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- ISBN13: 9780871401519
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Product Description
"[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.
Customer Review:AE7G325CHM5LZ
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Summary: An important novel
When Ralph Waldo Emerson penned his famous essay The Poet in the middle of the 19th century, there was no real "American Literature." Yes, there was literature written in the United States, by "American" authors, with some semblance of American settings and American themes, but the most popular works of that time were, for all intents and purposes, very much British (booo). The American literary identity was still forming. Everything from poetry to drama (can anyone name the first real example of American drama?) to the novel had a decidedly British "accent."
The only real American form at that time was short fiction. Mark Twain certainly could not be confused with Dickens. Likewise, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville can all be considered founding fathers of a truly American literary genre, the short story. Yet, Hawthorne's style still existed within the decorum of the British tradition, Poe set a great deal of his works in Gothic, European landscapes and Melville was, well, Melville ...
It was not until Walt Whitman that an authentic, unapologetic, and rightfully contradictory American voice was heard in literature. Whitman the poet, like Whitman the man, was gruff, emotional, independent, curious, observant, sensual, and very much the new American Adam. However, while Whitman was changing poetics forever, the American novel was still locked in British conventions of form. That is, until, Jean Toomer.
Toomer's Cane was something unlike any novel the world had ever seen - a literary gumbo of poetry, folk drama, short fiction, gospel and Homeric epic. Its narrative, a non-linear thread of vignettes, moves from the piney woods of South Georgia to the urban landscapes of Washington, D.C. and Chicago and back again. In these rich scenes, Toomer traces the drama and tragedy of the African American experience, first in slavery and then in the oppressive post-Civil War Jim Crow era.
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
The novel is a a cultural masterpiece of both folk and literary tradition, yet challenges convention at every turn. Prose reads like poetry, poetry serves as chapters. Toomer translates oral formulaic forms, like call and response and poetic refrain, into literary devices that sing from the page like living voices. His novel may be the most underrated work in the American literary canon. Toomer was 50 years or more ahead of his time - we are just now realizing his genius. I've been in love with this novel since I first picked it up from a used book store 20 years ago and I feel it belongs on every serious reader's to-do list.
Customer Review:A12U37O5CTFNO8
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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.
Customer Review:A3SFO2GSP5CVSM
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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.
Customer Review:A1EI302TRY0XUH
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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.
Customer Review:ABD8GLG46KK8O
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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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