Jazz
About this book
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.
Subjects
- 1000blackgirlbooks
- 18.06 anglo-american literature
- 813/.54
- african americans
- african americans, fiction
- african americans--fiction
- afro-americans
- afronorteamericanos
- american fiction (fictional works by one author)
- crimes of passion
- crimes of passion--fiction
- crimes passionnels
- ficción
- fiction
- fiction, historical, general
- fiction, psychological
- funérailles
- funeral rites and ceremonies
- funeral rites and ceremonies--fiction
- historical fiction
- homicide
- large type books
- love
- love stories
- middle-aged persons
- middle-aged persons--fiction
- moeurs et coutumes
- new york (n.y.), fiction
- noirs
- noirs américains
- personnes d'âge moyen
- ps3563.o8749 j38 2004
- psychological
- psychological fiction
- quartier de harlem
- reading level-grade 11
- reading level-grade 12
- relations humaines
- rites et cérémonies
- romance fiction
- romans
- social life and customs
- triangles (interpersonal relations)
- triangles (interpersonal relations)--fiction
- vida social y costumbres