Customer Reviews

Clifford's Blues

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4 star:		(1)
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I read this book a year ago and it haunts me still.

John A. Williams has crafted here a story so compelling, so engrossing in its depiction of life lived on a razor's edge, that you loathe putting it down; you may feel chills when you've finished it. It's that disturbing, and that good. CLIFFORD'S BLUES affirms that Williams retains his gifts (fresh as ever in his mid-70s!) and mastery of his craft.

Clifford Pepperidge is triple-crossed: condemned as "decadent" - for being American Negro, jazz musician, and active homosexual (especially impolitic when he's caught in bed with a prominent white man) - and interned "indefinitely" in a German concentration camp by Nazidom as it rises to power in the early 1930s.

This is a historical possibility we'd not thought of. Yet Williams, no stranger to historical fiction (see, for example, his novel CAPTAIN BLACKMAN), footnotes his text with incidences of real life black jazz musicians detained by the Nazis prior to the outbreak of World War II; I'd never heard about this.

John A. Williams has been publishing books, mostly novels, over 40 years. His heroes have tended to be "manly" black men: uncompromising, heterosexual, hard-loving, hard-drinking and cigarette-smoking urbane sophisticates. I've always taken them to be stand-ins for the author himself; perhaps they represent the image of manliness of a day not quite gone by.

Stepping out of his usual bounds and into Clifford's skin, however, Williams exhibits an even greater sense of manhood, an empathetic virility. Clifford may not fathom how he managed to get himself into such a mess, but he doesn't make excuses. He's as resolute about his sexuality as his racial and artistic makeup, though all combine to make him particularly alienated - and vulnerable - as he faces down brutal imprisonment with other Nazi-dictated "undesirables" (Communists, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews and gypsies) for twelve long years. He lives to see, almost veritably, the walls of his dungeon shake, practical escape, the possible passing on of his testimony - but at what cost?

I can say, with modesty and with pride, that I've read all John A. Williams' published novels. This is, for my money, his most powerful, arguably his greatest book since THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM.

Williams has always been a thinking person's writer and a darn good storyteller. In this extremely well written and deeply felt book he's rendered the poignant story of a character he made me truly care about. Clifford Pepperidge could be the long-feared-lost-or-dead relative whose tattered diary of surviving hell on earth has just been plopped down in your living room. How can you embrace all of what he's been through? What if it were you? The really eerie question is that, given history, or the record of human events, it's apparent that no one has a corner on inhumane depravity - we're each just as likely or capable of being captor or captive when, if, we allow a new holocaust. But when you look in the mirror, do you recognize the humanity within and extending beyond yourself? Will we remember?

My book club chose this for a future discussion. I do not usually judge a book by its cover, but this one seemed somewhat intriguing and I could not put this book down. After reading of the suffering of Clifford Pepperidge during the awesome days of the Holocaust and concentration camps, I was thankful for the author's efforts in portraying this aspect of our culture as it relates to the Jews. The suffering endured by the Jews is known to be incredulous, but Blacks were not thought to be a part of this life. Clifford's love for music was the glue that kept his sanity throughout this ordeal. The author's portrayal and Clifford's coping with his homosexuality, Dieter Lange, Anna, and the likes is insurmountable. You find yourself asking, "how much more suffering can he endure?" The author's ability to give you hope throughout is painfully good.

I don't want to mislead you, this is a sad story, but one that has enlightened me for the better of understanding our race's (African-American, Black, Negro, Colored) consistency with coping skills under extreme and diverse circumstances.

Clifford's Blues is the story of an African American gay musician who is imprisoned in the labor camps of Germany during Hitler's reign. Clifford's story is revealed through his diary, which provides a powerful first person account of the atrocities and horrors of the prison camps. Although we are all familiar with the horrific experience of Jews in Nazi Germany, we sometimes fail to realize that many others (Africans, Gays, mulattos, Americans other German citizens) also suffered under the oppressive thumb of Hitler. Williams does an exemplary job of weaving the essence of music - Jazz and Blues - through the story. This blending of the arts demonstrates how through music one can find and celebrate life, no matter how dismal that life may be. For the more astute music connoisseur, I'm sure the songs and artists mentioned in the novel will add additional depth to the reading experience.

I would have liked to know how Cliff's life unfolds after his internment. Perhaps a follow-up novel is in order where the author compares Cliff's Nazi imprisonment with his experience as an African American gay man upon his return to America. If you are looking for another perspective on the Holocaust this book is definitely a good place to start. Clifford's Blues is both well written and researched. It's as much educational as it is entertaining. Well worth the time spent.

