3.5
Jazz
ByPublisher Description
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession based on the hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.
“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour
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.
“Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious.” —People
“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour
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.
“Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious.” —People
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesJazz Reviews
3.5
“ci ho messo un po a capire il romanzo; la struttura corale inizialmente mi ha confusa, non me l’aspettavo non avendo letto nulla (come sempre) sul libro prima di iniziarlo.
Mi domandavo perché non si approfondisse la psiche di personaggi così chiaramente profondi.
Invece bisogna solo aspettare perche quella psiche viene mostrata molto bene sia come evento a sé sia come parte di un tutto.
In questo l’allegoria all’elemento musicale é molto forte.
Il romanzo parla di un amore violentemente passionale, del bisogno di amore e dell’amore per la Città (Harlem 1926) ed infine dell’amore per il JAZZ, forma espressiva più alta a cui gli afroamericani abbiano dato vita.
Il Jazz è però ispirazione per l’autrice, rimane sullo sfondo e permea invece nella quotidianità delle vite dei personaggi, è una “musica sconcia”.
La vicenda centrale viene raccontata inizialmente andando dritti al nocciolo e poi ripercorsa attraverso le storie degli attori e comparse della stessa per poi chiudersi in un cerchio perfetto.
La scrittura della Morrison come al solito é poetica; pungente, profonda ma molto dolce.
Romanzo ottimo”
““I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure. Hangs on to wells and a boy’s golden hair; would just as soon inhale sweet fire caused by a burning girl as hold a maybe-yes maybe-no hand. I don’t believe that anymore. Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out.”
“It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on… Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together never mind one leg was propped up on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preachers palm asking for witness in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore; there is no studs eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.””
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