Cliffords Blues by John A. Williams

Cliffords Blues Reviews

• 
  Charles

  The best hard reading I have ever done
  
  I have a degree in history and consider myself fairly knowledgeable about World War II and Holocaust, but Clifford's Blues was the most difficult account-- fictional or otherwise-- that I have ever read. It took me more than a year to finish because ever so often I would encounter a "diary" entry that was just too depressing. That in itself is a testament to the author's writing skills. And like many classic works on the subject, Clifford's Blues is a testament to the ability of some people to survive in the most horrific conditions. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in the war, etc., but it would help for the reader to have some knowledge beforehand.
• 
  Mandy

  Clifford's Blues is the story of a gay "American Negro" jazz musician named Clifford Pepperidge who gets sent to the concentration camp Dachau while living in Germany. The novel follows Clifford through diary entries made over May 1933 to April 1945.
  
  Clifford's Blues is an incredible book and important piece of history too easily forgotten. Although it was long and hard to get through at times, what I enjoyed most about the novel was that it was not just a Holocaust narrative with a black person dropped into any other story-line, Clifford's identity as a gay black man colors every part of his life at Dachau. Issues of race, sex, religion, and violence are on every page, and the parallels drawn between what happened in Germany in World War II to the climate in America around the same time are especially powerful.
  
  At times it could be frustrating that Clifford watched so much horror as something of an outsider, but the reality of the situation is that in any other case, he would've died much sooner. I hate that we don't get to know what happens to him in the end, and I didn't feel that the first and last entries tying the piece to the 1980's did much for the plot of the novel or even to tie up loose ends, though it did drive home the point that the stories of black people in concentration camps are not often heard and cannot be discounted. The growing relationship between Clifford, Dieter Lange, and Anna was revolting and horrific and yet seeing how it unfolded over the many years of the war was a compelling side story to both get out of the death and evil of the camp, but also as a way of fitting many other pieces together to unravel the truth of the war as they knew it.
  
  I am so shocked that this book does not get more recognition for being so unlike anything else I've read, but also so massively important and a heartbreaking, unimaginable story all at once.
• 
  Thomas

  3.5
• 
  Gregory Duke

  So so so boring for a novel about a black gay American man at Dachau for the entirety of the World War II crisis that he faces as a piano player and singer in Berlin at the wrong time. There are periodic heavy-hitting lines, and the characterization of the major figures is strong and complex and all that, but, damn, does this provide further evidence of how hard it is to make original Holocaust narratives after all this time.
• 
  Peggy

  Clifford's Blues is a brilliant novel about Clifford Pepperidge, a black, gay jazz musician arrested in 1933 when caught in flagrante delicto in Berlin with a white member of the U.S. State Department. His lover escapes, protected by his position and race; Clifford is sent to Dachau. What follows is Clifford's testimony in diary form about living as an enslaved personal servant to an S.S. officer, Dieter Lange. Clifford isn't sure how he was selected for this prestigious position. It's either his jazz chops or his sexuality. He's ordered to form a band with fellow prisoners. They play weekly at parties for the camp's S.S. and S.A. officers. It's a horrifying situation and it took me weeks to get through the first half of the book.
  
  What kept me reading was the way Clifford heard music. John A. Williams is an exceptional writer--poetic and jazzy sometimes, other times as objective as a documentarian. He is as much a master of the sentence as Clifford is a master at bending the notes of a piano. The writing style on any given page reflects exactly what the book's content demands at that moment. His transitions are so smooth that I barely noticed the shifts. Instead, I found myself looking up now and then at the end of sensational paragraphs, wondering how I got there, how I had entered in so deeply, floating in a sea of associations from someone else's brain.
  
  Clifford is a musician above all, and it saves him, makes him good at sizing up people. Musicians anticipate what's happening between the lines, in the white space. They count, and know when the count's off. You can trust Clifford. He knows who is getting more than their share, who's not going to make it. Though if they live at all and if they are Clifford's friend, they survive. At Dachau, survival isn't restricted to the living. They live inside Clifford's diary.
  
  It breaks my heart that these people Clifford knows--I mean his friends, those who help him, those he helps--exist in this piece of literature. The kind of suffering that they were forced to endure. What happened to them. Because literature is always based on the truth of the human condition. And this is its truth. Is it always? Or just sometimes? Could there be a sometimes not?
  
