Toni Morrison's books have never drawn me as close as "Beloved" did before. But "Jazz" cut me like a knife from the moment I started reading it. (Haha, I used this expression a lot.) That is to say, Toni Morrison made us empathize even with the male killer who killed an 18-year-old girl! I feel bad as I fall in love with Joe.

The novel has an educational opening. The narrator knows everything about everyone, but he is not God. We don't know who he is. He even tells some things that will happen in the future. Then, with a wonderful final chapter, the narrator becomes the author and states that he has taken control of himself and told things about the future, but he is surprised by the situation where Joe and Violet come.

Joe is a man in his 50s. Violet is a woman in her 50s. They both meet and get married while working on farms like slaves (even though slavery has been abolished) when they are young. In their 30s, they come to the city, Harlem. They fall in love with the city, which is a very sociological situation in the novel. Thousands of homeless and orphaned blacks whose villages have been burned down migrate to the city and build a life there.

In the novel, Harlem, which is called the city, is also considered the main character along with jazz music and blues. With beautiful descriptions, the novel bounces from music to the street, from the street to the tree, and from the tree to the dance.

The entire balance of this married couple is disrupted when Joe falls in love with 18-year-old white Dorcas. From love! After Joe kills Dorcas, Violet also stabs the girl's corpse at the funeral out of her humiliation. We already learn these things in the beautiful first paragraph. That is, we start with a violent story.

But then it turns into a description of what kind of love. When we think about how Violet is attached to Joe along with her past... And as we read what Joe feels for Dorcas and the man's silent crying, we also get lost in understanding the two loves. We even understand what they did, which is so bad.

The narrator is very unbalanced. He bounces from the past, present, and future of these three people to the story of Golden Gray in an instant. Therefore, it is beneficial to read the novel in a short time. It can be difficult to follow.

But behind everything, there are the sufferings of blacks, what has been done to them, illegal and unfair labor, debts, deaths, and fires.

Today, that is, in 1926 when the novel takes place, there is a war that has ended, a developing city, blacks who can even play baseball, a people who enjoy it, a prohibition on alcohol, puritans, and jazz music that unfairly grabs people's spoons. And of course, the sisterhood that Morrison somehow manages to bring to life.

I loved it very much. Nihal Yeğinobalı, in my opinion, has mastered Morrison's rhythmic language.

This is my second reading of Toni Morrison's JAZZ. I firmly believe that her books, and perhaps all books, merit at least two readings.

JAZZ is a complex and symphonic tale. It deftly weaves back and forth in history, traversing different perspectives and moving in and out of "reliability". This narrative style offers a musical, sketchy, and improvisational glimpse into the lives of the people inhabiting a city. The city in the novel almost seems as alive, outlaw, raucous, and mischievous as the characters themselves.

Toni Morrison's talent is truly remarkable. Her ability to create such a rich and multi-faceted world is a testament to her genius. With each reading, I discover new layers and nuances in the story, further deepening my appreciation for her work. JAZZ is not just a novel; it is a work of art that demands to be explored and experienced more than once.

Morrison's writing is truly superb and it really draws you in. She psychoanalyzes the characters with great mastery and conveys social messages.

However, the story didn't grab me. In many places, I found the plot and its rhythm rather heavy.

Nevertheless, I will choose another book by the author in the future because I really like her style.

3.5 stars.

Overall, Morrison's talent as a writer is evident, but this particular story had its flaws for me. Despite that, I look forward to seeing what else she has to offer in her other works. I believe her unique writing style has the potential to create more captivating and thought-provoking stories.

Jazz music holds a rather unique position in this book.

It isn't a central theme per se, but rather its influence on society in 1920's America is frequently alluded to.

One can't help but wonder what those individuals from that era would make of today's music, considering they regarded jazz as vulgar.

The freedom of expression that jazz afforded people was vividly manifested through dance and what some might view as promiscuity.

This was seen as preposterous by the majority of (mostly tame) citizens.

