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"[Cane] has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately; could not possibly exist without it." ?Alice Walker A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.
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Summary: five stars not enough
How often when someone talks about a book does he or she say, "I felt like I was there," or "It seemed real"? Those are nice compliments, but they are untrue to the act of reading, or writing, much as we might wish that fiction could create a world that we can truly see and feel and hear and taste.
This is the one book that makes me feel that it can in fact be done.
(A comment on a few of the other reviews: How on earth can it be said that this is a difficult book to read? At what point did Americans become unable to hear their own soul speaking?)
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Summary: Great seller!
The book came quickly and was in the promised shape. Will definitely but from this seller in the future.
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Summary: Excellent
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 It is also still relevant because its form's perpetual renewal transcends its time, even its use of outdated terms.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.
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Summary: Perfection
This is the most amazing book. I am so sad that Jean Toomer did not write any other fiction.
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Summary: Wonderful reading
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.
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