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Jazz
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Jazz
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Jazz
Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

Jazz

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 10, 2015
ISBN9780147520777
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Jazz

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Reviews for Jazz

Rating: 3.6673052081736914 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

783 ratings39 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I liked Beloved, Paradise, and The Bluest Eye, so I’m acquainted with her lyricism, which I love. However, in this book it seems lyricism is used as a tool to mimic the improvisation of Jazz (each character has its own “musical” voice as part of the ensemble), and they ebb and flow and lean back and pitch forward....all of which leaves me as confused and disconcerted as when I listen to jazz (I'm not a fan). The sudden changes in voice and narrative did not for me...maybe someone with a more refined musical “ear” can appreciate the swift shifts, but I’m found them off putting.But I still felt compelled to finish....the dialogue (brilliant in its conciseness), the pathos, the characters themselves, the evocation of “slavery, city, and spirituality,” and the potential of how it would end...so I did and I'm glad. She is a gifted writer and although this one was too “displaced” for me, I’m looking forward to reading Song of Solomon.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    granted i had no idea what was going on, but boy did i love the writing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    "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."And that's how the story's first few pages begin. Love, obsession, and black urban life. The plot line is discordant, jumping between storylines and past and present. It beats with ugly remembrances of violence and broken families, torn lives. Yet the writing in this book is simply beautiful, the unnamed narrator haunting. The book seems to echo the music of Jazz itself, saying listen to me! I have very mixed emotions after finishing this book. Read it and judge for yourself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I’m slightly unsure what to say about this novel. It is not destined to be a favorite of Morrison’s for me, but the writing is so damn good I don’t want to turn people off of it. It’s a fairly straightforward story about a marriage and an affair but told in a non-linear way. I don’t know much about jazz music, but I think it has a lot to do with a central melody and then instrumental and vocal riffs off that center - which perfectly describes the novel. This is Joe and Violet’s story, but then a lot comes off of that – about the city, about their pasts, about their origins, about slavery and the unfulfilled promise of the post-Civil War South and the post-World War I North... It all comes together in a sort of chaotic whole that can be disorienting at times, but then Morrison returns to Joe and Violet, and the reader finds that center again. It is really remarkable as a piece of writing, even if as a story it didn’t fully engage me.3.75 stars
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Joe and Violet are in the business of beauty. Joe sells cosmetics door to door and his wife is a home-visiting hairdresser. Usually a straight up and dependable man, Joe falls in obsessive love with a teenager named Dorcas. His passion for Dorcas forces him to kill her. At her funeral, in a fit of jealous insanity Joe's wife, Violet, attempts to slash the dead girl's face while she lay in her coffin. Violent Violet then goes home to free all of her pet birds. Her rage makes her human. The smartest character in the book is the City. I like the way the City makes people think they can do whatever they want and get away with it. The culture is full of passions, both right and wrong. Jazz will also take you back to July 1917, a time when Grandmother True Belle (great name) was afraid of Springfield, Massachusetts. Morrison's vivid descriptions of culture are breathtaking.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    With a 1992 copyright, this has become a classic of modern literature borrowing elements from the improvisational flavor of jazz. Morrison weaves a path of all the essential elements of the human condition using prose at times bordering on the poetic, and at times a run-on spray of phrasing. This is one of those books to put back on a shelf and pull off to re-read sometime again in the future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Did not impress me as much as "Beloved" but nevertheless it was an enjoyable read. It's about the aftermath of slavery and it's effect on subsequent generations . Set in New York in the Jazz age of the 1920''s the characters are still struggling with events from the past.