If it requires a major suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader-and if it doesn’t quite fully live up to all the trans-Atlantic hype surrounding it- Half-Blood Blues still emerges as substantive and entertaining.
and has garnered a host of positive reviews since its recent publication in the U.S. It made the short list for the Man Booker Prize as well as the Orange Prize in the U.K. The book proved to be a major success in the author’s native Canada, where it won the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2011 and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. That said, the rendition of their German-language conversations (Hiero doesn’t know English) in this same spontaneous and idiomatic style stretches credulity a bit. Her characters speak a jazz-influenced Baltimore argot particularly well-suited to repartee and the coining of aphorisms. This is largely true-though the commendations for her prose should be qualified.
If that ain’t a ghost story, I never heard one.”Įdugyan’s second novel (her first was The Second Life of Samuel Tyne) has been heralded by many as original both in subject matter and prose. “A bunch of German and American kids meeting up in Berlin and Paris between the wars to make all this wild, joyful music before the Nazis kick it to pieces? And the legend survives when a lone tin box is dug out of a damn wall in a flat once belonged to a Nazi? Man. Half-Blood Blues gives us an improbable but gripping tale, narrated by bassist Sid Griffiths of the Hot-Time Swingers, a German and African-American jazz band in Nazi Germany and later in France. How not, with central character Hiero (Hieronymus) Falk delivering “note after shimmering note, like sunshine sliding all over the surface of a lake,” and with the great Louis Armstrong, “who could make his glissandi snap like marbles, the high Cs piercing,” joining him in an impromptu jam session? For readers unfamiliar with jazz or unimpressed by it, the explosion of color, verve, imagery and verbal idiosyncrasy in the book will in and of itself quicken the heartbeat and warm the insides. In Esi Edugyan’s novel Half-Blood Blues, the narrator’s inventive and free-flowing descriptions of jazz mimic the music itself.
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