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Clifford's Blues
Africans and African Americans in the Holocaust.
304 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1999
32 people are currently reading
437 people want to read
About the author
John A. Williams
31 books61 followersJohn Alfred Williams was an African-American author, journalist, and academic. His novel The Man Who Cried I Am was a bestseller in 1967.
His novels are mainly about the black experience in white America. The Man Who Cried I Am, a fictionalized account of the life and death of Richard Wright, introduced the King Alfred Plan, a fictional CIA-led scheme supporting an international effort to eliminate people of African descent. This "plan" has since been cited as fact by some members of the Black community and conspiracy theorists.
In the early 1980s, Williams, and the composer and flautist Leslie Burrs, with the agreement of Mercer Ellington, began collaborating on the completion of Queenie Pie, an opera by Duke Ellington that had been left unfinished at Ellington's death. The project fell through, and the opera was eventually completed by other hands.
In 2003, Williams performed a spoken-word piece on Transform, an album by rock band Powerman 5000. At the time, his son Adam Williams was the band's guitarist.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
John A.^^^Williams
His novels are mainly about the black experience in white America. The Man Who Cried I Am, a fictionalized account of the life and death of Richard Wright, introduced the King Alfred Plan, a fictional CIA-led scheme supporting an international effort to eliminate people of African descent. This "plan" has since been cited as fact by some members of the Black community and conspiracy theorists.
In the early 1980s, Williams, and the composer and flautist Leslie Burrs, with the agreement of Mercer Ellington, began collaborating on the completion of Queenie Pie, an opera by Duke Ellington that had been left unfinished at Ellington's death. The project fell through, and the opera was eventually completed by other hands.
In 2003, Williams performed a spoken-word piece on Transform, an album by rock band Powerman 5000. At the time, his son Adam Williams was the band's guitarist.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
John A.^^^Williams
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
May 30, 2017
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.
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.
March 15, 2016
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.
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.
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.
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.
March 28, 2021
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.
July 29, 2021
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.
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.
September 19, 2021
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.
Read this. Goddamn.
Read
October 12, 2015Fiction W724cb 1998
February 8, 2021
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.
May 28, 2018
(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.
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.
January 28, 2023
Not an easy read, but it opened a new door for me. Aside from Jessie Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, I hadn't read much about blacks in Nazi Germany. Although this book is fiction, it helps to establish what being black meant in Germany at that time. It seems to be something that is not written about much. I hope to find other books that explore this issue. I am glad I read this. It just wasn't an easy read.
July 21, 2024
There's a lot to unpack in this book. If a novel about Dachau isn't bad enough, it's a novel about being a Black man in Dachau. Being a gay Black man in Dachau. Being a gay Black man under the dubious protection of a closeted gay Nazi. Being a gay Black man under the dubious protection of a closeted gay Nazi in a kind of dysfunctional, abusive thruple with the Nazi's wife. It's well written, but it's...a lot...and the ending will probably leave you unsatisfied.
March 23, 2018
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.
Give this book a chance if you can, if only to acknowledge the subject.
June 10, 2021
The best Holocaust novel no one's ever read, much less heard of
June 27, 2024
I must give John Williams credit for taking such an obscure piece of history- the persecution of blacks in Nazi Germany- and building an entire novel around it. He obviously did his research. But the actual story in Clifford's Blues fell a bit short for me. The title character is a gay, African-American jazz musician imprisoned at Dachau in 1933. He ends up staying there all 12 years the Nazis are in power.
The book is presented as a diary Clifford wrote in the camp. Since it's structured a lot like a diary, there's not much of an overarching plot. The first half was very slow-moving, and I had a hard time getting into it. There were a LOT of 'filler' scenes about camp life that don't do anything to advance the plot. Clifford is frustratingly naïve at times. And obtuse, for that matter. He alternates between hating Dieter Lange and viewing him as some kind of savior. Then again, that's kind of par for course for abusive relationships. And unfortunately, Clifford does depend on Dieter, because he'd be dead without him. As another reviewer pointed out, Dieter is kind of a pussy for a high-ranking SS officer. Clifford stands up to him a number of times and gets- if that- a slap on the wrist, which is very unrealistic.
The tone was a little inconsistent at times. Even as other prisoners suffer and die in the camp outside, the tone is relatively lighthearted. Especially where Dieter and Anna's antics are concerned. But again, this is mainly in the first half of the book. It DOES get better. And despite his annoying passivity, I sympathized with Clifford. Every person he loves or cares about ends up dying. It's not surprising, but it's still deeply sad.
Even after the war begins and conditions worsen, the plot is still pretty slow. I found it hard to get invested in the story because of the pacing. Then, in the last fifty pages, a million things are happening at once. But by then it was too late to change my overall impression.
And the ending left SO many questions unanswered. Who was the old man in the framing device? I can only assume Dieter, he's heavily implied to be. If so, how did he end up with Clifford's diary? Did Clifford just forget it when he and Anna left the camp? I find that hard to believe, since it's been such a huge part of his life for 12 years. His fate is simply left open-ended, and it's so frustrating. I really wanted to know what happened to him, if he survived the war, and it just stops there.
Clifford's Blues is far from bad. It's mostly pretty well-written. But it is uneven. Ignoring the filler scenes, the descriptions of camp life are graphic, brutal, and authentic. The details about jazz music and African-American musicians are fascinating. But the 'story' wasn't much of a story, and I didn't find the characters compelling.
The book is presented as a diary Clifford wrote in the camp. Since it's structured a lot like a diary, there's not much of an overarching plot. The first half was very slow-moving, and I had a hard time getting into it. There were a LOT of 'filler' scenes about camp life that don't do anything to advance the plot. Clifford is frustratingly naïve at times. And obtuse, for that matter. He alternates between hating Dieter Lange and viewing him as some kind of savior. Then again, that's kind of par for course for abusive relationships. And unfortunately, Clifford does depend on Dieter, because he'd be dead without him. As another reviewer pointed out, Dieter is kind of a pussy for a high-ranking SS officer. Clifford stands up to him a number of times and gets- if that- a slap on the wrist, which is very unrealistic.
The tone was a little inconsistent at times. Even as other prisoners suffer and die in the camp outside, the tone is relatively lighthearted. Especially where Dieter and Anna's antics are concerned. But again, this is mainly in the first half of the book. It DOES get better. And despite his annoying passivity, I sympathized with Clifford. Every person he loves or cares about ends up dying. It's not surprising, but it's still deeply sad.
Even after the war begins and conditions worsen, the plot is still pretty slow. I found it hard to get invested in the story because of the pacing. Then, in the last fifty pages, a million things are happening at once. But by then it was too late to change my overall impression.
And the ending left SO many questions unanswered. Who was the old man in the framing device? I can only assume Dieter, he's heavily implied to be. If so, how did he end up with Clifford's diary? Did Clifford just forget it when he and Anna left the camp? I find that hard to believe, since it's been such a huge part of his life for 12 years. His fate is simply left open-ended, and it's so frustrating. I really wanted to know what happened to him, if he survived the war, and it just stops there.
Clifford's Blues is far from bad. It's mostly pretty well-written. But it is uneven. Ignoring the filler scenes, the descriptions of camp life are graphic, brutal, and authentic. The details about jazz music and African-American musicians are fascinating. But the 'story' wasn't much of a story, and I didn't find the characters compelling.
October 21, 2008
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."
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."
March 22, 2016
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.
November 14, 2019
Interesting concept. Slow moving at first but then it grabbed me.
April 23, 2024
Immensely powerful and necessary. I really am shocked this isn't more popular than it is, though it is an incredibly hard read.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews