Jazz
by:
Toni Morrison (author)
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...
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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.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781400076215 (1400076218)
Publish date: June 8th 2004
Publisher: Vintage
Pages no: 229
Edition language: English
Series: Toni Morrison Trilogy (#2)
I could’ve started this review with Joe Trace. Joe Trace is searching for the narrator of this tale in the same way that he was searching for his mother “Wild” in this book. Sometimes, I felt like I needed a tracker to help me track down my own ideas about this book. At times, the book was so easy...
got lost in all the lovely words, loved getting lost. minor note but major emotions. narrative glides down perfect prose pathways and through poetic passages to different destinations, into one mind and out of another, into many minds, past future past future, man. who knows where the next road goes...
I am completely in love with Jazz. I think it has somehow immediately became my new favorite novel... ever. Head- or rather, heart- has exploded.
A short novel about an ill-fated love triangle in jazz-age Harlem that ends in a shooting. Morrison poetically reveals the characters' pasts and hidden griefs, their rural a/o small town origins and backstories that led them to the city.
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