Half-Blood Blues: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Paperback]

Esi Edugyan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 28, 2012

Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011
An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year

Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction

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 café. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: Looping from Nazi-occupied Berlin and Paris to modern-day Baltimore and back, Esi Edugyan's Giller prize-winning Half-Blood Blues is a haunting song of a novel. In Paris 1940, the three remaining Hot-Time Swingers run take after exhausted take, trying to get one right before the S.S. boots stomp their last chance. Our irascible narrator, Sid, learned to play bass lin Baltimore, with his longtime friend and rival Chip on drums, and in Berlin they'd joined up with Hiero, a half-black German “kid” who blows brilliant trumpet with a “massive sound, wild and unexpected, like a thicket of flowers in a bone-dry field.” As Hiero scratches the wax on disc after disc of imagined mistakes, Sid saves the final take--the record that will become legendary. When Hiero's arrested and sent to a Nazi camp, Sid’s the only witness, and things look suspicious. Fifty years later, Chip and Sid return to Berlin for the opening of a film about Hiero. But Sid stands accused of engineering his disappearance, and a strange letter suggests there’s more to the story than anyone knew. With delightfully witty jazz-cat banter, tactile imagery, and descriptions of music sensual enough to stand your hair on end, Edugyan evokes a time, a place, and a band whose refusal to repress their difference could mean death, or become a catalyst for acts of creative genius that will make them immortal. --Mari Malcolm

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Short-listed for the Booker Prize, 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. Having hit it big during the Weimar era, the band—a mixture of expat African Americans and German jazz fanatics, including Falk, who is both black and a German (a mischling, or crossbreed, in the eyes of the Nazis)—now faces tough and increasingly dangerous times in the wake of Hitler’s ban against “degenerate music.” Drummer Chip Jones and bassist Sid Griffiths, both African Americans, escape to Paris, but Falk is arrrested in Berlin. Cut to 1992: the discovery of the band’s unreleased last recording, “Half-Blood Blues,” a jazz version of the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi party anthem, has made a music legend of Falk, never heard from after the war and presumed dead, and has prompted a celebratory documentary, which will premier in Berlin. Edugyan tells this incredibly rich story of music, politics, and personal betrayal both subtly and dramatically, unveiling the mystery of what happened to Falk as she exposes the tensions between the band members and the secret that has been gnawing at one of them for half a century. Like Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King (2000), which tells a similar story of an expat jazzman and his troubled legacy, Edugyan’s novel mixes palpable period atmosphere with an interpersonal drama of great emotional depth. 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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Picador (February 28, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1250012708
• ISBN-13: 978-1250012708
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (95 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #73,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 55 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This Gate be in the Groove October 27, 2011

By las cosas

Format:Audio CD

Review of the book. I read the 13 longlisted books for the 1011 Man Booker, and this was my favorite; Barnes, the winner, was my second favorite.

A story told in parts alternating between 1992 and 1939/1940, the main characters are three black men who met in Weimar Germany playing together in a jazz group. Weimar life has been described (over described?), and certainly black US jazz musicians are an often glimpsed part of the background. But this book brings that world, or at least the portion inhabited by these three musicians, to the fore. Two of the men (Skip and our narrator, Sid) grew up together in Baltimore and the third (Heiro) was born in Germany. The parts located in 1939/1940 have an incessant and accelerating tension of claustraphobia and boredom mixed with hightened anxiety as the three, joined by other characters, hide out in Berlin and then in Paris as they attempt to evade the nazis (called the Boot). This is obviously not an unusual plot. But what adds a new twist is that the only two characters in any real danger are the blond, jewish, pianist and Hiero, the black trumpeter born in Germany. The US passports held by Skip & Sid served as at least some protection against what was going on, particularly in Paris. As the narrator said, their problem was that "we was officially degenerate".

Because they have a place to stay in both Berlin and Paris, and at least some protection, the tension of the war itself is often a background narrative, not the main story line. And that other story line is the friendships, betrayals and loses that accumulate as they play their jazz, trying to record the perfect take of a riff on a popular nazi song. As time goes on in Paris more and more is sacrificed for the sake of this album, which is never properly completed, though an outtake survives and later leads to a documentary film that is a focus of the 1992 parts.

This is not a jazz book, I certainly wouldn't call jazz a central theme of the book. But it contains some of the most lyrical descriptions of jazz playing that I have read. Describing the first time the three played with Louis Armstrong (who is vibrantly described in a short section of the book) the author describes how each of the three enters into and intertwines on the song 'Old Town Wrangler'.

"And then, real late, Armstrong come in.

I was shocked. Ain't no bold brass at all. He just trilled in a breezy, casual way, like he giving some dame a second glance in the street without breaking stride. It was just so calm, so effortlessly itself."