The story within the book is a powerful testament of love and tragedy.

However, what truly fascinates is the way it is written.

Every sentence seems to be a work of poetry, beautifully crafted and rich in meaning.

The writing is so exquisitely done that it took me longer than expected to finish the book.

I found myself constantly re-thinking and savoring each and every word, as if uncovering hidden treasures within the text. ✨

Reread

4.5, upped a half-star from my original rating: My stars always reflect my reading experience. If I read this a third time (and I may, one day), I think I’ll be a better reader of it and I could achieve those full 5 stars.

While the subject matter of Jazz is not as difficult as that of Beloved—though make no mistake, the darkness is here, underneath, to the side, or overcome (to a certain extent)—and its tone is lighter. The characters, freed from slavery, leaving sharecropping, run out of town with the burning and lynching of others, have more agency than before (any agency is more than none) now that they are in the City. In many ways this work is structurally more challenging than Beloved, with its multiple narrators. There is an “I” that might be the City, sometimes, or might be the author herself, most times. Characters take their turn telling their stories, expressed in quotations, as if they are talking to someone, but to whom might remain mysterious. A case for the first-person narrator being the writer herself becomes more evident in a beautiful section (my favorite) that describes the narrator’s evolving feelings toward a character named Golden. I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am. And with a lovely passage near the end that states her expectations for Joe and Violet have been thwarted.

Recurring images of birds (parrots and redwings); wells of water that kill and nourish; caves that hide and nurture as a parent is searched for (reminding me of Song of Solomon) make for a rich reading experience. After the first chapter, the beginning of each subsequent chapter riffs on a word/idea/feeling/scene of the paragraph that came right before it, but from the viewpoint of a different character or narrator. I’m sure the riffing has been noted before and described as lyrical, as fitting for the new music of the time and place. But I want to go back to the aforementioned agency due to the time and place.

When Joe tells his story, he enumerates how he “changed into new seven times,” starting from the time he named himself. Violet feels split in two, thinks of how that Violet did the things she can’t comprehend the other Violet doing. Near the end she reveals how she became the “me” she is now. There’s still hatred, violence, racism, and discrimination in the present; but it’s their broken pasts that can now be faced and assimilated, even if it’s 'just' because a loving partner is potentially there for the choosing, and for joy, in the now.

Jazz is a remarkable novel that unfolds through the voices of multiple narrators.

The distinct musical cadence in their voices brings the story to life, echoing the ebb and flow of the characters' inner lives.

From Joe's violent romanticism, Violet's vituperation, to Dorcas's hopeful lyricism, Morrison gives each character their own unique inner voice.

They tell the story of Joe Crace's affair with Dorcas and his tragic act of murdering her.

Morrison also delves into the post-slavery shift in the African-American experience.

She explores how they went from the initial freedom of breaking free from slavery's chains to realizing they were trapped in a more insidious form of enslavement.

The cities offered a false sense of freedom, causing them to forget the beauty of the countryside.

Despite all this, Jazz is a captivating account of the characters' inner lives caught up in the romance between Joe and Dorcas.

Joe, charming and convivial, is consumed by his passion for Dorcas.

However, this passion turns sour, leading to jealousy and murder.

Dorcas, feeling suffocated by Joe's sentimentality, begins seeing Acton.

Joe's half-mad wife, Violet, observes it all.

The unreliable narrators keep the reader constantly guessing, as they are all wrapped up in their own hopes, dreams, and fears.

The novel is fragmented by the different narrative voices, yet it remains rich and febrile with the characters' inner lives.

Their search for identity, whether it's Joe's search for his parents or Violet's search for love, is central to their emotional journeys.

Jazz is truly one of Morrison's masterpieces.

A plot synopsis simply cannot do justice to the complexity of this remarkable book. However, I will quote the opening paragraph, which provides a good enough idea and hooked me from the very first page.

"Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the funeral and cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, 'I love you.'"

