Womanly Virtues Friday
If you don't live in Canada you've never heard of the Giller prize. Be thankful for that. Suffice to say, it's yet another literary prize designed to fool people into reading books they wouldn't otherwise ever want to read.
This year's winner is Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. Edugyan is a Canadian and her parents are from Ghana. Here is the Amazon blurb for it:
Leonard Cohen once joked that his exposure to the communist songbook at the red-diaper baby summer camps in the Laurentians his parents sent him to left him with the curious notion that the war had been won by song. It's not just him. Gunter Grass and Michale Ondaatje have similar delusions.
This desperate and pathetic need to believe that the cultural life was central during the war is an ugly phenomenon. The very existence of our culture, of any culture, depends absolutely on the willingness of some men to be soldiers. It is their willingness to fight and perhaps die to preserve our way of life that makes it possible. Books like Half-Blood Blues are just a desperate attempt to live in denial of this.
Male soldiers aren't sufficient to have civilization but they are absolutely necessary to it and any woman or man of virtue will recognize this.
If you don't live in Canada you've never heard of the Giller prize. Be thankful for that. Suffice to say, it's yet another literary prize designed to fool people into reading books they wouldn't otherwise ever want to read.
This year's winner is Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. Edugyan is a Canadian and her parents are from Ghana. Here is the Amazon blurb for it:
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.What I'd suggest that this book is anti-realist. Without being naive realists, I think we safely say that this sort of writing and the people who like are driven by a powerful need to prefer fantasy to reality. And I'd further say that this need is driven by a desire to validate a series of moral beliefs that are not sustainable.
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.
Leonard Cohen once joked that his exposure to the communist songbook at the red-diaper baby summer camps in the Laurentians his parents sent him to left him with the curious notion that the war had been won by song. It's not just him. Gunter Grass and Michale Ondaatje have similar delusions.
This desperate and pathetic need to believe that the cultural life was central during the war is an ugly phenomenon. The very existence of our culture, of any culture, depends absolutely on the willingness of some men to be soldiers. It is their willingness to fight and perhaps die to preserve our way of life that makes it possible. Books like Half-Blood Blues are just a desperate attempt to live in denial of this.
Male soldiers aren't sufficient to have civilization but they are absolutely necessary to it and any woman or man of virtue will recognize this.
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