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Jazz

By Toni Morrison

(49)

| Hardcover | 9780679411673

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Book Description

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 lyContinue

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.

Critics

  • New Romance

    Within the first half-page of Toni Morrison’s novel, an 18-year-old girl has been shot dead by her middle-aged lover, and his wife has been manhandled from the funeral after attempting to cut the dead girl’s face with a knife. Both events are witness ... (read full critics)

    lrb published on Mon, 6 Sep 2010

  • Life Studies

    The facts are simple and brutal, you can read them any day in the newspapers. If you read them and if you feel they are published for you. The suggestion that news in America is often just white news, or news for whites, occurs again and again in Ton ... (read full critics)

    nybooks published on Thu, 26 Aug 2010

4 Reviews

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  • How far can you go for love?

    Check out what I wrote in my blog: http://lunairereadings.blogspot.com/2011/11/jazz-toni-m…

    I will never forget the beauty of this book that starts with the statement that the heroine was an ugly young girl. She was young and ugly, and started to sleep with this old and disgusting marr ... (continue)

    Check out what I wrote in my blog: http://lunairereadings.blogspot.com/2011/11/jazz-toni-m…

    I will never forget the beauty of this book that starts with the statement that the heroine was an ugly young girl. She was young and ugly, and started to sleep with this old and disgusting married man that finally got obsessed with her and ended up wounding her on the shoulder with a small firearm. She didn't want anything to do with him and she decided that it was better to die than to give up, so she let herself bleed to death. FInally, the man's wife has to go out to pray for another young girl for her husband, because he is about to die of sadness. This is a love story, a very beautiful love story and the lengths people are able to go for it.

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    ariadna73 said on Nov 2, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • A book that jazz

    This is a book where the incident is first summed up in a few sentences in the first page. What goes on next is the fascinating accounts of the incident and its aftermath by narrator and the voices of the characters, resembling a piece of jazz music where trading solos is a part of the story-telling ... (continue)

    This is a book where the incident is first summed up in a few sentences in the first page. What goes on next is the fascinating accounts of the incident and its aftermath by narrator and the voices of the characters, resembling a piece of jazz music where trading solos is a part of the story-telling. The author assigns each character a space of their own to release their emotions. Altogether they take us deep into the history of America in the 20s.

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    minneville said on Nov 18, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • A haunting tale about the marriage of Joe and Violet Trace, a relationship where the couple are not always in 'rhythm' with each other.
    The transition to a city life style was a difficult one for this African American couple having come from a slavery background.

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    Lindyloumac said on Sep 28, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • I read this at the apartment in the early-mid 1990s. I do not recall the story much. I was in my Toni Morrison period. I think this was the last of her books I read.

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    Batona said on Apr 23, 2007 | Add your feedback

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9780679411673 Hardcover $28.95 $24.75 bn.com
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