Selected Product:
| Cane
Paperback
Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Release Date: 1993-08
ISBN-10: 0871401517
ISBN-13: 9780871401519
List Price: $12.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Considered to be a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, a brief period during the 1920s, this book consists of sketches, poems and stories of rural and urban black African life that evoke images of smoke, sugar-cane, dusk and flame in the southern landscape, while the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets.
Excellent
| Customer Rating:  | | This is not a book that is likely to be appreciated by the pabulum fed mass readership of today, because it requires emotional and intellectual engagement, and refuses to give answers, while wishing its readers to take what they need at each reading. It is also still relevant because its form's perpetual renewal transcends its time, even its use of outdated terms. Look at other black fiction from the era and you will see that Cane is still relevant and undated. Even compared to the later, limp, stereotyped tales of an Alice Walker or Toni Morrison this book is visionary, however focused its beam. Some critics, over the decades, have tried to autobiographize the book, out of the necessity of their inability to relate to black art, and black culture, and Toomer's alleged ambivalence on the subject of race and class in America because he was a light-skinned black, whom some of his black critics even doubted was black, but that is a mistake, for every work reveals something of its author, if only in his choice of subject matter. Toomer may have been any of a dozen of his characters, but that is not the point of the book. He is and isn't those characters, but the truth is it does not matter, for all sugar cane has the same fate, and that was the point. Another thing to note is that of all the so-called jazz poems or works of `written' jazz- prose or poetry, none is more true to the improvisational darting nature of that dying musical form than this book. That is why any deeper analysis of themes, motives, and characters is bound to be superfluous, at least in a mere review, because a reader will inevitably, and as Toomer wanted, see something else in this Rorschachian book. And that's a very good thing. |
Perfection
| Customer Rating: | | This is the most amazing book. I am so sad that Jean Toomer did not write any other fiction. |
Wonderful reading
| Customer Rating: | | Cane is a collection of short stories that are loosely connected by theme and mood. It seems that the characters are very stifled by their environment. The main characters of each story seem to be either too introspective to include anyone in their lives or too extrospective/judgmental to form an honest bond with anyone. One quote from the book I think sums it up: "Time and space do not exist in a canefield." I think Toomer was saying that slavery still exists, but rather within the souls of black people. The memory or the history of it is the root of a very serious unhappiness, which begets stagnation, indifference and social impotence. |
Difficult (2.5 stars)
| Customer Rating: | I write this review with the realization that it is likely to be unpopular, nevertheless, I found the book to be very trying. While I can appreciate the modernist approach which was employed years before its time, the experimental nature of the writing had my head spinning. The text itself is a mixed bag that includes not only prose, but poetry and drama as well. Toomer insisted on these pieces being put together to form a novel, but I cannot help but feel many of the inclusions would have faired better standing alone. In my particular reading experience, I found that many of the pieces do not interlock or even coincide, which produces a sort of start-and-stop reading ordeal. There is simply no fluidity in the text.
Toomer was of mixed heritage, so the book is rife with ambivalence and a proverbial tug-of-war between "light and dark." It has been pointed out that Toomer was very much influenced by Picasso's cubism and worked to recreate this in his literature. As far as I know, Toomer and Gertrude Stein are the only two to have done this, and the effect is arrantly vertiginous in both cases.
In literary circles, this book is considered a must-read in African-American literature, and for that reason, it should be read and contemplated. However, if you are looking for leisure reading, I would suggest something else. The book is only 112 pages long, but I found that it somehow seemed rather "Victorian" in length. It is by no means fast.
In defense of the book, I think my problem with it is a result of preferring prose over poetry and drama. If you are a reader that likes all genres equally, you may find this considerably more enjoyable.
Suggested Af/Am Lit: Wright's Black Boy, Morrison's Song of Solomon, Ellison's Invisible Man, Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, and Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi. |
Beautiful
| Customer Rating: | | the first few chapters alone is worth having this book in your library. It reads like smooth passionate music, writing prose like poetry, capturing moments in history, in the past of our country, that many do not often think about. this book is amazing. |
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