{"id":17843,"date":"2011-11-11T06:01:33","date_gmt":"2011-11-11T06:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=17843"},"modified":"2015-10-25T20:04:32","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T20:04:32","slug":"review-giller-winner-recounts-struggles-of-mixed-race-jazz-musicians-in-prewar-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=17843","title":{"rendered":"Review: Giller winner recounts struggles of mixed-race jazz musicians in prewar Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review: Giller winner recounts struggles of mixed-race jazz musicians in prewar Europe<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ottowa Citizen<\/a>
\n2011-11-09<\/p>\n

Julian Gunn<\/strong><\/p>\n

Half-Blood Blues <\/em>By Esi Edugyan, Thomas Allen, 2011.<\/p>\n

I remember waiting for a bus and listening to a literary podcast when I heard that Victoria, B.C. author Esi Edugyan\u2019s<\/a> second novel, Half-Blood Blues<\/a><\/em>, had made the Man Booker Prize long list. The book had already received strong support: Lawrence Hill, Austin Clarke and other literary figures wrote glowing responses.<\/p>\n

The book was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker but lost out to Julian Barnes. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General\u2019s Award for Fiction and the Writers\u2019 Trust Award. And it won the Giller Prize this week.<\/p>\n

Half-Blood Blues<\/em> binds together disparate human behaviour \u2014 celebration, community and violence \u2014 in telling the story of a band of jazz musicians struggling to exist in Berlin on the cusp of the Second World War.<\/p>\n

American and German, dark-and light-skinned, gentile and Jewish, the members map complex racial and national identities. The musicians aren\u2019t targets only because of their skin colour or religious identity; they\u2019re also playing \u201cdegenerate\u201d music, according to the SS. That\u2019s a double whammy…<\/p>\n

…Hiero is Hieronymus Thomas Falk, a German citizen with a Rhinelander mother and an African father whose precise story shimmers elusively in the history of colonialism and war. \u201cHe was a Mischling,\u201d Sid explains, \u201ca half-breed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sid himself is \u201cstraight-haired and green-eyed\u201d and light-skinned enough to pass<\/a>, but ambiguously: \u201ca right little Spaniard,\u201d he says wryly. Though he\u2019s a foreigner, he\u2019s often safer than his friend in Hiero\u2019s own country. Hiero, Delilah and Sid move through a shifting triangular relationship where music plays as important a role as love….<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review: Giller winner recounts struggles of mixed-race jazz musicians in prewar Europe Ottowa Citizen 2011-11-09 Julian Gunn Half-Blood Blues By Esi Edugyan, Thomas Allen, 2011. I remember waiting for a bus and listening to a literary podcast when I heard that Victoria, B.C. author Esi Edugyan\u2019s second novel, Half-Blood Blues, had made the Man Booker […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,19,8],"tags":[8209,8212,8211],"class_list":["post-17843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-canada","category-media-archive","tag-esi-edugyan","tag-julian-gunn","tag-ottowa-citizen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17843"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43463,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17843\/revisions\/43463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}