Paris, 1940. A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again. He is twenty years old. He is a German citizen. And he is black. 
Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero’s fate. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris – where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance – Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance. 

The second I started reading this book, I was intrigued. Gordon “Rank” Rankin is shocked and hurt to find out that his college roommate, Adam, has used the life hurdles Rank has had to overcome to create a novel. After discovering that the friend he confided in has violated his past, he decides to write him a series of emails explaining his disappointment and anger, but more importantly to set the record straight and explain to Adam that he got the story all wrong. These emails to Adam are the basis of the novel. We travel back with Rank to a time when his world was turned upside down after his Mother had passed and he was left with his crazy Father, Gord.

Rank is a big man and his statue immediately intimidates others and ultimately it’s what continued to get him into trouble with the law. We’re first introduced to Rank at the age of 40 and for the past 20 years he has been attempting to escape the mistakes he once created. Now that Adam has exposed his misgivings, Rank is automatically thrown right back into the past he’s trying to escape.

The whole idea of this little project, you’ll recall, was to ferret out the truth. To take your bullshit version of me, flush it like the steaming turd of half-truths and oversights it was, and replace it with the glorious, terrible, complex, astonishing truth of Reality.

As Rank states, the emails become a project and it’s a journey for both Rank and the reader. Like Lynn Coady’s past entrancing novels, you’ll be whisked into a story that leaves you feeling every ounce of pain Rank’s ever experienced and you’ll want to point the finger at Adam for ever stealing a life story that was never his to tell.

My thanks to Trish from House of Anansi for hooking me up with this fabulous novel.

Having now read the book and let it resonate with me for almost a month, I concur that this is a very special piece of literature. Some reasons why:

• It resists categorization. You could call it a coming-of-age tale, I suppose; it is that, and more.
• All the characters, including, from the first paragraph, the land, are integral elements of the story, and they are allowed to have full personalities, to change, and to grow. Though the characters occasionally judge each other, the author never seems to judge any of them. True, we never get to find out what drives certain bit-part assholes, but the way that the other characters’ lives move on without and despite these would-be villains is a joy on its own.
• There is nothing sensationalist in this book. The issue of sexual identity, so fascinating in its own right, and such ready fodder for tabloid gossip, is experienced so vividly in context of the full lives of real people, that it becomes rather a mirror on which anyone can project one’s own identity issues.  Surely we all have things we don’t know how to discuss with others, things that keep us from “fitting in” (as much as anyone could ever “fit in” to a changing world in any way other than by living one’s own truth – this was one of the points the novel strongly illuminated for me).  Certainly all the main characters here have their own such issues.
• It contains abundant passages of breathtaking beauty. Treadway’s conversations with the birds (and Treadway’s character as a whole) were some of my favourites.

When I closed the book I found myself longing to know more about everyone inside it… a sequel? A prequel? A spin-off or two or three? …and then I accepted ruefully that the story as it had been told was complete. The final movement of the novel took me smack-dab into the Now, into this moment of awkward beauty, pain and completeness.

And I am grateful.

♥