But to Griffiths, she's also "sweet like lemon in a wound." Seeing how Brown looks at Falk, Griffiths laments, "Is that what genius does - entitles a gate to claim whatever pieces of others' lives he wants?" Both Falk and Brown might be described as "half-bloods," and Griffiths wonders which one the song title might apply to.Įdugyan gives the jazzmen a convincing argot: fellow musicians are gates, the Nazis are Boots, men and women are jacks and janes Griffiths' speech is a convincing element of the author's world building in the novel.
"She the most stunning and original thing I ever known," Griffiths says. Griffiths also resents the attention the young trumpeter receives from Delilah Brown, the singer- turned-agent who promises to connect them with Louis Armstrong in Paris. "It ain't fair that I struggle and struggle to sound just second-rate, and the damn kid just wake up, spit through his horn, and it sing like nightingales." Narrator Griffiths, the "least famous of the band," both realizes and resents Falk's extraordinary talent. The next year they cut a transcendent track, "Half-Blood Blues," in Paris before the Nazis whisk the visa-less Falk away. In 1939, Griffiths and his childhood friend, drummer Chip Jones, connect with a teenage trumpet prodigy, the black German Hieronymous Thomas Falk. Edugyan's story shifts between those interwar years of excitement and danger, and a surprising reunion of old men in 1992. 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," says American bassist Sid Griffiths, light-skinned enough to pass for white.
Edugyan's impressive story has truly earned its multiple major-prize nominations, including the Giller Prize for Canada's top novel in English. And it does so in Nazi-dominated Germany and France, where a black man's death could meet him any day on the street. It pokes into the dark corners of love, too, fraternal and romantic.
In its tale of squabbling jazz musicians at the onset of World War II, Canadian writer Esi Edugyan's novel "Half-Blood Blues" probes difficult, eternal questions about art and genius: "Do you still call it talent, if it blooms without any kind of nurturing?"
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