Jazz

Rating:
Summary: Dazed and Confused
Review: This book deals with the story of a couple in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. The book has many underlying themes and symbols throughout. It was difficult for me to draw the connections of the symbols to their meanings. While I read I had a hard time keeping up with the narritive because the scences changed rapidly. When I finished reading it I felt like I needed someone to come and explain all the symbolism used in the novel. However I do enjoy Morrison's descriptions of the city before and during the Harlem Reniassance and how jazz was an expression of Black's emotions during the time period. This was my first Morrison book and I was not too happy with the overall feeling I got but hopefully her other works are more clear cut.

Rating:
Summary: Dark passion
Review: Inspired by a newspaper story where a woman stabbed a dead woman at the funeral, Morrison tackles obsession, vitriolic hatred manifested as marrings. The marring of a deep love by an affair, the marring of the mistress, the marring of Violet's reputation/identity by her actions throughout the community that once embraced her.
To defend, to attack a live mistress/sexual opponent is acceptable but when one's husband has killed hsi mistress to hold the love in amber, is madness. A madness that goes deeper than what we can imagine.
Or can we?
In Tar Baby, the topic was love and loving with White people as the background, a white canvas, if you will but here, it is Black on black canvas. Cry for freedom by traveling from the South as a loving couple, cry for release through a 50 year old man finding love with an 18 year old girl and then cry vengeance with a capital V for Violet. Hot like hot chocolate in hell, thsi book is jazz, hits its mark with the improvisation, the dance of the sentences that are no longer simply poetry but now notes, harmony, lyrics, melody dancing along the ceiling, on the wall as shadows, as figures entwined first 1 then 2 then 3 then 2 then a solitary one again. Bebop, bebop. 4 beat to 8 beat to 16 beat then to 8 then to 4. Improved as scat through Coltrane, a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme.

Rating:
Summary: Confused and Frustrated
Review: I forced myself to finish Jazz based on the author's critical acclaim, but what a waste of time. Other than the few snippets of imagery that I still remember, the storyline was extremely difficult to follow and the characters were not at all well developed. Jazz was the second Morrison novel (after Beloved)
I've read, and it will be my last because I don't possess the mental gymnastics/framework she requires.

Rating:
Summary: Moving, masterful...Morrison
Review: I've never been a fan of Toni Morrison's. Even though she is both a critical darling AND heralded as a literary Messiah by the proletariat, I've never been able to get into her. Still, I have to respect any successful purveyor of the "wacky-for-the-sake-of-whack" style of writing, and someone who has for years been both El-train fodder and critical wunderkind.

Morrison is a "book tease". Sure she can be extremely engaging writer, but the reader is only engaged because he's being TEASED. She doesn't give the whole story away, but prefers to lead you along nipping at her bait. She does this in everything I've read by her, and she continues her torture in JAZZ. As soon as she gets you engaged in one facet of the story, she switches to another. Now this is fine, because at the end, all of her separate stories will come together and create a glorious cohesive whole of narration. Still, the reader cannot but be frustrated and annoyed by a tease. It seems unnecessarily cruel to do this over and over and over again. THE BLUEST EYE, BELOVED and now JAZZ. It seems everything the woman writes is shamelessly, remorselessly, PITILESSLY cruel to her readers.

Yet, it is clear that Morrison doesn't do this out of some twisted wish to see her readers suffer. Certainly she's no Faulkner. So there must be something else here, some master plan, some great literary rationale behind all the fuss. Plainly, there has just got to be some reason that everyone likes her and I don't. So I approached JAZZ the way you approach that relative you really never liked, but you have to make nice to at a funeral. I decided I'd shake hands, but not touch cheeks.

