Twelve Bar Blues

Patrick Neate

ISBN 10: 0670887919 / ISBN 13: 9780670887910

Published by Viking, New York, 2001

About this Item

First Printing, Signed by author on title page,

Seller Inventory # 10425

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Twelve Bar Blues
• Publisher: Viking, New York
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670887919
• ISBN 13: 9780670887910
• Binding: Softcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Printing: First printing
• Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

"Alex Garland watch out..." - Cosmopolitan Spanning three continents and two centuries TWELVE BAR BLUES is an epic tale of jazz and juju, fate, family and friendship which finally unfolds in the Louisiana bayou... At its heart is Lick Holden, a young jazz musician, in 1900 New Orleans. The story of Lick's search for his step-sister echoes throughout the other stories in the book - of Sylvia, the English hooker and Jim her young companion; of the mysterious seashell head-dress; of Musa, the itinerant witchdoctor and of Tongo, the frustrated African chief. And all of this structured around the harmonic progression of the 12 bar blues ...

Review

An adventurous, musically structured yarn that begins in 18th-century Africa and ends in present-day New York City, Twelve Bar Blues, British writer Patrick Neate's second book, was a surprise winner of the 2002 Whitbread Novel of the Year. For the most part Neate's prose is enthralling, beginning with a semihallucinatory tale of a jealous witch doctor's sabotage of his childhood friend. The latter is stolen by slave traders and sent to America; a century or so later, his descendant, Fortis "Lick" Holden, survives poverty in Louisiana to become an early pioneer of the jazz form. Over the course of Neate's story, we meet up with Louis Armstrong in 1920s New Orleans; cruise the slums and jazz joints of Chicago, London, and Africa; meet up with Tongo Kalulu, the love-conflicted chief of the Zimindo, a strong tribe; and travel to America with a black, retired London prostitute in search of her real father. Neate has a few lapses in judgment: several supporting characters don't ring true (one feels like a thin surrogate for the author), and the air goes out of his writing when he begins to think in clichés. But all is forgiven through the scope of this wild novel, with its inspired network of familial connections over many years and its deep mysteries that reach, like roots, through layers of American history and identity. --Tom Keogh