The now octogenarian Griffiths and his drummer bandmate Chip Jones have been invited to a festival in the German city, newly liberated with the fall of the Berlin Wall, where a documentary film honouring the genius of Falk, now something of a cult hero among jazz musicians for making a record before his capture called “Half-Blood Blues” that took its melody, ironically enough, from a Nazi Party anthem, is set to unveil. Sid Griffiths – the bassist in Falk’s jazz band, the Hot-Time Swingers, and the novel’s narrator – is the only one with Falk at the time of his capture, an event that he would go through life not speaking much about.įlash forward to Berlin, 1992. It opens in Paris of June 1940, where the aforementioned brilliant jazz trumpeter, Hieronymus Falk, a German black man who is the product of an interracial marriage, is captured in a café without proper paperwork and is sent away to a concentration camp. Half-Blood Blues is a knotty novel with a generous heaping of plot. What Half-Blood Blues ultimately is, is a tale about betrayal and a love triangle, telling much of its story in flashbacks leading up to the Second World War and the days immediately following the invasion of Poland.
That story, though, isn’t told in Half-Blood Blues, making the novel feel like a bit of a squandered opportunity in some respects. So, with that bit of knowledge, you might be forgiven for thinking that Half-Blood Blues, essentially the story of a gifted 20-year-old black jazz musician who is captured by the Gestapo in 1940 in Paris and is never heard from again, would be a searing examination of what it might be like for someone non-Jewish to endure torture and humiliation at the hands of the Nazis. Homosexuals, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses and, as Esi Edugyan’s sophomore novel, Half-Blood Blues, notes, black people were all sent into the concentration camps. However, academics are apt to point out that it wasn’t just Jewish people who were affected, even though they were the group that Hitler overtly and punitively singled out.
When one thinks of the Holocaust, one tends to think of the plight of the six million Jewish people who perished in the Nazi death camps.
0 kommentar(er)