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Amazing. How a story is told makes all the difference.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Amazing book. Set mostly in Harlem around WWI but with many forays into various characters backstories in the South, mostly in Virginia. About a couple, Joe Trace and his wife, Violet, called Violent by many. Joe Trace has an affair with a younger women, Dorcas, and when he loses her, he kills her. Then he regrets it and pines away and is no help to Violet anymore. Violet gets her nickname from trying to cut the corpse in the face at the funeral. All the characters are so fully developed that you understand them and how they could've ended up doing the horrible things they did and how those things kind of came from their pasts and their family histories too. This isn't really a spoiler. The book starts out telling you he killed her and what Violet did. I guess it takes all the rest of the book to make you understand it. Truly beautiful. I am giving it four and a half instead of five because I got lost at the end of some of Morrison's convoluted sentences and paragraphs, but I'm sure if I went back and read carefully I could figure out what she was trying to say. I think the deficiency my have been mine.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I struggled with this book but it is truly a work of excellence. I just struggled with the book. I usually love Morrison’s writing but this one was hard. But I appreciate it. It tells the story of the migration to the north when African American’s moved from the rural south north the the cities, especially Harlem. It is a story of migration, orphans seeking homeland and identity and Jazz music. Narrative is a interesting aspect of the book. There is a collective narrative. As in Jazz improv, each character might have a solo composition that is part of the whole story. The narrators are unreliable. Some narration might be inanimate and the author may have been one of the narrators. Symbols: red winged birds representing freedom, Violet (violent) birds being caged. There is a lot of descriptions that represent violence, too. This is the second of the author’s trilogy of history. I’ve read Beloved, Jazz and now I will need to read Paradise.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I think I liked this one even better than Beloved? The first time she switches timeframes and point of view I was like "wait, what just happened?" but after that I was able to swing with it. I relate with Violet a disturbing amount. I found all the female characters to be extremely compelling and even found Joe to be sympathetic sometimes.

    I should read this again someday. There are many subtle connections between the stories, I caught many but sometimes I had the pesky feeling i was missing something. Really great book, reminded me of Baldwin's Another Country in that the meat of the story is revealed before you understand it, and you gradually understand more and more as you go on.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Jazz focuses on the lives of a black couple, Joe and Violet Trace, who moved from rural Virginia to NY fairly soon after they married. The story goes back and forth in time, from Violet's childhood after her mother dies to Joe's origin as the child of a "wild woman". Though a short book, this is not a quick read.Joe and Violet have no children, and all seems fine, until he becomes obsessed with a teenager, Dorcas, in their NY city neighborhood. Honestly this part of the story does not fit with Joe's personality as we have met him, so it's a bit confusing. Violet forgives him, Felice (Dorcas's best friend) seems to forgive him, and life in the city goes on.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There is a lot that is good about this book, but I somehow just quite really like it. There are a lot of beautiful phrases and the narrative jumps are executed well enough. One of the main characters is said to have reinvented himself seven or eight times, and perhaps so did this book by switching between different characters, eras (mostly 1920s and 1870s), and different narration styles. That makes it interesting, but I didn't think the 1870s storyline contributed much, even if it arguably linked the novel to Beloved with archetypal images of a cave in the woods and the like. I should think this book will leave you with a taste for more Morrison, even if it can be a bit in your face.“Perhaps it's the artificial rhythm of the week — perhaps there is something so phony about the seven-day cycle the body pays no attention to it, preferring triplets, duets, quartets, anything but a cycle of seven that has to be broken into human parts and the break comes on Thursday. Irresistible.”
