Though Germany is increasingly dangerous for their kind they feel little compulsion to leave.Īnd then they meet Delilah. Their outfit includes black and mixed-race Americans from the South, a German Jew passing as Aryan, a connected son of an aristocratic German, not to mention black German Hiero. She takes us back to Berlin, around the beginning of the war, and immerses us in the world Sid, Chip and Hiero inhabit. We are compelled to continue and try and connect these dots Sid, Hiero, this woman, the arrest and the letter. There Sid watches as Chip, on screen, says in an interview, that he blames Sid for Hiero’s arrest by the Gestapo, that he could have prevented it and that he did it over a woman.Īuthor Esi Edugyan now has us well and truly caught in her web Now, I do not normally think in terms of an author having ‘a contract’ with the reader as some do, but at this stage I was thinking, no matter what happens, I’m seeing this through to the end.īut before Sid and Chip can make their trip to Poland they attend the premier.

Hiero, he believes, is alive and living in Poland!Īll this takes place within the first 40 pages. On the eve of their departure for Berlin he tells Sid that he has received a mysterious letter. Sid on the other hand, bass player and the novel’s narrator, was not considered particularly talented and has largely lived a quiet life since the war.īut Chip has news for Sid. Chip, the drummer in the band, benefited most from being rediscovered with Hiero in the 60’s and spent most of the years since touring and fighting a heroin habit. A documentary has been made on the pre-war German Jazz scene with particular emphasis on Hiero.Īttending the premiere are two of Hiero’s former band mates – Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones.

The wall has come down and a new, unified Germany is ready to celebrate its more diverse past. With the right kind of death, a man can live forever Hiero is afforded the legendary status of any dead-before-their-time genius. Naturally this only fuels speculation and theories. The official story is that he was transferred to a labour camp and died not long after the war ended. The recordings become a hit, with Hiero posthumously declared a genius.Īs for Hiero, no one knows what became of him.

The house’s war-time occupant was a Nazi and apparently a secret Jazz enthusiast. In the early 60’s, a set of recordings dating from the war are discovered hidden in the wall of a house in Vichy. Though a German citizen, he is black, without papers and one night he is arrested by the Gestapo and never seen again. Hieronymous ‘Hiero’ Falk plays trumpet in a jazz band in occupied Paris. But it is the intrigue of the story that will delight readers. Friendship and betrayal lie at the heart of Esi Edugyan’s acclaimed novel following Jazz musicians in wartime Berlin and Paris.

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