Start the New Year with a great read! Half-blood Blues (F E242h) by Canadian author Esi Edugyan is a compelling novel and winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Set in Paris, Berlinand Baltimore, and interweaving two time periods, 1939 and 1992, Half-blood Blues relates the black experience in Nazi Germany and occupied France.
In 1939 Berlin, Sid Griffiths, who narrates the story in a jazzy black vernacular, and his friend Chip Jones, both African Americans, are members of a popular jazz band, the Hot Time Swingers. The band also includes a Jewish piano player and a brilliant young trumpeter, Hieronymous “Hiero” Falk. Hiero, the son of a French African soldier and a white German mother, is part of a particularly hated racial group in Germany. With the growing Nazi threat, all the members of this interracial band, but especially Hiero, are in danger, exacerbated by the fact that the Nazis identify jazz as the degenerate music of blacks and Jews. After the Nazis deport their Jewish piano player, Sid, Chip and Hiero flee to Paris, where they believe they will be safe.
Stranded in Paris during the months leading up to German occupation, they record a song Hiero calls “Half-blood blues.” Eventually Hiero is arrested and the others escape.
I loved the very vivid atmosphere and rich dialogue created by Edugyan in this powerful and original story. A sense of dark foreboding and dread is palpable throughout the novel and keeps you on edge as the story unfolds. The world inhabited by these jazz musicians is both dangerous and exciting and takes many twists and turns. The vibrant tones of their music and their conversations are in stark contrast to the impending doom all around them. While I didn’t always understand the motivations of the characters, I did think that they were believable as they struggled to survive in dire circumstances.
The second part of the narrative set in 1992 follows Sid and Chip as they journey back to Europe where Chip publicly accuses Sid of complicity in Hiero’s arrest all those years ago.
This is a story not only about war and its horrors, but also about the power of human emotions and the resilience of the human spirit.
Posted by Audrey, Reference Librarian
