[.ca] Jazz (ISBN 2264020741)

From Amazon.com:
Jazz embraces the vibrant music and lifestyle of 1920s Harlem, an urban renaissance of opportunity and glamour. A novel of murder, hard lives, and broken dreams, Jazz sways with a lyric medley of voices and human consciousness. Narrated by the author, Toni Morrison, this is an intense but gratifying three hours of tape. Background jazz music enhances the feel of '20s Harlem, a city that attracted thousands of black southerners hoping for better lives. Joe Trace and his wife Violet were part of this migration; madly in love with each other and the idea of this urban mecca, they "traindanced into the city." But like so many of the marriages in Morrison's novels, this union crumbles, and the dreams for a better life fade away. Joe finds another, a love "that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going." In Jazz, time ebbs and flows like human memory, traversing between recollections of the past and expectations for the future; likewise, jazz music is often wild and chaotic. Here Morrison once again exemplifies herself as both a superb writer and a masterful storyteller.

Chronique amazon.fr:
Lauréate du prestigieux Prix Pulitzer (équivalent du prix Goncourt) avec son roman Beloved, Toni Morrison est l'une des plus fortes voix afro-américaines à être apparue dans la littérature américaine des années 80 et 90. Lié à son histoire personnelle, celle de sa famille et de la communauté noire américaine, ce roman se déroule dans le Harlem des années 20, haut lieu de la bourgeoisie noire et des débuts du jazz. C'est cette musique, la première musique réellement noire-américaine qui rythme le récit, étourdissant. Joe Trace assassine en 1926 sa jeune maîtresse Dorus devant sa femme, Violette, qui à son tour assassine une deuxième fois sa défunte rivale, dans un mouvement de vengeance folle. Ces deux gestes désespérés, associés au vent de liberté qui flotte sur le Harlem des années 20, vont contraindre les deux époux à chercher dans leur passé commun les traces de leur présent ravagé. Sur un fond de jazz naissant, c'est une fresque de moeurs, à la fois tragique et sublime, à laquelle nous convie Toni Morrison. --Florent Mazzoleni

When prose is poetry:
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.

Rereadable:
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

Phenomenon:
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.

Dazed and Confused:
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.

An Underappreciated Novel:
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!