{"id":234,"date":"2011-05-19T10:26:04","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T10:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/?page_id=234"},"modified":"2012-02-06T22:07:21","modified_gmt":"2012-02-06T22:07:21","slug":"amanda-tripp","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/writings\/reviews\/amanda-tripp","title":{"rendered":"Amanda Tripp"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fiction Reviews<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Half-Blood Blues<\/em><\/h1>\n
by Esi Edugyan
\nToronto: Thomas Allen, 2011
\n311 pp., $24.95<\/h6>\n

There are so many wonderful things to say about Esi Edugyan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s second novel, which is also a recent Giller prizewinner. Half-Blood Blues is the story of jazz bassist, Sidney Griffiths\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 experiences of Berlin and Paris as World War II begins to devour Europe. He relates this story over 50 years later, as he makes an uncertain return overseas to face the events and friends he left behind when he finally escaped an abandoned Paris to return to his hometown, Baltimore. Amid the chaos of impending war and the brutal realities facing black foreigners and residents in both Germany and France, Griffiths and his band mates find the last slices of survival (such as it is) by delving deep inside their forced dependencies on each other, and on their music.<\/p>\n

Edugyan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s masterful storytelling brings to life the painful intricacies of trying to eke out a living in a city on the verge of war, and in so doing Half-Blood Blues becomes a vibrant study of vulnerability and betrayal, of the many sharp and bony angles of love. Though interested in these painful sides of love, the reading experience itself is entirely loving; Edugyan fills every available space with the powerful life around her characters, keeping us in the world when the world is the place to be, and granting us reprieve inside of Griffiths\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 mind when the fictional world becomes all too silent. As readers we are never left alone, and in some ways, Edugyan enacts an extra kindness by therefore almost never leaving her characters entirely alone. If we yearn for more out of every scene and every encounter, it is only because the writing is so rich and beautifully done and not because Edugyan denies the reader. Make no mistake: the world Griffiths explores is a hard one, and he is himself hard, and sometimes difficult to love \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as we all sometimes are.\u00c2\u00a0 And Edugyan by no means shies away from the difficulty around these lives. It is a credit to her mastery that the trials and hard times which the reader would otherwise look away from take on a quality of depth that seems to command our compassionate attention. Half-Blood Blues, then, is a worthy reading experience as much as it is an important period piece \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not only just for its historical significance \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that has not yet been reenacted till now.<\/p>\n

The narrative moves almost seamlessly from the past to the present, with the occasional disorienting surfacing in new places, in new relations, without explicit indication. Rather than seeming accidental though, these moments of disorientation mimic the uncertainty and upheaval the characters experience each time they step out onto the city\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s streets, wondering which of their inherited, cultural or social characteristics makes them the enemy today. Though the rather familiar sound of jazz emanates from the fiber of this book, its historical setting might be exclusionary for the present-day reader. Nevertheless, that possible alienation is arrested by an evocative narrative, which breathes life into a world that, though distant, becomes inclusive for the uninitiated. Edugyan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s control is so gentle and natural that the language of Half-Blood Blues slips around the reader like a lover, as if the story is whispered into your ear. Some scenes though are so vibrantly wrought that they explode from an aural world into a visual one. So, while you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to know jazz to feel like Half-Blood Blues is speaking to you, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure that those with more musical ears than I do get some extra pleasure out of Esugyan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s textured writing.<\/p>\n

In short, this is a novel for everyone. Half Blood Blues is a work that deserves attention, and the reading of which everyone will thank himself or herself for experiencing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mongrel <\/em><\/h1>\n
by Marko Sijian
\nToronto: Mansfield Press, 2011
\n197 pp. $19.95<\/h6>\n

Sera is on the way across the Canadian-American border to reunite with a man she can feel in her soul. Earlier the same week, under a water-pumping station, Gus is sure he is about to lose his virginity to her. That night Sophie will try to take her own life. Across town, Milan will witness his father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rebirth, only to watch him disappear. Shortly after this, Gunther, the quarterback, celebrates a meaningless victory by losing everything. Their stories are intricately and sometimes grotesquely intertwined, connected by the tenuous interdependencies that thread adolescence together. This connection only increases each story\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brutality, and each character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s vulnerability; as supports are erected, torn down, and reconfigured, we can only hope for them that they will make it through the next day.<\/p>\n

Marko Sijan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s breakout novel is set against dreary Windsor, Ontario, in the summer of 2009. Over the course of a few days, five teenagers hurtle through these momentous experiences, though the real pleasure (and, it has to be said, some of the horror) of Mongrel is in Sijian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fiercely accurate depiction of the intense mundaneness of teenage life. The novel is not afraid of the reality of racism and ignorance, and it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t pretend that anything will ever be okay. Sijan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s narrative is by no means void of compassion, though there is little kindness in the characters\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 lives, or at least, in their perceptions of their own lives. This would make for a challenging reading experience, and even though there are some moments where I wanted to almost physically pull away, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something magnetic about how common these otherwise very specific experiences actually feel. Sijan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s real victory here is in stripping his characters of so much, deconstructing their dreams, to leave something raw and infinitely more real underneath.<\/p>\n

Maybe this pursuit of the real awful flesh of adolescent experience, cowering beneath the cliches of self-realization so common in stories about teenagers, explains the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s insistence on the physicality of adolescence. Sijan wields sexuality like a battering ram in Mongrel, wearing down any gentleness and sentiment to mere physicality and excretion. Each chapter takes the reader inside the mind\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s voice of a different character, but interestingly, never so that we can experience different sides of one same situation or moment. Though we get to be inside them all, understanding them, for this brief time, like no one else seems to understand them, this privileged position isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t used to build any bridges between them: love and friendship are dismembered as systematically as love is, and we outsiders on in the inside are too helpless to put anything back together for them. This impotence is strangely unifying after the fact – we are as useless in improving their lives as they are they unable to foresee what lies ahead for them, and certainly, what lies in them, though both are things that the adult reader might have a slightly more optimistic sense of.<\/p>\n

Mongrel is a clamouring of voices. It is a geography of cruelty and cultural oppressions. Sijian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s characters have the rare quality of being almost too human, but are also successfully allegorical. The novel sometimes feels like an assault of moments that are all too familiar, and of crises my own interior teenaged self doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think it could have survived, but there is something so honest about the characters and their situations (even when they feel foreign to personal experience) that it would feel like a betrayal to deny them and the social realities they face every day.<\/p>\n

Sijan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writing is sharp and accurate, and sometimes profoundly comic in the darkest ways. This first novel is a serious achievement, and its seriousness shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be discounted because of its narrators\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 range of wisdom. Instead this is exactly why it should be taken so seriously \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as a rare and importantly sincere portrait of the emotional and psychological dangers of adolescence \u00e2\u20ac\u201c at a time when the media tries to address the urgency of real-life adolescent crises without being brave enough to explore these realities in the representations provided to teenagers. For these reasons, despite having struggled through parts of Mongrel, I have not stopped thinking about it since and suspect it will stay with me for quite some time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fiction Reviews Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2011 311 pp., $24.95 There are so many wonderful things to say about Esi Edugyan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s second novel, which is also a recent Giller prizewinner. Half-Blood Blues is the story of jazz bassist, Sidney Griffiths\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 experiences of Berlin and Paris as World War II begins to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":77,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-234","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":937,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234\/revisions\/937"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}