But JAZZ isn't a book you can stay aloof from. And for once, either because she hit me over the head with the title or simply felled me with her inimitable stylism, I was in the Morrison groove, digging the Morrison style and truly experiencing that strange Morrison trip for perhaps the first time. I can finally appreciate the beauty of her prose, and respect the value of her intricate narratives. The book reads like jazz; fast, furious stories rushing together. Jangling, almost discordant narratives flowing towards the same culmination, and then racing back in a different tack to return to that same point through a different series of interconnecting literary melodies. And then narrative and the music fill your head with so much magnificent noise that you too feel like you're standing in the center of the City, watching it flow around you, and live and breathe.

Such is the beauty of Morrison, and of JAZZ. Hardly a perfect journey [hence the 4 star rating], but well worth the few bumps. Now if only she'd been able to do this for BELOVED!

Rating:
Summary: a drunken journey through the mind of a crazy women
Review: Please don't read this book, it's awful. It has no flow and takes you in every direction but the one that might make sense. If you feel you must read this "masterpeice," take acid before every sitting.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent at points, but very uneven
Review: Toni Morrison's Jazz is like the very little girl with a very little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it is horrid.

First, where it is good. Jazz tells about a murderous love triangle in 1920's Harlem involving Joe Trace, a middle-aged cosmetics salesman who takes an 18-year old lover, and then to keep the affair from ending, kills her. His wife Violet then seeks revenge on the girl by mutilating her corpse at the funeral, but finally is reconciled to the girl's family and to her husband. A plot about passions, if there ever was one, and Morrison's language certainly evokes those passions. Hers is prose more to be experienced than read. The passages narrating the characters' childhoods and states of mind leading up to their various acts of love and violence makes you understand exactly what experiences in being a Negro in the turn-of-the century south or Jazz Age New York would lead a person to feel the anger and longing that produces the passionate violence this book is about. Her language does not only explain these dark passions, does not only let the reader share them, but actually makes them seem beautiful, in their own inverted sort of way.

But in her use of this language, Morrison is not so much an author as a presdigitator. Her lyric prose catches the mood of the characters' actions without actually making them make any sense, and so the excellent style of the novel merely serves as a diversionary tactic to distract one from the fact that the plot is quite weak. Read for emotion, the book does let you feel what the characters feel, but read actually paying attention to the text, there are numerous moments where you can't help but ask, "And the character is doing this why?" or "This symbolic motivation is related to the character's actual actions in what way?" I felt almost cheated at the end when Violet reconciles herself to Joe without even a cursory explanation of what led her violent, hateful, destructive emotions to do a complete about-face in the space of the last twenty pages. Certainly, the final description of their renewed commitment to their love is beautiful, but it is marred in that it makes no sense, and its senselessness makes no sense either.

This might be overlooked if Morrison even managed to keep up her lyric conjuring for the entire novel. But it is occasionally interrupted by self-indulgent intrusions wherein a narrative "I" confesses that even the author really doesn't understand the characters. (This does not help the reader in the slightest.) Then there are the extended flashbacks involving minor characters' childhoods in the South that neither advance nor explain the main 1920's Harlem plot, and furthermore destroy the lyric jazz mood of the novel because the jazz style that works so beautfully in the city simply is not appropriate for the rural deep South.

Jazz is a good novel to experience the first 50 pages of, to become wrapped up in Morrison's almost magic prose. But it is not worth finishing -- she should have lent her considerable narrative talents to a more worthy plot.