This is the second installment in Morrison's Dantesque trilogy on African-American history, which began in Hell with the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Beloved" and continues in Purgatory with "Jazz". Mostly set in Harlem in the 1920s, the narrative eventually extends back to the American South some seventy years before through jagged flashbacks and jump-cut reminiscences. With a host of shifting, unreliable narrators (the author herself becomes one), which are often not clearly identifiable, this is a rather challenging read. Morrison renounces linearity to befuddle the reader, and in this way, the novel is uneven and disjointed, mirroring the music that gives it its name. Jazz, in turn, evolved from the undeniable need of African Americans to express themselves even when they were shackled in body and spirit.

I admit that I often got lost, but I loved wandering in her lyricism and symbolism and finding my muddled tracks again. Each character's "composition"—confusing, seemingly unrelated, and often vastly different in tone; like single, spontaneous instruments in a Jazz ensemble—eventually fit together to assemble a single cohesive story of love and obsession from the hopes, fears, and harsh realities of African-Americans who've left behind their rural past for the promise of an urban future.

Every paragraph is full of stunning poetic import; words both written and left unsaid so laden with pain and wonder that it becomes poetry. Morrison turns her skillful hand at themes that so many other writers fail at illuminating with such an authentic touch. Her works aren't just about slavery and racism and pursuing the American Dream, but about real human relationships anyone can relate to, no matter their background.

—————

My other reviews of Morrison's Dantesque trilogy:

01: Beloved · ★★★★★

02: Jazz · ★★★★

03: Paradise · ★★★★★

She returned to her apartment and took the birds from their cages, setting them out the windows to either freeze or fly, even the parrot that said, 'I love you.' Maybe she thought this could solve the mystery of love. Good luck and let me know. You have to be clever to know how to be both welcoming and defensive, when to love and when to quit. If you don't know, you can end up out of control or controlled by something outside. 'You are there, it says, because I am looking at you.'

This idea of rest is attractive to her, but I don't think she would like it. Women are like that, waiting for ease and a space filled only with the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn't like it. They are busy and think of ways to be busier because such a space with nothing to do would knock them down.

The things that help you sleep through it all. Back-breaking labor might work; or liquor. Surely a body-friendly presence next to you. Someone whose touch is reassuring, not an affront or a nuisance. The stomach jump of possible love is nothing compared to the ice floes blocking her veins now.

And she had never named him. She called him'my parrot' all these years. 'My parrot.' 'Love you.' 'Love you.' Did the dogs get him? Or did a night-walking man snatch him up? Or did he get the message and fly away? Standing in the cane, he was trying to catch a girl he hadn't seen yet, but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but wishing he was the golden boy I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he.

Is this where you got to and couldn't do it anymore? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never will be loved by anyone who can choose to do it? 'You want a real thing?' asked Alive. 'I'll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.' Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated and serious than tears.

'I sell trust; I make things easy. That's the best way. Never push. Like at the Windemere when I wait tables. I'm there but only if you want me.' I couldn't talk to anybody but Dorcas and I told her things I hadn't told myself. With her I was fresh, new again. I chose you. Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that's the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking out, the choosing. Don't ever think I fell 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.

Risky, I'd say, trying to figure out anybody's state of mind. But worth the trouble if you're like me - curious, inventive and well-informed. What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not noticed the hurt that wasn't linked to the color of his skin or the blood beneath it. But to something else that longed for authenticity, for a right to be in this place, effortlessly without a false face, a laughless grin, a talking posture. I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am.

...the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything). Yes. No. Both. Either. But not this nothing. Men groan their satisfaction; women hum anticipation. The music bends, falls to its knees to embrace them all, encourage them all to live a little, why don't you? since this is the it you've been looking for. He didn't even care what I looked like. I could be anything, do anything - and it pleased him. Something about that made me mad. I don't know...Joe didn't care what kind of woman I was. He should have cared. I cared.

...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.

