Customer Reviews

Toni Morrison boxed set

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is nothing difficult in reading Ms Morrison. She is very detailed and that requires concentration. She answers no questions for you and perhaps that is what makes some readers say she is too complicated. If you remember the character, when she jumps forward or backward in the story, it is easy to pick up where she left off. Beloved is merely a song about a woman's commitment to not suffering any more indignities if it were in her power not to do so. Perhaps her initial method was extreme but then again, what is not extreme about enslavement? What is not extreme about a group of people having no history beyond the 19th century? What is difficult about her novels is that you have to have the answers to these questions before you start reading.

There's only one way to remember them:reading

and humming the "song"they inspire along the

poetical and invoking lines of an almost shamanic

incantation rising to bring them back into

life so that we meet,know and re-bury them with love and
awe,with respect and recognition of
a sacrifice as supreme as crucifying itself.
They are all deities in the lost and sacred
society bush of ancestors long forgotten and recalled when the moments are
supreme, when it comes to love, life

and death: Beloved, Macon Dead, Violet, Circe...

I agree with the comments of the other reviewers...simply want to add that I believe Jazz to be the great american novel for both its writing (which in and of itself is a kind of jazz music) and its use of that unique American music, jazz, to describe and explore love.

When facing the question of love (is it possible?) this book should be your manual. Just like "Beloved" deals with parental love and "Paradise" deals with love between man and his God, "Jazz" is the ultimate in romantic love. It is romantic, sometimes even funny, and all through reading it makes you feel like you`re standing on the edge of a cliff, hearing the most important thing to make the rest of your life livable, or at least give you the option to fly. It`s sad, on the verge of tragedy all through the book but somehow it keeps missing the tragic by a few inches and becomes if not optimistic, at least moral enough to make you belive in love (and the possibility of ethics) again. Though it is placed in early 20th century NY City, it is never nostalgic or cliche or preechy - Tony Morissons writing has such an air of urgency and blunt observation about it that it never falls into any of these traps. Read it, it amazing!!!!