Winner of the Giller Prize
The remarkable story in this book is told in a voice most of us have never heard before. It is the voice of an old, black jazz musician from Baltimore recalling in his own unique dialect the precarious life he lived with other black musicians, first fleeing the Nazis from pre-War Germany to wartime France, and finally escaping to America.
A weird feeling rose up in me. Last I seen Unter den Linden, they torn out all them linden trees that gave the boulevard its name, tossed up white columns in their place, sanded the pavement so their damn jackboots wouldn’t slip.
"This ain’t our Berlin, Sid," said Chip.
I nodded. "It’s lost something I bet ain’t nobody even remember what it was."
"Except us, brother. Except you and me."
I took a very short survey of my friends who read this book. One of them, a Canadian, thought it was the best book he had ever read, and this was because of the reality of that voice. Another reader, an American, found the voice annoying, and felt the book was patronizing, or worse, even an insult. However you feel about this book is how you respond to the voice of the narrator.