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Outstanding - challenging - extraordinary improv performance!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not as hard-hitting as Song of Solomon or Beloved - those books explore similar themes much more effectively - but there were still passages on love and the longing for it that made me catch my breath.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In the 1920s, a man named Joe Trace cheats on his wife, Violet, and shoots his lover. Violet then attempts to attack the corpse at the funeral, after releasing her beloved birds into the cold of New York. Morrison takes readers from present to past and back again to tell the stories of her characters, cultural experience, and what love (or lack thereof) can do to a person.I love Morrison's books, period. Morrison is an absolutely brilliant writer with an expert command of language. The book is lyrical, flowing, and cuts deep to the core of the human experience.If you haven't read any of Morrison's work, you must. I started with Beloved, but I've loved everything of hers I've read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In the opening scenes, Joe shoots the woman with whom he'd had an affair after she ends the relationship. His wife Violet attacks the corpse at the funeral. Much of the rest of the book deals with the aftermath and with trying to put the pieces of the relationship back together. The characters are very flawed. The writing is excellent. It's one of those novels that has to be re-read to be fully appreciated. It's a book that would create some excellent discussion in book groups or classroom situations. I'm not certain I enjoyed it well enough to commit to a re-read.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz is a book that I really enjoyed at times. But, at the same time, there were portions of the novel I could barely force myself to endure. It is that uneven.Jazz, mostly set in 1926 New York City, is the story of Joe Trace, a 50-something-year-old man whose marriage is not what it used to be. There is a general sense of optimism now in the city’s black community. The Armistice ending World War I is already seven years old, and the future appears bright for everyone brave enough to have traded life in the rural South for what the City has to offer. Joe, though, is not content. When his job as a door-to-door beauty product salesman for the Cleopatra company brings him into contact with Dorcas, an18-year-old neighborhood beauty, Joe makes his move. But only three months later, when Dorcas unceremoniously dumps Joe for a younger man, he cannot accept it and shoots her dead in a crowded room. Joe’s wife Violet, cheated of her chance for vengeance, brings a knife to the open-casket funeral where she does her best to disfigure the corpse. But life goes on, and Violet will find herself almost inadvertently helping her husband through his grief.Morrison’s mysterious narrator reveals most of this in the book’s first six pages (the book jacket reveals the rest), and uses the remainder of the book to fill in the details. Through a series of flashbacks, the author tells the individual and joint stories of the central characters, going back one or two generations in some cases to remind the reader just how closely linked to the days of slavery the residents of 1920s Harlem still were. But, as Morrison points out in the following passage, the City gave its residents hope for a better future:“The wave of black people running from want and violence created in the 1870s; the ‘80s’ the ‘90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it. Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it.”Bottom Line: Jazz is a highly atmospheric novel filled with many truths about the human condition – a novel that vividly brings 1920s Harlem to life. Some of the generational flashbacks, however, poignant as they may be, are overwritten and heavy-handed enough to obscure, rather than reinforce, Morrison’s overall theme. Jazz is still worth a look, but it is not one of Toni Morrison’s best efforts.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Joe and Violet that comfortable kind of love. Joe was gentle. Violet could have been labeled eccentric. They owned a bird that said, "I love you." They came to the City from the South. They were products of that great migration. Then Joe laid eyes on teenage Dorcas while peddling beauty products. Dorcas drowned out Jazz and brought along the Blues. Initially Morrison set all the characters before us along with all the necessary details. The rest of the story is the background and breakdown of all these characters and events. This was the wilderness for me. There were numerous times while reading through this wilderness, I wanted to scream, "Get to the point already." Violet was always on the perimeter of the story to me. Her presence never bore any weight. Joe was gentle, weak, and possessive all at the same time. Dorcas was a dark cloud that loomed over the narrative. When Dorcas's friend Felice gave her account of events, I began to enjoy the novel. That came at the end. When I read that this book involved a scorned wife trying to stab a corpse, I thought it has to be good. I must have missed it. I felt as if I was in a black hole the entire time. Even though I did not enjoy the entire book, there were passages that were simply brilliant.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is the compelling story of a tragic attraction between an older man and a nihilistic young woman. It was the first book I'd ever read by Toni Morrison, and it totally blew me away.The plot focuses on the aftereffects of the extramarital affair as well as the motivations behind the crime of passion the man commits when his paramour jilts him for someone closer to her age. The real story seems to concern how such events arise from a set of African American experiences and are ultimately recontained within that community.Enthrallingly told, with compassion for all & justification for none, this wrenching tale and its beautiful language captured me completely. I was only a bit disappointed when the narrator asserted herself as an outside observer near the end, confessing that she hasn't caught the essence of her characters or their conflict. I respect her making these admissions, but I was loving the strong heady substance of the tragic love story undiluted by them.Then, Morrison does something that--oddly enough!