Name: Jazz
Rating: 3.724489795918367 (49 reviews)
ISBN: 0452269652

Toni Morrison

Jazz

a novel

Maureen

“I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible — like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one.”

***

3.5 stars. Jazz is unlike her other novels that I’ve read. The plot is messy and non-linear, a narrative that explores all viewpoints: first, second, third — you name it. There is, however, an overarching narrator, which to me, reads as Morrison herself. 

Set mainly during the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz embodies many things. Passion and betrayal, but also violence, depression, and the search for identity. 

The entire plot is summed up in the book’s first paragraph. How a husband cheated on his wife with an 18-year-old lover and murdered her after discovering her affair, and how the wife retaliated by slashing her corpse during the funeral. 

An ambitious narrative to undertake, but it’s no problem for a great novelist like Toni Morrison. 

The stream of consciousness flows so endlessly, that it’s hard to understand where the story is going. But you tread on simply because you’re aching to know how it all ends. Safe to say, the ending is as rewarding as the glimmering quotes Morrison sprinkled all around. (My favorite thing about reading her novels.)

Quotes like, “Maybe everybody has a renegade tongue yearning to be on its own” reveal her genius time and again. How she captures the human condition like no other. 

Despite revealing the characters’ plights at the start, she thoroughly examines their psyche, why they act certain ways, and the traumas that incited it. Like her other novels, Morrison never passes up the opportunity to discuss the vestiges of racial violence.

Everyone here is imperfect, but she humanizes their actions in such a way that you can’t help but root for them in the end.

Truly unlike her other novels, this deserves to be recognized for how it highlights the doors that opened up to her people in Harlem during the Jazz Age, the dissonance that lies between the rural and urban landscape, and how “it was loving the City that distracted me and gave me ideas.”

A bold and experimental read.

Mary Rose Luksha

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison was the first book of hers that I read. I really enjoyed it so I decided to pick up Jazz. This was definitely a let down after Song of Solomon. 

Most of the time I was reading this I felt like I was reading a college student's creative writing assignment on description. Her description was great, and she excellently captured the whole feel of Jazz and that time period...but a page-turner that does not make. The story was thin. And it was upsetting because there is a more intricate story there. Maybe she's assuming that her reader picks up on her subtleties and generalities and fills the story in on their own, but I like a little direction now and then. 

I probably would have given this two stars, due to lack of plot, but her excellent description and evocation of emotion saved it.

Summer Stanley

I think I may need to read this again in a different state of mind. Although there were moments and phrases I found beautiful and particularly poignant, I just spent most of the story confused. Trying too hard to connect the dots and what happened? Did anything?

Suzie

ame 

‘Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers’ Guardian Joe Trace – in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband – shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life. ‘She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Amy Brown 

ikkychan

nandi

savannah eden

Joe Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet - who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks - tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Jazz is the story of a triangle of passion, jealousy, murder and redemption, of sex and spirituality, of slavery and liberation, country and city, of being male and female, African American, and above all being human.

Jazz

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