Coming Through Slaughter (Vintage International) - Softcover

Ondaatje, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679767851 ISBN 13: 9780679767855

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1996

Synopsis

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 title

Product Description:

Coming through Slaughter 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.

Review:

"Anybody who cares about good writing ... should get this book and luxuriate in it." -- Minneapolis Tribune

"One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time." -- Geoff Dyer, The Observer

"A beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written." -- The Sunday Times

"Coming Through Slaughter ... is so stuffed full of the dolour and lust that both buoys and blemishes a life, it reads like a story dying to be told." -- Books in Canada

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679767851
• ISBN 13: 9780679767855
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160