Half-Blood Blues
Esi Edugyan, 2011
Picador : Macmillan
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250012708
Summary
Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris cafe. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black.
Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African Americans from Baltimore, have appeared in a documentary about Falk. When they are invited to attend the film’s premier, Sid’s role in Falk’s fate will be questioned and the two old musicians set off on a surprising and strange journey.
From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world as he describes the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that led to Falk’s incarceration in Sachsenhausen. Half-Blood Blues is a story about music and race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1977 or 1978
• Where—Calgary, Alberta, Canada
• Education—University of Victoria; Johns Hopkins University
• Awards—Giller Prize; Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
• Currently—lives in Victoria, British Columbia
Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist, born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, to Ghanaian immigrant parents. She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and Johns Hopkins University before publishing her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, in 2004.
Despite favourable reviews for her first novel, Edugyan had difficulty securing a publisher for her second fiction manuscript. She spent some time as a writer-in-residence in Stuttgart, Germany, which inspired her to write another novel, Half-Blood Blues, about a mixed-race jazz musician in World War II-era Europe who is abducted by the Nazis as a "Rhineland Bastard."
Published in 2011, Half-Blood Blues was shortlisted for that year's Man Booker Prize, Scotiabank Giller Prize, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and Governor General's Award for English language fiction. She was one of two Canadian writers, alongside Patrick deWitt, to make all four award lists in 2011. On November 8, 2011 she won the Giller Prize. Again, alongside deWitt, Half-Blood Blues was also shortlisted for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. In April 2012, Half-Blood Blues also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
In 2018, Edugyan released Washington Black, which was long-listed for that year's Man Booker Prize.
Edugyan lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is married to novelist and poet Steven Price. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The novel is narrated by…Sid Griffiths, who…speaks with a black Baltimorean accent, punctuated with a hint of German slang, and even if his voice sounds a little off…it doesn't get in the way of Edugyan's nimble storytelling. She tempers the plot's Casablanca-style melodrama…with healthy doses of quotidian banter, admirably capturing the bickering camaraderie of the young musicians.
Andrew Haig Martin - New York Times Book Review
Unforgettable…Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed. It’s a work that promises to lead black literature in a whole new direction.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Destined to win a wide audience… Deftly paced in incident and tone, moving from scenes of snappy dialogue, in which band members squabble and banter humorously, to tense, atmospheric passages of description…Edugyan makes fresh tracks in this richly-imagined story.… Half-Blood Blues itself represent a kind of flowering—that of a gifted storyteller
Toronto Star
A superbly atmospheric prologue kick-starts a thrilling story about truth and betrayal… [A] brilliantly fast-moving novel.
Times (London)
Shines with knowledge, emotional insight, and historical revisionism…Truly extraordinary in its evocation of time and place, its shimmering jazz vernacular, its pitch-perfect male banter and its period slang.
Independent (London)
(Starred review.) Edugyan’s second novel, shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, pays a mournful tribute to the Hot-Time Swingers, a once-legendary six-piece German-American multiracial jazz ensemble gigging in Berlin on the eve of WWII. When the pianist is picked up by the Gestapo, the remaining members flee to Paris with forged passports to meet Louis Armstrong in hopes of cutting a record. After the German occupation of Paris, “the Boots” arrest Hieronymous (“Hiero”) Falk, the band’s 20-year-old-genius Afro-German trumpet player, leaving the band with one half-finished record, one shattered love affair, and one too many secrets. The story of the band’s demise and partial resurrection, as seen through the eyes of Sid Griffiths—the upright bass player—unfolds in richly scripted vignettes alternating between 1939/1940 (when Hiero disappears) and 1992 (when Sid and Chip Jones, the percussionist, revisit Berlin for a Hieronymous Falk festival and walk down memory lane). By the book’s end, readers will have pieced together most of the truth behind Sid’s biased recounting of events, but nothing will prepare them for the disclosure of an ultimate betrayal. While the rarely explored subject adds to the book’s allure, what stands out most is its cadenced narration and slangy dialogue, as conversations, both spoken and unspoken, snap, sizzle, and slide off the page. Sid’s motivation can feel obscure, but his lessons learned are hard-won all the same.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Canadian Edugyan’s second novel jumps between Berlin and Paris in 1939–40 and Berlin in 1992 to tell the story of a German American jazz band and its star trumpeter, Hieronymous Falk.... That narrow moment in time when the freewheeling decadence of Weimar Germany gave way to jackbooted tyranny has been the subject of much fine fiction, but Edugyan is the first to overlay it with jazz history. It makes a sublime marriage. —Bill Ott
Booklist
In Edugyan's second novel...some jazz musicians find their music and lives endangered in Nazi Germany and occupied Paris. Paris 1940. Nazis everywhere. The musicians are huddled in a shabby apartment. One of them, without papers, goes out on a reckless search for milk. Bam! He's arrested and deported to a German camp. Edugyan (a Canadian of Ghanaian descent) has incorporated the novel's climax in this taut opening.... A memorable evocation of the defiant thrill of jazz at a terrible time.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. To what end does the novel take the reader back and forth in time and place, from Berlin to Paris in the 1930s and 40s and Europe in the 1990s? How does this affect the reader?
2. Delilah is a major female character in an otherwise largely male populated novel. How does she push against the gender relations in the novel, and how does her romantic involvement with the other characters affect the reader’s sense of her character? Would you describe her as an early feminist?
3. Do you think that Sid, the narrator, is at the heart of Half Blood Blues? Whose novel is this?
4. Half-Blood Blues explores, among other things, the jazz era of the 1930s. In what ways does jazz affect the novel’s structure, the voice of its characters, the tone of the book?
5. One reviewer criticized the novel on the grounds that the Afro-German experience has been sidelined. How does telling Hiero’s story from the point-of-view of a different character affect it? What are the moral implications of doing so?
(Questions issued by publisher.)