- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Picador (21 Aug 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330331450
- ISBN-13: 978-0330331456
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.4 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 530,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Jackie Kay's first novel is a curious and haunting story about mixed-race jazz trumpeter Joss Moody (Irish mother, black father), who turns out, on his death, to have been a woman all along. The story begins with that discovery. Thereafter it traces its consequences for his white wife Millie, who always knew, and his adopted black son Colman, who didn't. Millie rehearses the stages of her relationship with Joss, reworking an intense and abiding love and commitment in which gender is, oddly, never really an issue. Colman, by contrast, is driven, in the period immediately following his father's death, by anger and an intense feeling of betrayal, to try to "out" his father, and complete his humiliation as a kind of personal expiation. As he retraces the steps of Joss's life, however, he begins gradually to change his mind. Kay has won acclaim for her poetry. Here she shows that she can harness her plangent voice to a narrative, producing writing of real maturity. Race and gender are deftly woven into its fabric, without insistence, to reveal a troubling ordinariness about fragmentation and confusions of identity in contemporary British life. --Lisa Jardine
Product Description
Trumpeter Joss Moody has died and the jazz world is in mourning. But in death, Joss can no longer guard the secret he kept all his life, and Colman, his adopted son, must confront the truth: the man whom he believed to be his father was, in fact, a woman.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sensitive study of loss of a loved with feelings confused,
By kestrick@hotmail.com (Keighley) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Trumpet (Paperback)
Written mainly as a series of interior landscapes with relatively short sketches of the outside world in London and Scotland, the work stimulates your curiosity and engages your empathy. The focus of the story, Joss Moody, deceased trumpeter, appears largely and tantalisingly through others' eyes. This approach is no mere device, it is the point: what Joss meant to those who knew and loved him/her and how his "deception", as some define her/his secret, affects their loyalty and feelings for him/her.A certain frustration may come from not having one's curiosity fulfilled about Joss's motivation for abandoning his life as the female Josephine. I also regret not witnessing more of Joss's mother's encounter with the adopted son, Colman. The book, though, is not an argument for transvestitism nor is it an apology, nothing so crude. The book is more a celebration, a song for that intangible in the human spirit that makes us feel we have experienced a unique relationship in knowing a particular individual. We are not presented with analysis of these experiences but, rather, the author plays each character's reflections much as Joss played his music. Indeed, Joss, though dead, is still very much alive not only in his recordings but also within those he loved. We too experience him/her in the sublime "Music" chapter where the soul of the novel and the soul of Joss meet in a poetic nexus. By the end of the book, we have come to know Joss and his/her affect on people but s/he remains an enigma. The newspaper hack attempting to ghost-write Colman's "official biography" of Joss would doubtless produce a conclusive character portrait confidently separating appearance from reality and yet be a million miles from the truth. Kay instead leaves all judgements up to the reader who through her sensitive rendering feel not an impulse to judge but rather a reason to grieve.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tightly woven, moving drama about identity and love,
By A Customer
This review is from: Trumpet (Paperback)
A rare book of great emotional strength which left me sobbing quietly at the end. It combines a tribute to the intense comforts of a passionate and long lasting marriage with an agonising search for identity and belonging and finally resolves its narrative movingly and resonantly. Every description rings true, every character lives, every episode has meaning - nothing is spare. A really wonderful book.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A moving, funny and occasionally horrifying novel.,
By
This review is from: Trumpet (Paperback)
The extraordinary life of a jazz trumpeter, Joss (born Josephine) Moody, who lived and played as a man. The story is told by a series of voices after Joss's death, including 'his' grieving widow and angry foster-son. Jackie Kay brings out the black humour of gender confusion, while gently suggesting that genius and love are just that, no matter how bizarre the circumstances. Beautifully written (the author is a poet) - but never precious.
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