But the element of this book that made it work for me was the narrator. He is the quintessential every man. He discovers that he isn't a great jazz player, and he was willing to do anything, even betrayal, to be great, in the game. After leaving Europe he comes back to Baltimore and lives the non-glamourous life, working for decades as a medical transcriptionist. The book opens as he is invited to the Berlin opening of a documentary film about Heiro, and Chip convinces Skip to attend. The continual self-doubt and frailty of Skip is in contrast to Chip's bombast. But Skip's shortfalls are those of a person who has lived a full life and is aware that he has much to regret. The straight-forward narrative reads like someone being honest with us and himself. But throughout the book he, and the reader, learn that things aren't as they appear, and that our emotions color both our actions and our perceptions. The narrative, and the narrator, feel alive and believable. Even the ever annoying Chip we learn to appreciate, as you appreciate an old family member you never really liked, but have learned to accept.

The book isn't perfect. Calling women "janes" hundreds of times throughout the book wears thin, and someone who spent decades doing transcriptions, even medical transcriptions, is unlikely to write "we et in silence". And the only female character, Delilah, was not very believable or well sketched. But these are minor complaints.

49 of 59 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Blues medley--a work not completely finished January 2, 2012

By Blue in Washington TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Interesting book, but awkward and unsatisfying for me at its end. In part the story of two black American jazz musicians and their German colleagues whose music and performing are suppressed by the Nazis in 1939 Berlin. Forced to flee to Paris, the two are joined by a Canadian woman working for Louis Armstrong and an African-German prodigy, Hiero Falk. From that point forward, the story is focused on the brilliant trumpeter Falk, who disappears into a Nazi concentration camp within a few months of the German invasion of France and is presumed to have perished as a consequence. Falk's short performing and recording career has nevertheless become legendary, and by 1992 he has become sufficiently interesting historically to merit a documentary film which draws on recollections by his former American bandmates, now in their 80s. .

Much of the novel consists of switchbacks between the 1930s and 1990s which center on relationships between main characters in their flight from the Nazis and the two American musicians returning to Germany for the viewing of the bio-documentary of their friend. These vignettes are mostly in dialogue form, and when they focus on music, they are quite interesting. When they focus on their personal issues and relationships, they lose clarity and meaning (for me at least). The dialogues are the only clue to who the characters really are. There is little or no internal perspective offered by the author.

When it turns out that Hiero Falk actually survived the Nazi death camps and is living in newly democratic, rural Poland, there is the inference that the story of his survival and life since 1945 will be explained and that his complicated relationships with the two American colleagues will come to some resolution. Very surprisingly, this never happens. The final chapter of this story just kind of sags into non-closure and the reader really has no clue as to what really happened to the musical wunderkind in the intervening 50 years.

So to sum up, the reader is easily drawn into the interesting scenario set up at the beginning of novel with the promise of knowledgable insight into the music and lives of the musicians under political stress.. There is the expectation that the highly original characters introduced at the beginning will grow into more open and relatable people as the story progresses. This latter development doesn't take place and the book's purpose and ending suffer because of that lack.

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Authentic depiction of musicians left adrift in pre-ww2 Europe October 10, 2011

By JCY 500

Format:Audio CD

The following is a review of the book, nominated for the 2011 UK Man Booker Prize. I had to order the book from Amazon's UK site as it was not yet available in the US.

Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues is an authentic and moving depiction of a group of jazz musicians left in limbo in pre-WW2 Berlin and Paris. The author has obviously invested a great deal of time in researching the realities of being struggling jazz musicians at that time, as well as the argot unique to the musicians. Her dialog always seems spot on, never forced, never contrived. Unlike some novels set in the milieu of jazz, Ms. Edugyan never strives to appear cool, but instead creates characters with individuated, unique voices. I would also imagine that she has a healthy respect for the arduous process of creating meaningful music.

The novel is basically about a group of struggling musicians, German and American. None of them have achieved commercial success, but are well regarded within their world. One of them, Hieronymus - Hiero - is clearly a superior musician. They record some sides of various tunes they're working on, but none meet the satisfaction of Hiero, who insists that all the acetates be destroyed. Unbeknownst to him, the bass player, recognizing the quality of the recording, secretly withholds one of the records. It's not till many decades later that the recording is widely circulated, giving the remaining musicians a modicum of fame and respect from jazz cognocenti.

The novel is given resonance through its setting - the horrors of the Nazi years are just over the horizon. The novel gains gravitas through depicting the daily privations of the musicians through the prism of the encroaching Nazi dominance, both in Berlin and Paris. It also concerns itself with the unique status of Hiero, German born, and of African descent, as well as that of the pianist, Paul, a German Jew.

Superbly written, gripping, with the alluring, at times chilling, backdrop of the pre-war years, as well as a believable plot twist, Half-Blood Blues,like the best novels, seems too real to be imagined. Highly recommended.