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly disappointing
Review: Having read a number of Morrison's novels, I expected this to be much better than it was. While the language was sophisticated and the symbolism/imagery provocative, it failed to meet the standards of her other and, not surprisingly, better-known novels.
The book is about the love between a man, his wife and the man's new lover. Rather than tell the story in sequence, Morrison explains the history of the individual characters to explain their motivation and help the reader understand why they act the way they do. All well and good. Unfortunately her desire to slip into a "stream of conscious" writing style and need to use recurrent symbolism - nature themes are abundant and especially masterful when juxtaposed against "the City" - interrupts the flow of the story and can be disorienting at times. I found myself going back to reread pages to figure out what plot twist I had missed only to discover I had not missed anything at all , but had rather misinterprested a misplaced metaphor.
While it may be harsh to rate the book a two given what passes for literature these days, compared to her other works, I believe it is justified.
For someone just beginning to read Morrison, I would suggest starting with this book rather than reading it later. It would just be a disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: Dancing with Jazz
Review: Reading Jazz is akin to dancing to jazz; with all its rhythmic syntax, onomatopoeia and musical tropes, it surely did take my breath away. While I was having a delightful time with the story, I was also caught every now and then to ruminate on Toni Morrison's lyricism. Her use of a narrator who is arbitrary in a lot of sense, and much more so impersonal, makes the story very appealing in terms of reconciling the past with the present and of reality with principles. She tackles the issue or racism and sexism very explicitly and boldly enough without making Jazz pedantic. Her structuring of the characters is haphazard, which makes it sometimes confounding but I think her style is worth exploring.

Jazz is a story of a love triangle and what lurks within and outside this three-centered relationship is the multifarious and complex story of the lives of the Negroes in the time of slavery and the great migration. It supposes to speak out their long-repressed voices especially the women's voice. It slightly exhorts why there was abuse or injustice, and it shows it clear-cut and point- blank. Its lyricism hopes to lay the lessons of human folly and to bespeak that justice and love comforts the grieving and painful past. It also talks about dealing with the past, defining memory and learning from it.

The marvelous thing about the story is its use of musical tropes to make the story more passionate. Morrison has also ingeniously used alliteration such as:

"..It is the face of a sneak who glides over to your sink to rinse the fork you have laid by her plate....".

Her use of words such as scatty, bluesy, unjazzy, hincty, is entertaining. I love the book even at the instant when I read its first word, Sth, I already got a kick out of discovering what Morrison has to say more about Jazz, Blues, Love and Life.

Rating:
Summary: Jazz: The Liveliness of Writing
Review: Toni Morrison has done it again. She has managed to capture the true artistry of writing while keeping her characters real and lively. She starts the book with two women talking about the main characters Joe and Violet. It is very interesting to see how she starts the book of with dismay and choas instead of 'Once upon a time'. She puts you in the middle of the couple problems. Joe has bet involved in an affair with an 18 year old girl named Dorcas. After a while of the two seeing each other secretly Dorcas goes to a party and dance with other guys. Joe walks in and sees her and kills her. Afterwards he is sad and nisses her, he won't talk to Violet back at the apartment and he doesn't even come out of the house. Violet becomes upset because she realizes that Joe would rather her be something els be she doesn't know what.

Instead she goes and trys to take revenge on a dead girl, trying to stab her at the funeral service while she is lying in her coffin. She misses and is hauled away by the usher boy at the service and is now looked down upon by the rest of the people in the community. Morrison does another thing that is very interesting in the story, instead of adding on to it there she goes back and shows you how events lead up to how they are now. Each chapter going alittle bit farther and a little bit farther back, back to the point before Joe is even born. The only slow point in the book is here, things come slow and don't flow as easy, I found myself having to go back and read a few paragraphs over. Even through the slow point, however, Morrison still manages to keep her characters lively and upbeat. I recommend this book to anyone who has read any other works by Morrison, and also to anyone who likes to just get into a book right away.

Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: This was the first book by Toni Morrison I had read, and I was a little intimidated. I listened to the audio book. Her soothing, calm voice and the poetry of her language quickly absorbed me and I was deeply entangled in this fascinating, strange story. However, I was very confused from the middle all the way until the end...narrators keep switching and the time period keeps jumping around. I was so frustrated that finally I had to actually read the book, and now I feel more confident that I understand it, but not really. Anyway, her language is so beautiful and unusual that, coherant or not, JAZZ was worth the read. I'm now reading SONG OF SOLOMON, and that too is confusing at times but good so far.