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kjboldon's review
3.0
Just not my jam. Weird poetic prose about a historical figure, that isn't historically accurate. Weird, often compelling, but did not cohere into a whole greater than its parts for me.
mazza57's review
1.0
Far from being the best novel about Jazz ever I found this to be a collection of pages that really said nothing. I am surprised by it from this usually brilliant author
_mallc_'s review against another edition
5.0
son of a ground squirrel!
heck of a novel.
heck. of. a. novel.
heck of a novel.
heck. of. a. novel.
shannon_b's review
5.0
This fluctuated between a 3-5 star review. By the time I finished it was a solid 4.5. In the last ten pages it became clear Buddy Bolden wasn’t a fictional character in a historical setting he was a real historical figure, and normally I don’t like historical fiction but that dawning realization made this book so much more incredible.
My review jumped to a 5 when I read a quick review that mentioned the style mirrored not only Bolden’s dawning schizophrenia, which I had caught, but the style of jazz itself, which I really didn’t. That attention to detail absolutely jumped this book to a 5 star review.
My review jumped to a 5 when I read a quick review that mentioned the style mirrored not only Bolden’s dawning schizophrenia, which I had caught, but the style of jazz itself, which I really didn’t. That attention to detail absolutely jumped this book to a 5 star review.
jacquesdevilliers's review
5.0
He was the best and the loudest and most loved jazzman of his time, but never professional in the brain. Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.
There are few vaguer appraisals of writing than the adjective ‘musical’. It’s somewhat akin to describing a film as ‘poetic’. In both cases you get a sense that the terms are empty containers into which the reader/viewer can channel a rush of feelings that escape a more exacting description. Worse still is the term ‘jazzy’, which usually has something to do with the rhythm of the syntax, or the repetition of choice phrases, or the bold disregard for standard punctuation, or...
Many readers of Coming Through Slaughter would probably call Michael Ondaatje’s novel ‘jazzy’, doubly tempting given that it’s actually about one of jazz’s earliest progenitors, Buddy Bolden. And Ondaatje certainly is driven to find a writing that would sound Bolden’s music off the page. Metaphors aside, Ondaatje is certainly a linguistic showman; loved dearly by lovers of language, generally despised by readers longing for the more solid hook of a storyline that Ondaatje playfully approaches from every angle but head-on. Bolden’s well-known story ends in madness and decades of confinement and eventual death in a mental institution. This mental state fractures almost every page. Ondaatje uses blank space like he’s playing a Miles Davis solo, and he jumps in place, time, and point-of-view like the literary bastard of Eric Dolphy (the title of the latter's great album, Out to Lunch, sounds appropriate in this context). Ondaatje writes Bolden’s behaviour, both on- and offstage, as beautiful as it is unhinged. Consider this passage, Bolden at home with his wife Nora:
Once they were sitting at the kitchen table opposite each other. To his right and to her left was a window. Furious at something he drew his right hand across his body and lashed out. Half way there at full speed he realised it was a window he would be hitting and braked. For a fraction of a second his open palm touched the glass, beginning simultaneously to draw back. The window starred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star. She was delighted by the performance. Surprised he examined his fingers.
Ondaatje’s writing is this same balance of discipline and derailment, a choreography of gentle violence. Paragraphs coarse with a coiled intensity, which Ondaatje often conveys in scenes of jagged yet understated action, working his paragraphs up towards what one might call poetic punchlines:
So he leaves me Tom Pickett. Goes to tell my friends I have gone mad. Nora walking to me slowly to tell me I am mad. I put the chair down and I sit in it. Tired. The rain coming into my head. Nora into my head. Tom Pickett at the end of Liberty shouts at me shaking his arms, waving at me, my wife’s ex-lover, ex-pimp, sit facing Tom Pickett who was beautiful. Nora strokes my arm, don’t tell her I can’t feel her fingers. Her anger or her pity. The rain like so many little windows going down around us.
But whatever might be called ‘jazz-like’ in this writing, the jazz of Ondaatje’s book really resides in his approach to the subject matter. He riffs on the facts of the characters’ lives only to take us way outside of whatever might have actually happened. Ondaatje, ironically a one-time documentary filmmaker, uses a clutch of facts like the theme of a jazz standard; that is, as raw material for improvisation and invention. Because no recordings of Bolden exist, Ondaatje is freed in his descriptions to rewrite a music and musician we’ll never actually hear. Creating a series of literary numbers charged with the inspiration of what Bolden was purported to have sounded like, he re-imagines the jazz pioneer’s city of New Orleans, his life and loves.
If I find fault with the otherwise marvelous results, it’s in the strange omission of any real engagement with race. For none of the black characters living in the turn-of-the-century Jim Crow South does their blackness ever surface as an issue for them. Perhaps at the time Ondaatje was writing Coming Through Slaughter, this omission was regarded as a radical and progressive move: a refusal to impose upon and thus threaten to reduce these characters to a blackness the way white America had done and continues to do. But this inevitably becomes a historical aversion from a brutal reality it seems delusional to ignore. Consider if Bolden’s life was fictionalised by a writer like James Baldwin, a writer who was still alive at the time Ondaatje’s book was written and quite capable of telling the same story. Not only would race not have been erased, it would have been an inseparable aspect of Bolden’s life story. Yet Bolden’s musical life will resonate differently for different people, and Ondaartje’s interpretation is no less extraordinary for the notes he leaves out.