--reminded me of Wm Gibson's futuristic neural surgeries: She lifts her characters' emotional struggles out of the story, like an old photo from a frame, and says of their image: "I wonder, do they know they are the sound of snapping fingers under the sycamores lining the streets?"The agony, the loss, even the lifelong love scarred by betrayal and sickness of the old married couple -- the immortal feelings beat on in the sounds of the music of their people -- JAZZ.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I REALLY love Toni Morrison as a writer. There's just something about her that is a mesmerizing storyteller. Jazz hooks you right from the start, with Violet showing up at the funeral of Dorcas, & trying to attack her as she lies in her coffin because Violet's husband Joe "took up with" this young girl, who was barely 18.These characters are REAL, you hurt for them, you shake your head at them, you feel for them as their stories, histories, & back stories are told. The City, which is all it's referred to in the book, but which I finally figured out was actually NYC, is described in 1920's terms. I enjoyed the fact that you don't quite know who the narrator is, because it seems to change with each section of the book.I thought this was a wonderful read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    While I loved the lyric quality of the writing (definitely living up to the title), the story itself didn't speak to me...I was a little disappointed, not because the book wasn't good (it was) but because I've had such strong emotional responses to other books by Toni Morrison.It's possible I'm at the wrong age to read this book, though.... too old to be Dorcas or Felice, too young to be Violet. If I'm going to give the story another chance, I think I need to wait about 20 years.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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 and smooth, I just got lost in its many layers. Other times, also when I was lost, I was wondering if there was a destination or things I needed to follow or if getting lost was the whole point of the book. There was something to this book, a little like slipping, and poetry, and I suppose Jazz, where visions and revisions are not only possible but necessary. After reading the book twice, I couldn’t tell whether the book was a minor key for major emotions or something more.The City. 1926. There were things about this time that screamed for more concreteness. And yet, we were left with The City and everything radical that that implied -- violence and more violence in the background, and the threat of more violence. Zanna, a reviewer on Goodreads, said, “sinewy vine, hacked at in places yet blossoming out, covering itself with fresh, lush, resurgent life.” That captures what is best about this book. I felt like the book was scratching at something that was hard to explain, never truly explicit -- but too loud and emotion-filled to be truly implicit.Is the book improvised? I can’t say. I can only say that a first draft is often improvised. But was this a first draft, one of many trials and errors, or something that was actually worked over once, twice, thrice, never really improvised but only meant to look improvised. I don’t know that something published can truly be like true Jazz.Just like Joe Trace, perhaps this book had to evolve. It had to reinvent itself every few other pages or else it feared it wouldn’t survive.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Superbly written, Jazz is the tragic yet hopeful story of Joe and Violet. Born down in Virginia in the late 1800s, they move to "the city" (never named, but I'm guessing New York) when they are in their thirties. Life there for them is more different than they ever imagined, and they change for both better and worse.

    Also, Jazz is the story of Dorcas, a confused teenage girl trying to wiggle her way out from under her strict aunt's thumb. Dorcas collides in a way with Joe and Violet that is horrible, yet will make you feel sympathy for everyone involved.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One way or another, all of Toni Morrison's books are about how the lives of black women in America have been damaged by the consequences of slavery. But that doesn't mean they're all the same. Her characters, especially her women, are always unexpected and original in their conception. By the time she came to write Jazz, she had also developed a strong, individual and very engaging style of writing. It's a constant pleasure to read her, the narrator's voice keeps taking you by surprise with the images it uses and the leaps it takes from one topic to another. You never feel you're being lectured about African-American history, having the stories of hate and oppression rammed down your throat. All the same, the message is very clear. As others have said, when you take a step back from the book you might find yourself wondering where the story has gone. It isn't made clear who the narrator is, and various crucial threads seem to cross arbitrarily, or are simply left dangling. But that doesn't seem to be a problem. All the illogicalities of the story somehow seem to make sense at the moment you come across them, and there's a suspicion at the back of your mind that it will all fit together somehow if you start again at the beginning.