It took me twenty years to finally pull Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Shosha, about Jews and the Holocaust from my bookcase and read it. One week later I had finished it and moved on to read Clifford's Blues. Two compelling and distinctive plys coil together to offer up complementary perspectives on the rise of Nazism in Germany. Singer puts a face on pre-World War II European Jews, richly depicting what it meant to be a Jew in western Europe in the years prior to and during the Holocaust. For most modern Americans this is a fairly familiar story.

Williams offers up a tale much less familiar. He introduces us to Clifford Pepperidge, a gay, black, American jazz musician who spends a dozen years incarcerated in Dachau prison, one of the many labeled undesirables who were captured as the Nazis rose to power. While other prisoners suffer the misery of prison barracks and captor abuse, Clifford sits in the comfortable home of a gay Nazi officer and his bovine German wife. There as a servant, Pepperidge allows himself to be used sexually and musically by both husband and wife, the price of survival. In his daily interaction with other prisoners he sees that good men, those with the character and ethics to stand up for their fellows, rarely survive long. It is those who capitulate, who sink down into the muck, who lose their humanity, who will endure.

Williams provides us with a fascinating picture of how people react to power and influence, even when it clearly is evil. We see the German burger who blinds himself to the fate of those caught up in the hungry trap of Nazism. The German officer who grasps at every opportunity to accumulate wealth and power. The many who stumbled forward in step with a horror that grows ever larger and more malignant. Where Singer presents a picture of people desperately trying to hold onto their hopes and dreams even in the face of rising oppression, Williams shows us the convolutions that strip away humanity in both victim and oppressor.

The writing is strong, and Williams clearly took the time to do the necesary research to bring his story to life. Richly developed characters hold the reader's interest. It is not a book to be quickly forgotten. Williams holds a mirror up and asks us to look at ourselves and think about how we can be shaped and influenced by people and events. His darkside tale underscores the possibility of our own tumble into inhumanity and evil.

Exceptionally thought provoking and informative into a time and place one would not think or even phathom that we, afro americans, even existed or were apart. The writing is fast paced and flowing from cover to cover, inviting you in, leaving you standing on the sideline and just plain in a stupor at other times. I enjoyed the book immensly and highly recommend it as a buyers choice, not to be lent out if you want to keep it.

If only half of what is published were half as well crafted. By the way, the Kirkus Review at the top says this is Williams's first novel. But this is John A., the author of The Man Who Cried I Am, right? Does Kirkus have him confused with another John Williams?

Williams does a remarkable job of blending jazz, gender, and history into what I see as an absolutely unforgettable novel. If you thought you knew something about the Holocaust, think again. Williams, in his trademark manner, has a way of telling through fiction the factual history that others are to busy or racist to acknowledge. Certainly one of the best in his oeuvre.

A very interesting construction of a diary kept by a fictitious gay black American jazz pianist, Clifford Pepperidge, incarcerated in Dachau leading up to and during the Second World War, but driven by real events. Upon arrival at the concentration camp Clifford is recognised and selected as a house servant by SS Captain Dieter Lange, a former pimp and low life acquaintance of Clifford's, who is not only interested in the pianist's musical abilities, but also as potential for his own sexual outlet. The strange and dependant relationship that develops between Cliff and Dieter Lange, and Lange's wife Anna, becomes ever deeper as they learn each others secrets.
The diary is very revealing about life in a Dachau, and brings home the horrors of the suffering and struggle for survival of the inmates; how circumstances changed as war broke out and progressed, and the desperation of both inmates and captors as the war was clearly coming to, for Germany and possible for the inmates, a disastrous end.
While I am in no position to confirm the authenticity of such a fabrication, the accuracy concerning the fact that in addition to blacks, and Jews, dissidents, criminals, gypsies, gays etc, from very early on Jehovah's Witnesses were imprisoned in concentration camps (something rarely acknowledged), and their unique position (their potential freedom was in their own hands), leads me to assume that the John A Williams has carefully research all his facts, supported by the usefully included bibliography.
All in all it makes for a captivating, moving and informative read.

This book changed my life. It is not your average Nazi Camp story its about: love, friendship, loss, rape, loss of innocence, and loss of faith (in humanity and in a higher God figure). Could not put it down! I finished it in 1 Day and I just wanted more and more!

I read this book for class and I glad it was on my reading list. I forgot that there were Blacks in the Nazi camps with the jews. This book brings it to light. It's writen in the spirit of Anne Frank. Reguardless of the maddness that surrounded this character he grew.