Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

This novel has been on a shelf since August 2012 and was recommended by my friends at Fanfare Books, Stratford, Ontario, Canada.  It was a finalist for several awards including the prestigious Man Booker Prize and was awarded the Scotia Bank Giller Prize for 2011.  Earlier reviews mention the beauty of the language and compare Edugyan’s use of dialect to the talents of Mark Twain. This year it is one of the novels chosen for Canada Reads, and that is why it finally got the reading it deserved.   Esi Edugyan has created a masterful tale bringing to light the world of Jazz in Europe during the horror of the Hitler years.

            From the liner notes: “Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.  Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time…”  Passions fill this story: for Jazz, for life, for love, for success, but it is the realness of the characters that stands out for me.  Hiero, Sid, Chip, Pau, Ernst, and Delilah are real – REAL.  The friendships in this novel demonstrate love and betrayal.  The reader’s loyalties are tried along with the loyalties of the characters.  Along the way the reader is immersed in the experience of living in Berlin and Paris during the beginnings of World War II.

            Hiero is a black German unable to get papers in Hitler’s Germany, while Sid and Chip, originally from Baltimore, have been friends since childhood.  And the novel is not just about being black in Germany, “Cause blacks just wasn’t no kind of priority back in those years.  I guess there just wasn’t enough of us” (77).  But the friendships are uneasy in this novel and music, talent, and the love for one woman, Delilah, cause conflicts and jealousies.  Introduced into this world is Louis Armstrong, and his interest in this group of Germany based jazz musicians becomes an integral part of the controversy.  The recording of a song entitled “Half-Blood Blues” becomes an obsession for Hiero, and disc after disc is destroyed until Sid slips one in his vest: “…and it was like I could feel the damn disc just sitting in there, still warm.  I felt its presence so intensely it seemed strange the others ain’t sensed it too.  Its wax holding all that heat like an altar candle” (5).

            To say much more would give away too many moments I do not want to deny to anyone who chooses to read this book.  Just one teaser without spoiling anything, the trip to the zoo in Hamburg gave me a picture of life in Germany, not a result of Hitler but predating his power, a picture I wish I could erase from my mind’s eye.  Read it.

Edugyan, Esi. Half-Blood Blues. Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2011. Print.