Jazz

By Toni Morrison

Subjects: Historical fiction, Crimes of passion, New york (n.y.), fiction, Crimes of passion--fiction, Funérailles, Romans, Noirs américains, Psychological, Personnes d'âge moyen, American fiction (fictional works by one author), Afronorteamericanos, Homicide, Noirs, Fiction, Fiction, psychological, Rites et cérémonies, 18.06 Anglo-American literature, Funeral rites and ceremonies--fiction, Love, Ficción, African Americans, 1000blackgirlbooks, Funeral rites and ceremonies, Vida social y costumbres, Triangles (interpersonal relations)--fiction, Middle-aged persons--fiction, Ps3563.o8749 j38 2004, 813/.54, Afro-Americans, Social life and customs, Reading Level-Grade 11, Romance fiction, Fiction, historical, general, Relations humaines, Middle-aged persons, Large type books, Triangles (Interpersonal relations), African americans--fiction, Love stories, Reading Level-Grade 12, Quartier de Harlem, African americans, fiction, Moeurs et coutumes, Crimes passionnels, Psychological fiction

Description: It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one... At last, at last, everything's ahead... Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise. Joe Trace--in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband--shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas ("Everything was like a picture show to her"). At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser--who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds--tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. 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.