Product Description

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. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12298 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-08
• Released on: 2004-06-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
“Wonderful. . . . A brilliant, daring novel. . . . Every voice amazes.” —Chicago Tribune

“She may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner.” —Newsweek

“[A] masterpiece. . . . She has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Thrillingly written . . . seductive. . . . Some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“A compelling blend of heart and language. . . . Resounds with passion.” —The Boston Globe

“Marvelous. . . . Morrison is perhaps the finest novelist of our time.” —Vogue

“The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women.” —Edna O’Brien, The New York Times Book Review

“She captures that almost indistinguishable mixture of the anxiety and rapture of expectation—that state of desire where sin is just another word for appetite.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved. . . . Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour

“She is the best writer in America. Jazz, for sure; but also Mozart.” —John Leonard, National Public Radio

“A masterpiece. . . . A sensuous, haunting story of various kinds of passion. . . . Mesmerizing.” —Cosmopolitan

“Lyrically brooding. . . . One accepts the characters of Jazz as generalized figures moving rhythmically in the narrator’s mind.” —The New York Times

“Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious.” —People

Inside Flap Copy
In the afterglow of a clean triumph--her widely celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, Beloved--Toni Morrison moves to even higher ground. This, her eagerly awaited new novel, Jazz, is spellbinding for the haunting passion of its profound love story, and for the bittersweet lyricism and refined sensuality of its powerful and elegant style.

It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one...At last, at last, everything's ahead...Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise.

Joe Trace--in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband--shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas ("Everything was like a picture show to her"). At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser--who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds--tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse.

In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice--whose identity is a matter of each reader's imagination--weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its blues are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery. Richly combining history, legend, reminiscence, this voice captures as never before the ineffable mood, the complex humanity, of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood.

Jazz is an unprecedented and astonishing invention, a landmark on the American literary landscape--a novel unforgettable and for all time.


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author
Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.

Customer Reviews

"I'm strong. Alone, yes, but top notch and indestructible, like the city in 1926 when all the wars are over..."
Set primarily in Harlem in 1926, when jazz was bursting forth from the traditions of gospel and blues, this 1992 novel is one of Morrison's most experimental and least accessible. Written from multiple points of view, it uses the patterns of jazz itself for its structure. A series of overarching themes connects the work, but these are seen in individual characterizations and episodes which flash backward and forward, twisting and turning as they connect, misconnect, change, and ultimately create a unique world larger than the sum of its individual parts.

Focusing primarily on middle-aged Violet Trace, her fifty-year-old husband Joseph, and Dorcas Manfred, his teenage lover, whom he believes shares his passion, Morrison explores issues of love and fear, sex and obsession, violence and passivity, and strength and dependence, in addition to her big issues of color and gender. At the outset of the novel, Joseph has murdered Dorcas, fearing that his love for her will never be as great as it is at the moment just before her death. His wife Violet, distraught, is forcibly removed from Dorcas's wake, and though she believes herself to be strong and indestructible, she shows her own vulnerability, sometimes seeing "that other Violet" who inhabits her soul.

Gradually, the individual stories of Violet, Joe, their families, and Dorcas and her family, some members of whom go back even into the 1800s, flesh out the characterizations upon which this novel depends. For much of the novel, however, the reader must be patient, not sure exactly how all these characters are connected to each other, like the most experimental improvisations in jazz. Gradually, they do connect, and gradually the theme of redemption emerges triumphant.

Brilliant in its construction and thematic development, the novel requires the reader to make many connections which other authors (and Morrison in most of her other novels) make or suggest as a matter of course. Her complex, spiraling structure (which Faulkner also often employs) in Beloved, Song of Solomon, and even an early novel like Sula, for example, seems more effective in these, perhaps because these novels have smaller casts of characters, and the importance of particular episodes and the relationships of many characters are clearer. For me, this was a novel to appreciate, rather than to love. n Mary Whipple

Sula
Beloved
Song of Solomon
Tar Baby (Contemporary Fiction, Plume)
Conversations with Toni Morrison (Literary Conversations Series)

not morrison's best work
Jazz is a heavy-handed trope, filled with brilliant,complex
characters who are struggling to survive amidst violence and self-undoing. The backdrop is one of the most revered, loathed, dangerous and beautiful places, Harlem, New York. The language
is delicious; the writing is dense. The problem is that it takes
too long to get to the heart of the story. Toni Morrison spends
more time describing her surroundings than actually doing something
to move the story forward.

In her works, primarily Beloved, Song of Solomon and even The Bluest
Eye, Morrison's choice of place is used to juxtapose the tragedy
of her characters' lives but in this story, a sense of place
almost ruins what should have been a great story.

Ironically, reading Beloved was much easier for me than this book
and that book is supposed to be much harder to read. I understand
that Toni Morrison demands participation from the reader but I was
in deep waters with this one and couldn't see the shoreline for
days if you know what I mean.

I'm giving her three stars for effort but I couldn't finish this book.

A Great, But Not Super, Novel of American Black Struggle [56]
Sometimes these reviews are based more upon context (what else you recently read) rather than upon the reader's own tastes. I will try to avoid allowing this review from being tainted from the magic presented by other recently read novels.

For inexplicable reasons, I read this book within weeks of reading other African American great novels: "Their Eyes are Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston; "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker; and, "Go Tell it on the Mountain" by James Baldwin. This book, quite simply, is not in their league. It does not offer a love story equal to "Their Eyes." It does not offer a historical perspective of the tortured characters like "Go Tell" and does not deliver dialogue like "Their God" or "Color Purple."

But, then again - what book does rival the three mentioned above? The other three are universally acclaimed novels which many critics list not only among the greatest African American novels, not only the greatest American novels, but among the greatest novels of any culture ever written. So, my context may well be unfortunately biased.

But, this novel has highlights - like the beginning of the second chapter - where her prose is so lush and precise and exquisite that she reminds me of Adrienne Rich - a prose writing poet. Morrison, in certain passages of this book, is a poet. Throughout this book, she is an extremely talented novelist.

I will eventually read her other classics, "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon." And, as I have been told they surpass this book - which is quite an achievement - I can never wonder why she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.