Toni Morrison's Jazz

Toni Morrison's Jazz
Begin: 04/29/07
End: 05/07/07
Quality: Seven out of Ten
Reason: Reading Plan.
Gene: Fiction.African American Fiction..
Original Language: English.
Date of Publication: 1992.
Fog Index: 8.2/85% are harder.
Flesch Index: 76.3/91% are harder.
Flesch-Kincaid Index: 6.2/86% are harder.
Complex Words: 6%/92% has more.
Number: First.
Synopsis: Joe Trace shoots his teenage lover, Dorcas. His wife tries to disfigure the girl at her funeral. This novel goes back and forth through time explaining the stories of not just, Joe, Violet and Dorcas but others as well.
Thoughts: Wow. I don’t know how she does it. I really am at such a loss when I read her books. Toni Morrison is just so fucking amazing. I mean really! The worlds and characters that she creates, the prose that she weaves seemingly out of magic and poetry.

Now, having said all of that, this was not my favorite Toni Morrison. I felt that it was a little fractured, a little more rambling than I would have liked. I do not know if this has anything to do with the fact that I am feeling a little spacey lately.

I guess that is my main problem with this work, too much going on. You had the main story with Violet, Joe and Dorcas but then their was Alice Manfred and the back stores of Violet and Joe and I just had a hard time keeping track. I also found the narration to be confusing. I wasn’t sure who it was. It wasn’t till the end of the book that I realized it was Toni Morrison herself, or at least I think so.

I would write more but I seem to have misplaced my brain. I feel bad since most of what I wrote is negative. And I really did like it but since my brain is gone, I’m going to give up the ghost.
Quotes:

“And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered.” (117)

“I told you again that you were the reason Adam ate the apple and its core. That when he left Eden, he left a rich man. Not only he he have Eve, but he had the first taste of the first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life. The very first to know what it was like. To bite it,. Bite it down. Hear the crunch and let the red peeling break into his heart.” (133)

“Don’t ever think I feel for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.” (135)

“Only now, he thought, now that I know I have a father, do I feel his absence: the place where he should have been and was not. Before, I thought everybody was one-armed, like me. Now I feel the surgery. The crunch of bone when it is sundered, the sliced flesh and the tubes of blood cut through, shocking the bloodrun and disturbing the nerves. They dangle and writhe. Singing pain. Waking me with the sound of itself, thrumming when I sleep so deeply it strangles my dreams away. There is nothing for it but to go away from where he is not to where he used to be and might be still. Let the dangle and the writhe see what it is missing; let the pain sing to the dirt where he stepped in the place where he used to be and might be still. I am not going to be healed, or to find the arm that was removed from me. I am going to freshen the pain, point it, so we both know what it is for.” (158)

“The girls have red lips and their legs whisper to each other through silk stockings. The red lips and the silk flash power. A power they will exchange for the right to be overcome, penetrated. The men at their side love it because, in the end, they will reach in, extend, get back behind that power, grab it and keep it still.” (182)

“What’s the world if you can’t make it up the way you want it?”
“The way I want it?”
“Yeah. The way you want it. Don’t you want it to be something more than what it is?”
“What’s the point? I can’t change it?”
“That’s the point. If you don’t, it will change you and it’ll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.”
“Messed it up how?”
“forgot it”
“forgot?”
“forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the street wisahing I was somebody else.”
“Who? Who’d you want to be?”
“Not who so much as what. White. Light. Young again.” (208)

“I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it-to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer-that’s the kick.” (229)