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Towards the end of this book the narrator impatiently posits: "What's the use of living in the world if you can't make what you want of it?" (or words to that effect). I think that's at the core of this story - that freedom and self-realization come not from the things that happen to us, but from the choices we make about how to respond. Sometimes we choose wisely and sometimes poorly, but even the worst outcome is better than allowing the world to define you.Certainly the couple in this story, Joe Trace and his wife Violet, make heartbreaking choices. But how they face up to their choices, struggling not to give in to the violence, jealousy, and hardship that threatens to destroy them, not only makes for deep, empathetic characters and a compelling story, but also a pretty great life lesson. You could say that Toni Morrison approaches this novel with a similar attitude: what's the point of writing a novel if you can't make what you want of it? The story eschews the conventional transitions of most novels, wandering through time and across geography and between narrators. Her prose is similarly unconstrained, alternately sleekly between narration and lyric poetry. Requires the reader to attend, yes, but love the way this allows Morrison to move around the story, telling bits of it first from one perspective and then the other, preserving the layers and complexity of the tale through to the final words of the final chapter. Which, when you get down to it, is a lot like the musical form after which the book is titled. Like life, jazz is shaped by the choices that the artists make. Sometimes the result is lyrical, other times cacaphonous, but anyone who's every listened to jazz understands that the music is, at its core, entirely about freedom and self-realization.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Violet is Joe Trace’s woman, but she is battling the other Violet who lives inside her, the one who wants to steal babies and say weird things. Joe Trace, almost to his surprise, starts up a relationship with eighteen year old Dorcas, and shoots her when she leaves her. Violet loses her mind at the funeral, attacking the coffin and trying to slice the corpse’s face. Yes, it sounds violent, and it is, a bit, but more than anything Jazz is a book about what shapes a person, about redemption, passion and love. Set in the first decades of the last century it slides back and forth between now, then and long ago, in a writing style that uses jazz music’s restless variations around themes. New York, just referred to as City, is very present, almost a character in itself. Not least is the contrast between it and Joe’s and Violet’s rural upbringing central. An almost gentle anger flavours the pages throughout.It’s cleverly and organically done, but I lack some sort of core here. Too many threads are left hanging, and I have a strong feeling that I won’t remember too much about this novel the second time around either. It’s not often I say this, but I think this one might have actually benefited from being a hundred pages longer.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Again I found it rewarding to return to a Toni Morrison novel. In this story an unknown narrator tells the tale of Joe and Violet Trace. Joe got his name because that was what his parents left without.. .a trace, and Violet gets her named changed to Violent because she tries to cut the face of the dead 18 year old that her husband first wooed and then shot “just to keep the feeling going”. And that‘s only the first two pages. The narration switches back and forth between characters and time, also telling the story of Joe’s mom, the Wild One and the man Golden Gray who was raised by Violet’s Grandmother. There is a kind of music to the city of Harlem and the sensory images of the setting helps to establish this. I am always amazed at the catastrophic events that are seen as commonplace in the worlds of her characters. This story has the ability to make Joe, an adulterer and murderer, a sympathetic character who believe it or not is a good man. There is also a story of love here that we could never foresee until we get to know the history of these people. Morrison uses a narrator who in the end feels she has done poor job describing these people and wishes she lived her own life rather than just observed others. This perhaps is a reflective comment by the author, but I hope she nevers listens. The Amazon description details: 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.--------------------------------------------------------------Morrison is the next author to read whenever you are disappointed in your latest book. Her language alone lets you know why you spend your quiet hours immersed in words.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Love, betrayal, and forgiveness are some of the most common themes of literature, but there is nothing common about Toni Morrison's extraordinary writing. She evokes the tension of living in Harlem in the 1920's with such passion that one can hear the jazz undercurrents in her spontaneous prose that continually surprises the reader.Don't read Morrison's books expecting a linear story. She dances around her plot in tantalizing circles that eventually overlap enough to ultimately make sense. I was grabbed in the beginning by the mystery of why Joe murdered his lover Dorcas and was curious about (the sometimes Violent) Violet's over-the-top reaction. Patience and careful reading pay off in this book that doesn't always play by the literary "rules" but ends up being a satisfying reading experience.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Morrison has soul, which is apparent from reading her novel, Jazz. Written in the style of jazz music, Jazz tells a story of Harlem, but drifts across time and space to help fill out the respective motif.The story focuses on Joe and Viole(n)t trace, each on opposite but similar ends of a spectrum when it comes to Joe's late mistress, Dorcas. As part of a larger, Dante-inspired trilogy (c.f. Beloved and Paradise), Jazz falls somewhere in between, which would put it in Purgatory, aptly so.Leveraging unique narrative and engaging characters, Morrison has put together a great piece to listen to by yourself, or improvise with your friends. Highly worth a read.