Half-Blood Blues - Softcover

Edugyan, Esi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250012708 ISBN 13: 9781250012708

Verlag: Picador, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

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. Esi Edugyan's 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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Esi Edugyan has a Masters in Writing from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best New American Voices 2003, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (2006).

Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was published internationally. It was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a More Book Lust selection, and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of 2004's Books to Remember. Her novel Half-Blood Blues won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

Edugyan has held fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain and Belgium. She has taught creative writing at both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria.

She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

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Half-Blood Blues

A NovelBy Esi Edugyan

Picador

Copyright © 2012 Esi Edugyan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781250012708

Half-Blood Blues

I

Paris 1940

Chip told us not to go out. Said, don't you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you, all of us still reeling from the rot--rot was cheap, see, the drink of French peasants, but it stayed like nails in you gut. Didn't even look right, all mossy and black in the bottle. Like drinking swamp water.

See, we lay exhausted in the flat, sheets nailed over the windows. The sunrise so fierce it seeped through the gaps, dropped like cloth on our skin. Couple hours before, we was playing in some back-alley studio, trying to cut a record. A grim little room, more like a closet of ghosts than any joint for music, the cracked heaters lisping steam, empty bottles rolling all over the warped floor. Our cigarettes glowed like small holes in the dark, and that's how I known we wasn't buzzing, Hiero's smoke not moving or nothing. The cig just sitting there in his mouth like he couldn't hear his way clear. Everyone pacing about, listening between takes to the scrabble of rats in the wall. Restless as hell. Could be we wasn't so rotten, but I at least felt off. Too nervous, too crazed, too busy watching the door. Forget the rot. Forget the studio's seclusion. Nothingtore me out of myself. Take after take, I'd play sweating to the end of it only to have Hiero scratch the damn disc, tossing it in the trash.

"Just a damn braid of mistakes," Hiero kept muttering. "A damn braid of mistakes."

"We sound like royalty--after the mob got done with em," said Chip.

Coleman and I ain't said nothing, our heads hanging tiredly.

But Hiero, wiping his horn with a blacked-up handkerchief, he turn and give Chip a look of pure spite. "Yeah, but, hell. Even at our worst we genius."

Did that ever stun me, him saying this. For weeks the kid been going on and on about how dreadful we sound. He kept snatching up the discs, scratching the lacquer with a pocket knife, wrecking them. Yelling how there wasn't nothing there. But there was something. Some seed of twisted beauty.

I didn't mean to. But somehow when the kid turned his back I was sliding off my vest, taking the last disc--still delicate, the grooves still new--and folding the fabric round it. I glanced around, nervous, then tucked it into my bass case. The others was packing up their axes.

"Where's that last record at?" said Hiero, frowning. He peered at the trash bin, at the damaged discs all in there.

"It's in there, buck," I said. "You didn't want it, did you?"

He give me a sour look. "Ain't no damn point. We ain't never goin get this right."

"What you sayin, kid?" said Chip, slurring his words. "You sayin we should give it up?"

The kid just shrugged.

We lined up the empty bottles along the wall, locked up real quiet, gone our separate routes back to Delilah's flat. Curfew was on and Paris was grim, all clotted shadows and stale air. I made my quiet way along the alleys, dreading the sound of footsteps, till we met up again at the flat. Everyone butColeman, of course, Coleman who was staying with his lady. We collapsed onto dirty couches under blackout curtains.

I'd set my axe against the wall 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 a altar candle.

 

 

It was the four of us living here. Delilah, Hieronymus, Chip and me. Couple months before we'd spent the day nailing black sheets across the flat's windows, but damn if that grim sun didn't flood through anyway. The rooms felt too stale to sober up in. We needed to sweat it out in the fresh air, get our heads about us. Ain't been no breeze in weeks.

Hiero was draped in his chair, his scrawny legs dangling, when all a sudden he turn to me. His face dark and smooth as an eggplant. "Christ I feel green. My guts are pure gravy, man."

"Amen," I said.

"Man, I got to get me some milk."

"Amen," I said again.

We talked like mongrels, see--half German, half Baltimore bar slang. Just a few scraps of French between us. Only real language I spoke aside from English was Hochdeutsch. But once I started messing up the words I couldn't straighten nothing out again. Besides, I known Hiero preferred it this way. Kid hailed from the Rhineland, sure, but he got old Baltimore in the blood. Or talked like he did.

He was still young that way. Mimicking.

Something had changed in him lately, though. He ain't hardly et nothing since the Boots descended on the city, been laid up feverish and slack for days on end. And when he come to, there was this new darkness in him I ain't never seen before.

I gave my old axe a quick glance, thinking of the record tucked away in there. It wasn't guilt I felt. Not that exactly.

Hiero sort of half rolled onto the patchy rug. "Aw, Sid," he groaned. "I need milk."

"In the cupboard, I reckon. We got milk? Chip?"

But Chip, he just open one brown eye like a man half-drowned. His face dark as cinder in this light.

Hiero coughed. "I'm tryin to clean my stomach, not rough it up." His left eye twitched all high up in the lid, the way you sometimes see the heart of a thin woman beating through her blouse. "It's milk I need, brother. Cream. That powdered stuff'll rip right through you. Like you shittin sand. Like you a damn hourglass."

"Aw, it ain't that bad," I said. "Ain't nothin open at this hour anyway, kid. You know that. Except maybe the Coup. But that's too damn far." We lay on in silence a minute. I tossed my arm up over my mouth and man if my skin didn't stink of rancid vinegar--that was the rot, it did that to you.

In the bad light I could just make out the room's last few chairs huddled by the fireplace. They looked absurd, like a flock of geese hiding from the hatchet. Cause they was the last of it, see. This been a grand old flat once, to go by Lilah's stories. All Louis XIV chairs, Murano chandeliers, Aubusson tapestries, ceilings high as a damn train station. But the count who lent Delilah the place, he done urge her sell what she could before the Krauts come in. Seemed less bleak to him. And now, the flat being so empty, you felt only its depths, like you stranded at sea. Whole place nothing but darkness.

Across the room, Chip started snoring, faint like.

I glanced over at Hiero, now all knotted up in his chair. "Kid," I said thickly. "Hey, kid." I put a hand to my head. "You ain't serious bout givin up on the record. We close, buck. You know that."

Hiero opened his mouth, belched.

"Good mornin right back at you," I said.

He didn't seem to have heard me. I watched him heave hisself up on his feet, the chair moaning like a old mule. Then he sort of staggered on over to the door. Least I reckon that was his idea. Looked more like he heading for the fireplace, stumbling all about. His shoulder smacked a wall.

Then he was on the floor, on all fours.

"What you doin?" I said. "Hiero, what you doin, kid?"

"What you mean, what my doin? You ain't never seen a man put on his shoes before? Well, stick around, cause it's bout to get excitin. I'm gonna put my damn...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250012708
• ISBN 13: 9781250012708
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 333
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