Book recommendation / Preporuka knjige......Morrisson Toni, Jazz.

' They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddently the world was right side up. Violet learned what she had forgotten until this moment: that laugher is serious. More serious, more complicated than tears.'  Toni Morrison, Jazz

" Oni su se i smijali, čak je i Rose Dear odmahnula glavom i nasmijala se te odjednom svijet je opet bio okrenut na pravu stanu. Violet je shvatila što je zaboravila do tog trenutka: da je smijeh ozbiljan. Puno ozbiljniji, puno kompliciraniji od suza." Toni Morrisson, Jazz

Today I'm sharing a book recommendation with you. It wasn't easy to select a quote to open this post with because there are so many memorable passages in this novel, but I think the one I choose works well enough. I posted about Jazz a few weeks ago on my instagram account. It is my third novel by Toni Morrison.  Prior to Jazz, I had read Beloved and Paradise. In many ways, it reminded me of the latter. Even the author herself compared this novel with Beloved and I must admit I drew many parallels in my own mind as well. 

One thing is for sure : this novel is as haunting and emotionally exhausting as Beloved. It requires not only concentration of the mind but also that of the heart. Morrison put her heart and soul into writing this, as all great writers do. However, unless you're prepared to really open your heart to this one, you might as well skip it.  Yes, the brilliant way it is written will make you sympatize with every character but unless you are prepared to really treasure all of its complexity, there is not point in picking it up. This book deserves your full attention. I will not share a review with you here because I have another blog that is reserved only for book reviews but I will say that despite all the sadness this novel cointans, it managed to make me feel more hopeful about life....and that's the best recommendation I can give. Jazz teaches us how important love is...and what lesson is more important than that one?


Danas ću s vama podijeliti preporuku knjige. Nije bilo lako izabrati citat s kojim ću otvoriti jer ima toliko puno pamtljivih odlomaka u ovom romanu, ali mislim da je onaj koji sam odabrala sasvim prikladan. Već sam nešto pisala o ovom romanu prije nekoliko tjedana na svom instagram računu Ovo je moj treći roman spisateljice Toni Morrison, prije njega sam pročitala Raj i Voljena, a na puno načina me podsjetio na ovaj posljednji. Čak je i sama autorica usporedila Jazz s Voljenom, a  i ja sam osobno povukla puno paralela. Jedna stvar je sigurna: ovaj roman je isto opsjedajući i emocionalno iscrpljujući kao Voljena. 

Zahtjeva ne samo koncentraciju uma, nego i koncentraciju srca.  Morrison je stavila u njega srce i dušu, kao što svi veliki pisci rade. Niste li spremni doista otvorili srce ovoj knjizi, nemojte ju ni uzimati u ruke. Naravno da će vas izvrstan način na koji je napisala natjerati da suosjećate s svakim likom, ali ako je neće cijeniti u svoj njenoj kompleksnosti, nema smisla da je uopće čitate. Ova knjiga zahtjeva vašu punu pozornost. Neću ovdje pisati ogled jer za to imam poseban blog koji služi samo za oglede o knjigama, ali ću reći da unatoč tome što je ovaj roman prepun tuge, uspio je u tome da me navede da osjećam nadu prema životu...i to je najbolja preporuka koju mogu dati. Ovaj roman nas uči koliko je važna ljubav, a koja je lekcija važnija od te?

my illustrations (watercolour)/ moje ilustracije (akvarel)

“Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder.
And I the eye of the storm.”

......

“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. And I made up my mind to follow you too.”

Toni Morrison, Jazz

“I’m crazy about this City.

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible-like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out.”

Toni Morrison, Jazz

moja ilustracija

“When they fall in love with a city it is for forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves, their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they and the city have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like - if they ever knew, that is.”

.....

“Hospitality is gold in this City; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don't know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing like that hard case last winter.”

“Little of that makes for love, but it does pump desire. The woman who churned a man's blood as she leaned all alone on a fence by a country road might not expect even to catch his eye in the City. But if she is clipping quickly down the big-city street in heels, swinging her purse, or sitting on a stoop with a cool beer in her hand, dangling her shoe from the toes of her foot, the man, reacting to her posture, to soft skin on stone, the weight of the building stressing the delicate, dangling shoe, is captured. And he'd think it was the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging, high-heeled shoe moving in and out of sunlight. He would know right away the deception, the trick of shapes and light and movement, but it wouldn't matter at all because the deception was part of it too. Anyway, he could feel his lungs going in and out. There is no air in the City but there is breath, and every morning it races through him like laughing gas brightening his eyes, his talk, and his expectations. In no time at all he forgets little pebbly creeks and apple trees so old they lay their branches along the ground and you have to reach down or stoop to pick the fruit. He forgets a sun that used to slide up like the yolk of a good country egg, thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, and he doesn't miss it, doesn't look up to see what happened to it or to stars made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps.

“She thought it would dry his tears and give her some satisfaction as well. It could have worked, I suppose, but the children of suicides are hard to please and quick to believe no one loves them because they are not really here.”

.....

“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.”

moje ilustracije


I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for 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'st eh 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.'

" 'Mess it up how?'

" 'Forgot it.'

" 'Forgot?'

" 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.”


Toni Morrison, Jazz

“This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor mornings free of flies and heat when the light is shy. No. Not at all. They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don’t know where from.”

Toni Morrison, Jazz

my illustation (watercolour)

“You want a real thing?” asked Alice. “I’ll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.”

Toni Morrison, Jazz