  This novel is sweeping in theme and character, in the depth of its moral and social evidence. It deserves to be lauded, lifted up, and read by as many people as can bear it. My thanks to Ishmael Reed, whose essay "On Tokens and Tokenism," introduced me and, I hope, many others, to the author John A. Williams.
• 
  Cody

  Absolutely fucking astounding. Painful, yes. Beautiful in its own way? Completely. A fiction of a reality rarely talked about concerning the composition of concentration camp prisoners, ‘composition’ denoting any of several qualifiers. Of course the Jewish population is ably represented, but how often does one confront the mass numbers of homosexual, ‘antisocials,’ Reds, Gypsies, petty criminals, children, physically/mentally handicapped, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholic priests, and, yes, Blacks imprisoned, tortured, and erased from this planet during the twelve-fucking-years camps existed? Or consider the companies still flourishing that were bedfellows with the Nazis? Lest we forget the goddamn Évian Conference. Good job, America/UK/Sweden/France/Norway/Mexico/Canada/Argentina/Peru/Australia/Ireland/Switzerland/Argentina and at least a half dozen others. Is that paint on your hands?
  
  Read this. Goddamn.
• 
  Diego Palomino

  Wow! Beautiful book, I am very impressed by this writer. I was attracted to this book because it is set in a concentration camp and the main character is an African American musician. Now I am very interested in WWII history and have seen films and read about the Holocaust and the impact on Jewish population it had never had the chance to see the impact on other ethnicities. Well this book places the reader as a witness on life in a concentration camp and also in the lives of the administrators. Apart from the descriptions of everyday life and death, which are very revealing (having read and seeing films about it) I new very little about how these places function. The many different ways people ended at these places, how they were classified, in both instances of prisoners and camp administrators, the corruption as everyone is on the take in an effort to survive. Both prisoners and administrators appear to be struggling to make it through the whole process that the Nazi regime lasts. We see the ups and downs the hope of when tus will end. The second aspect of this book was the musical journey seeing through the eyes of the main character who is a musician, the joy he reflects while he plays and descorche music and players of the time. To be able to write with such conviction about the war and then about music makes this a wonderful literary experience. I love this writer.
• 
  Priyanka Suresh

  (3.5 stars)
  
  Set in Nazi Germany, this book is about Clifford, an American black, gay, jazz musician at a concentration camp in Dachau. While it is loaded with themes like sexuality, identity, religion and the lesser heard stories about minorities in the concentration camps, my horror was constantly assuaged with accounts of hope, love and music. Not only does the author directly use references of music, he also uses similes and at times, the writing itself is quite lyrical.
  
  Dare I say, for invoking all the thought and emotion that it did, this book was easy to get through. I was furious at the injustice towards Cliff while also being angry at the unfairness of his privileges over the other inmates. While his passion for music saved his life, it also built a growing resentment within him as it did not arise from freedom. And when he felt like he didn't even have his music, he had the "place" of overwhelming love and peace - that he felt was a sanctum, which nobody could touch and nothing could get to. That is what I found most interesting about the book, though not obvious at first - how he clung on to freedom through hate, love and hope for a brighter tomorrow, even when he was unsure of whether there would be one.
• 
  Sharonda Cole

  I read this book some years ago. To be honest this was my first indication of Blacks and the holocaust. It opened my eyes to forgotten history, history that no one wants to acknowledge.
  Give this book a chance if you can, if only to acknowledge the subject.
• 
  S.S.

  This was a very interesting piece, focussing on a gay black male inmate of Dachau who records events in the form of a diary. It was interesting because it gave an unusual, not often explored perspective on concentration camps; Clifford, (the protag.) served time as a house-servant to an SS officer and his wife. I don't think I've ever read a book quite like it before, to be honest. I did find a lot of instances a little unrealistic perhaps - like for instance, how many times Clifford smart-mouthed Dieter (who is a fairly high-ranking SS officer and therefore should have been quite the scary dude) without many noticable repercussions - but other than that, I thought John A. Williams had done an appreciable amount of research into the era. I am a massive nerd for anything music-related, so enjoyed the blues musician angle of the piece. This is another book to go into my collection of WWII related era books.
• 
  Ryan Mishap

  Story about a gay, black jazz musician in a Nazi prison/concentration camp from 1933-1945. I've read many survivor's tales, and Williams describes the conditions well. Less convincing are many of the occurences in the novel.
  Cliff, the main character, is a "houseboy" to a former criminal and gay man, who is now a married SS. Overall, it is an interesting novel, but various levels of misogyny surface and there is an awful lot of unrealistic instances of "fucking."
• 
  Frances

  Okay, not great. The German in it is awful. I don't think the frame worked well, but the story and Clifford's voice are both okay. Story of a gay black American jazz musician imprisoned in Dachau during WWII as an officer's slave.
• 
  Damon

  Interesting concept. Slow moving at first but then it grabbed me.