Jazz
(Toni Morrison)
Like a jazz song, Toni Morrison begins her novel in the middle of a story and works her way out. Like jazz, it is as though the story, the incident, the idea, the feeling is already assumed, it is the kernel and everything after and around it is embellishment, detail.
The time is 1926. The place, The City (curiously like New York City). Violet (later nicknamed Violent) Trace, at the novel's outset, attacks a dead woman in her coffin with a knife. The deceased, a young, beautiful woman named Dorcas, is the person with whom Violet's husband, Joe Trace, was having an affair. Joe had taken up with this woman because Violet no longer fulfilled his needs, spending more of her time and passion with her parrots, becoming crazier as the days went by. Joe sold women's beauty products door to door; all the women in their part of The City knew him. He had it in his head to have a woman, not his wife, as a friend, someone to talk to about his life.
Morrison interjects with wonderful anecdotes from Joe and Violet's family of cottonpickers and poor, hard-working people. The author is subtle with scenes of racism, betrayal, inidelity, the power of the new music that is low (found not in the heart but in low places). She describes lives as having a seven day cycle of rhythm -- working all week then having two day to themselves for play. This rhythm is comprised of duets, triplets and quartets. The novel, I think, is like this. Morrison's prose takes the reader unaware, informing and stirring up emotion.
Though everyone knows Joe killed Dorcas, it is as though no one knows. Joe and Violet resume their life together, sharing past experiences and dreams. The can finally look at each other, look at what their life together has become. When Joe finally touches Violet physically, it is with love, and passion.
Toni Morrison's Jazz, is visceral. A beautiful, almost parable-like work that absorbs the reader, and helps the reader absorb another time and place that can very well be the here and now.
Resumos Relacionados
- Sometimes You Die
- Beloved
- The Series Of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning
- The Bluest Eyes.
- Beauty = Woman
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