughts has a priority over a plot.

The story of love lost, searched and found on the background of 1920's Harlem creates an appealing, coloful tapestry. Morrison often uses "stream of conscoiusness" method of writing, first applied by Virginia Woolf. Dialogues, although rather scarce, are brisk, full of humanity (good and bad) and even spark with wisdom of common people. The narrator identifies with the characters, portrays them with affection and ultimate understanding. The story is marked with striking sense of detail, various motifs interchange and interweave -- just like in jazz music -- and the result is powerful.

As with jazz music, "Jazz" the book is not a book for everyone. But once you come to appreciate the style, you can read it again and again and every time find something new.

One is bound to agree with a reviewer in Cosmopolitan who related to "Jazz" as if it was "Shakespeare singing the blues."

Rating:
Summary: An Underappreciated Novel
Review: After having read this novel I can't believe all the negative reviews, most people claiming that the novel was too hard or difficult to follow. I've read 4 of Morrison's books (The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula and Beloved) and I'll have to say that enjoyed this one amensely and I pretty much read over a span of three days. It's not a difficult read, nor is it difficult to follow if you've read any of her before or read Hemmingway, Faulkner or Kerouac for that matter. On a second reading of any of Morrison's novels, you always come away with something new, as with any quality piece of literature. So I really don't buy into this idea that Morrison's novels, this one in particular are difficult to read.

This being said, I found this novel to be a great pleasure, a story that's simple enough about a middle-aged married black couple The Traces in "the City" during 1920's the husband Joe Trace has a fling with a young girl named Dorcas Manfred whom he later kills in the middle of party though the girl's Aunt/Guardian doesn't press charges and the wife Violet "Violent" Trace tries to disfigure the dead girl in the casket at her funeral. That's basically it without giving away the novel. There is an almost sensual use of language here that tells the stories behind the story that is common in Morrison's novels that gives Jazz that particular kind of flavor that distinguishes it from Morrison's other works and makes this novel more than a pleasure to read. I highly recommend it!