It’s a mature book in every aspect. Maybe it's not as young and ambitious as Beloved or some of Toni Morrison’s other works. The true maturity is vividly展现 in the later chapters. Here, we get to know the narrator more deeply and understand the relationship between Joe and Violet in greater detail. We don't require a thrilling ending. Instead, we just need to know that life progresses in rhythms and rhymes that we, as both authors and readers, don't fully comprehend.

I was firmly convinced that the narrator was another aspect of Violet, that the narrator existed within that other Violet who was crazy and out of control. However, as I reread the last chapter, I realized that Violet was Toni Morrison’s representative. But then I also realized that she wasn't. Just like all the characters in the book, Violet evolved and reinvented herself in ways that Morrison couldn't anticipate. They had to do so. That was the only way to survive in The City, to survive at all in that specific time and place.

How did the characters manage to do this? Because they are alive! Every author starts to have this feeling about their characters after a certain period. It takes maturity to allow your characters to develop independently over time and not attempt to force them into something they're not.

And what about Joe and Violet? They didn't desire to be the most exciting characters. They had their own plans, aiming for an adulthood that was happier than most, somewhat romantic, strange in its own way, but as human as anything else that has ever walked on this earth.

How do you reach that stage, the stage where the story takes on a life of its own and everything you wanted to control controls itself in ways that make you feel like just a vessel? The narrator doesn't quite know. I don't quite know either. And that's precisely what makes good fiction so magical.

It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shameless or apart and wild.

Another dazzling novel from Morrison which follows Beloved in her trilogy but which can equally be read as a standalone as the connections are thematic rather than through characters.

The 'now' is the mid-1920s and the place is Harlem, NY. While chronologically this takes place during the Harlem Renaissance, the book deliberately eschews glamour and artistry. Instead, it immerses us in the lives of ordinary people: a hairdresser, a door to door salesman, their local community, and the clubs and speakeasies where the jazz of the title wafts out and over the text's landscape.

Once again, this work delves into intergenerational traumas centered on the legacies of chattel slavery. Broken families, orphaned children in search of rootedness and home are explored, with light touches of the horrors of lynching, race riots, and the pervasive racism that, for instance, permitted Black men to serve in WW1 yet denied them honor or respect.

There's a sensuous, hard-hitting story featuring a violent love triangle that provides the book's structure. However, what truly stands out is Morrison's lyricism and the way her prose replicates the syncopated rhythms of the music that weaves through this tale. Motifs are presented and reoccur, and improvisations move across time as individual voices emerge to tell their story before harmonizing back into the main melody.

Polyphonic, beautifully sculptured, this novel continues the story of African-Americans that began so devastatingly in Beloved. It offers a profound and poignant exploration of a community's history, struggles, and hopes, all set against the backdrop of the vibrant and complex world of Harlem in the 1920s.

No easy reading, but it's worth persevering.

The central plot is already summarized in the first few lines: It is 1926 in Harlem, a 50-year-old man shoots his 18-year-old lover. The crime remains unpunished by any prosecution. The betrayed wife appears at the funeral to disfigure the face of the deceased. Later, she builds a relationship with the latter's aunt and adoptive mother.

Around this exposition, the novel is composed like jazz music. In ever wider digressions, the backgrounds of the characters are told. Seemingly without a clear line and with a changing perspective, the story jumps around and yet always returns to its theme.

This composition is both confusing and impressive. The language constantly creates a strong atmosphere full of the sound and the feeling of life of the jazz age. I also found the ending particularly beautiful.

Toni Morrison was a remarkable writer. She once expressed her sadness that as a child, she was the only one in her family who couldn't play music by ear.

However, one only needs to pick up one of her books to understand that she had an amazing sense of rhythm with words.

Her writing was like a beautiful symphony, with each sentence and paragraph flowing seamlessly together.

Morrison's use of language was so powerful that it could transport readers to different worlds and make them feel a wide range of emotions.

She was a master at creating vivid characters and telling stories that were both engaging and thought-provoking.

Despite her initial disappointment with her musical abilities, Morrison found her true calling in writing and left a lasting legacy that will be cherished for generations to come.