How High the Moon

Overview
Excerpt

by Jiří Klobouk

In How High the Moon a seventeen-year-old Adolf in 1950 Czechoslovakia deals with the growing totalitarian oppression. He loves jazz and Jean Simmons. Nothing he hates more than the Commies who replaced the Nazis after the war. The native sycophants turn out to be more beastly than were the fascist interlopers. Adolf plays blues and boogie-woogie on piano to wall himself off from the obnoxious hammer and sickle apparatchiks. They consider his music counter-revolutionary, undermining the principles of socialism. In 21. Chapters of humorous narrative describing his daily struggle we come to understand better the meaning of Sidney Bechet saying: “If you play jazz you cannot lie.” Adolf is convinced that he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. The country he set his heart on lies over the Ocean where the sound of jazz first emerged. His dream to escape the hellhole he lives in remains a dream until one day, like in some fairy-tale, he boards train which takes him beyond the Iron Curtain to freedom.

Jiří Klobouk writes fiction, radio plays, poetry and essays. He discovered jazz when he was twelve and later began to visualize the world around him through a camera lens—he worked in film and television. He created a body of work in which as one critique noted: “We could feel the rhythm and see things from unexpected angles.“

Klobouk’s short stories have appeared in literary periodicals: Partisan Review, Chicago Review, Artful Dodge and Skidrow Penthouse. For Winter Wolves, a story published in Mid-American Review, he was named outstanding writer in the 1985-86 Pushcart Prize edition.

His list of books includes: My Life with Blondie, Anti-Communist Manifesto(1975), Mostly Beethoven, Radio Plays I, Radio Plays II, Third Wife, JAZZ II:Parents, Music After Midnight and How High the Moon.

by Jiří Klobouk

I have no idea how much you care about the fact that I own up what led me to consider committing suicide. But as you’ll comprehend in Chapter 16—with a great sight of relieve, I guess—my brother Bubbles talked me off the ledge. What makes this somehow a bit weird is that in real life I have no brother. To make sure you believe that I’m not pulling your leg, I had to invent him. The moment I did, I kind of lucked out like a passenger who survived a plane crash on the runway of Kangerlussuaq Airport. So, what you are reading is my revelation of what almost caused me to get rid of myself. Nothing pseudo. All up front. To start from nothing, my name is Adolf Vincik. In a historical context of global events Adolf could be considered a cursed name. I’m talking about the coincidence that the same year I was born Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in neighboring Germany. The year was 1933 and my mother swears on a stack of Bibles I got my name to honor my grandpa, a.k.a. her father, who inherited his name Adolf from his father, and so on. Apparently, this first name inheritance goes on in our family for hundreds of years. To tell the truth I feel privileged to carry on the tradition. You bet some people don’t hide their opinion that names like mine makes them nauseated. At any rate, the part of my life I’m trying to convey took place five years after the war, in 1950. In March of that year I turned seventeen. But here comes the thing I have a hard time to swallow: although I can improvise blues and boogie-woogie on piano almost like Pete Johnson, if you happen to flip the pages of Encyclopedia Britannica—I do not exist. Not a single peanut-sized paragraph describing my life achievements. Not even a black and white photograph of Adolf Vincik staring into the lens of a Rolleiflex camera. That was when I received recognition from a subaquatic club for breaking a record for staying submerged in a bathtub for four minutes and three seconds. I remember once during my training session my mother found me lifeless in the bathroom and called on my father reading newspaper in the living room that I had drown. It took him a while to call back, advising her to drain the bathtub, turn me on my stomach so the water can splash out from my lungs. Of course, I jumped out from the bathtub before she removed the stopper. So here I am, alive, describing the event.