Coming Through the Slaughter (Bloomsbury Classics) - Hardcover

Michael Ondaatje

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747515883 ISBN 13: 9780747515883

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1993

Synopsis

This book is based on the life of cornet playing Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of the turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Ostensibly a novel, this book is also a documentary recreation of Bolden's life, expressed through a collage of fragmented memoirs.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.
In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either "The English Patient or "In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje "oeuvre.

From the Back Cover:

At the turn of the century, the Storyville district of New Orleans had some 2,000 prostitutes, 70 professional gamblers, and 30 piano players. It had only one man who played the cornet like Buddy Bolden. By day he cut hair and purveyed gossip at N. Joseph's Shaving Parlor. At night he played jazz as though unleashing wild animals in a crowded room. At the age of thirty-one, Buddy Bolden went mad. From these sparse facts Michael Ondaatje has created a haunting, lushly atmospheric novel about one of jazz's legendary pioneers and martyrs. Obsessed with death, addicted to whiskey, and self-destructively in love with two women, Buddy Bolden embodies all the dire claims that music places on its acolytes. And as told in Coming Through Slaughter, his story is as beautiful and chilling as a New Orleans funeral procession, where even the mourners dance.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0747515883
• ISBN 13: 9780747515883
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256