There are few vaguer appraisals of writing than the adjective ‘musical’. It’s somewhat akin to describing a film as ‘poetic’. In both cases you get a sense that the terms are empty containers into which the reader/viewer can channel a rush of feelings that escape a more exacting description. Worse still is the term ‘jazzy’, which usually has something to do with the rhythm of the syntax, or the repetition of choice phrases, or the bold disregard for standard punctuation, or...
Many readers of Coming Through Slaughter would probably call Michael Ondaatje’s novel ‘jazzy’, doubly tempting given that it’s actually about one of jazz’s earliest progenitors, Buddy Bolden. And Ondaatje certainly is driven to find a writing that would sound Bolden’s music off the page. Metaphors aside, Ondaatje is certainly a linguistic showman; loved dearly by lovers of language, generally despised by readers longing for the more solid hook of a storyline that Ondaatje playfully approaches from every angle but head-on. Bolden’s well-known story ends in madness and decades of confinement and eventual death in a mental institution. This mental state fractures almost every page. Ondaatje uses blank space like he’s playing a Miles Davis solo, and he jumps in place, time, and point-of-view like the literary bastard of Eric Dolphy (the title of the latter's great album, Out to Lunch, sounds appropriate in this context). Ondaatje writes Bolden’s behaviour, both on- and offstage, as beautiful as it is unhinged. Consider this passage, Bolden at home with his wife Nora:
Once they were sitting at the kitchen table opposite each other. To his right and to her left was a window. Furious at something he drew his right hand across his body and lashed out. Half way there at full speed he realised it was a window he would be hitting and braked. For a fraction of a second his open palm touched the glass, beginning simultaneously to draw back. The window starred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star. She was delighted by the performance. Surprised he examined his fingers.
Ondaatje’s writing is this same balance of discipline and derailment, a choreography of gentle violence. Paragraphs coarse with a coiled intensity, which Ondaatje often conveys in scenes of jagged yet understated action, working his paragraphs up towards what one might call poetic punchlines:
So he leaves me Tom Pickett. Goes to tell my friends I have gone mad. Nora walking to me slowly to tell me I am mad. I put the chair down and I sit in it. Tired. The rain coming into my head. Nora into my head. Tom Pickett at the end of Liberty shouts at me shaking his arms, waving at me, my wife’s ex-lover, ex-pimp, sit facing Tom Pickett who was beautiful. Nora strokes my arm, don’t tell her I can’t feel her fingers. Her anger or her pity. The rain like so many little windows going down around us.
But whatever might be called ‘jazz-like’ in this writing, the jazz of Ondaatje’s book really resides in his approach to the subject matter. He riffs on the facts of the characters’ lives only to take us way outside of whatever might have actually happened. Ondaatje, ironically a one-time documentary filmmaker, uses a clutch of facts like the theme of a jazz standard; that is, as raw material for improvisation and invention. Because no recordings of Bolden exist, Ondaatje is freed in his descriptions to rewrite a music and musician we’ll never actually hear. Creating a series of literary numbers charged with the inspiration of what Bolden was purported to have sounded like, he re-imagines the jazz pioneer’s city of New Orleans, his life and loves.
If I find fault with the otherwise marvelous results, it’s in the strange omission of any real engagement with race. For none of the black characters living in the turn-of-the-century Jim Crow South does their blackness ever surface as an issue for them. Perhaps at the time Ondaatje was writing Coming Through Slaughter, this omission was regarded as a radical and progressive move: a refusal to impose upon and thus threaten to reduce these characters to a blackness the way white America had done and continues to do. But this inevitably becomes a historical aversion from a brutal reality it seems delusional to ignore. Consider if Bolden’s life was fictionalised by a writer like James Baldwin, a writer who was still alive at the time Ondaatje’s book was written and quite capable of telling the same story. Not only would race not have been erased, it would have been an inseparable aspect of Bolden’s life story. Yet Bolden’s musical life will resonate differently for different people, and Ondaartje’s interpretation is no less extraordinary for the notes he leaves out.
hollyevaallen's review
5.0
Absolutely gorgeous. I’d never even heard of jazz musician Buddy Bolden before reading this book and I don’t usually care for the concept of “fictionalized real life accounts” but this book was amazing. As one of the characters slowly descends into madness, you truly feel as though the same is happening to you. Another character’s bewilderment feels like it’s really yours. Somewhat tragic and has unpredictable scene changes that take some getting used to (feels like syncopated jazz music) but it’s so worth it. I’d really recommend this to anyone even mildly interested in jazz music or poetry (as some passages read like poetry).