Jazz breaking news: Man Booker Prize Nominee Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues Evokes The Spirit Of Jazz
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan is the most substantial work of fiction to incorporate successfully jazz within its pages since Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home and is, in many ways, a more ambitious work than Zabor's ursine novel which won the 1998 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in the US and deservedly so.
With some very well drawn characters Half Blood Blues, especially Chip, the diffident narrator Sid, Delilah, and above all Hiero, and a great grasp of jazz without an earnest devotion to the idea of it, the book isn’t self consciously a homage, although Edugyan has an affectionate but not, thankfully, a sentimental regard for the music as jazz musicians in war torn Europe flee the Nazis, seek refuge in their music and bypass racial prejudice and above all their fear for their own personal survival. Above all the book is a quest.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize this year Edugyan, who was unknown to most readers before the Booker announcement although it is her second novel following The Second Life Of Samuel Tyne in 2005, also uses a fictionalised Louis Armstrong as a force of good and the spirit of jazz as a model for the mood of toleration and humanity which is the book’s great strength.
– Stephen Graham
The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize will be announced on 18 October. The books on the shortlist in addition to Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan are The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes; Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch; The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt; Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman and Snowdrops by A.D. Miller