Product Description

Joe Trace, door-to-door salesman, erstwhile devoted husband, shoots to death his lover of three months, 18 year old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hardworking wife Violet tries to disfigure the corpse with a knife. Captures the complex humanity of black urban life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23386 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Spanning the Transition from Slavery to the Freedom of Jazz
For many African-Americans, the period from 1860 through 1930 was a particularly challenging one. The formal slavery of the South transitioned into a vulnerable rural economic existence, dependent on the weather and the price of crops. The promise of the city lured many to leave their homes, and adopt city life-styles that put new social pressures on them and their relationships. Jazz tells this story through the microcosm of one marriage, that of Joe and Violet Trace.

Unlike many books about marriage, this one is a love story. Although it bears no relationship to any romance novel you have ever read, it reveals the way that the need for love develops from within each of us and allows us to grasp its potential when we respond to the yearnings of those we care about.

Music was important in the lives of many people during those years. Churches and music halls vied for the attention of most people in the cities. Jazz was a new influence, bursting on the scene with a combination of extreme freedom and mutual respect for the other players. In this book, jazz is represented both as a symbol of freedom and as a source of base impulses that can lead people astray. Ms. Morrison also pays homage to jazz by building her narrative around the individual stories of those involved taken in solitary order, much like the solos in a jazz piece. The narratives all weave together, but you have to hear the whole piece to understand how. Be patient with what seem like digressions. They are really transitions into new perspectives, like when a horn does a riff before returning to the theme.

You also get the metaphor of jazz used in the relationship of the two Traces. They were originally in rhythm with each other, then fell out of rhythm, and then regained their ability to improvise together. It's very nicely done!

To me, the best part of the book was that Ms. Morrison does not permit her characters to fall back on misfortune, fate, and heredity as excuses for misbehavior. Clearly, those factors affect us, but we all have the potential to rise above them. We need only open our eyes and start responding to those closest to us. Then, we can build a better life together.

The family background of the two Traces is a rich tapestry as well of the social history of African-Americans during this period. Ms. Morrison's imagination is quite remarkable in the variety and vividness of these characters!

For those who are interested in understanding more about the roots of the Jazz Age, this book will also be very appealing.

After you have finished thinking about the lessons of Jazz, you should consider where you display the good characteristics of a jazz player . . . and where you do not.

Feel the rhythm around you!

Exceptional
This is an extraordinary book. It raises difficult questions about identity and freedom yet in spite of its moral complexity includes some of the most moving passages I've read.

Whilst the narrative style requires concentration and engagement, preseverance is well rewarded. The last pages stand on their own as a profound meditation on love.

Symphonic lyricism
As a child of fine artists and a classical and jazz musician, I had no idea or understanding as to why many of the churches- from the turn of the century to almost the present day in many areas- consistently referred to jazz as the devil's music, or dangerously secular, until after reading this book. Toni Morrison becomes the metaphor herself, along with her invented characters, as a story of love and passion, anger and rage, sorrow and grief, hunger and lonliness, acknowledgement, and quiet, earhty epiphany unfolds as uncontrollably as the tides,with all the simple complexity of a jazz riff- and with as much freedom from judgement. Toni Morrison's descriptive powers sweeping across the landscape of history and the landscape of the individual character's lives is frightening in its ability to overwhelm. She brings out the raw, triumphant humaness of each character with such lyricism and painful joy. The novel can at times feel like a giant denoument, yet its slowly building climaxes are what make it more than readable; they make it exciting, sublimely predictable and unpredictable simultameuosly. It almost makes one understand better why the story of Christ is called a "Passion"; passion, as exemplified in this novel, is not just a sexy or damaging thing, but also the way to come to know God.

There are small pars of the novel that are a bit too detailed in the rendering of lesser character's lives. Yet her rendering of the time period- Harlem in the 20's, and the community is incredible. This is more, or different, than a novel. It is an epic poem- an epic jazz poem that has you hearing the music as it mildly, painfully, poignantly and triumphantly ends. Toni will not let you down with this one.