Yesterday I had the opportunity to do something I rarely get to do: read a book in one sitting. I often feel like this is the way a book should be read, shutting out the rest of the world and just taking it all in.
Michael Ondaatje's first novel, Coming Through Slaughter, does two things extremely well. First, he is writing about Buddy Bolden, a little-known jazz trumpeter. His prose and the structure of the novel reads like jazz. There's no specific formula, but long and short bits, fast and slow, spare and descriptive...thrown together into something beautiful. Second, the point of view is constantly switching. Sometimes there are three different first person narratives on the same page. But Ondaatje does this so well that the reader always knows who is speaking.
Many critics call this the greatest novel ever written about jazz. Though he's more famous for The English Patient, who knows what will happen when the film adaptation of Coming Through Slaughter comes out in 2009. While this is the first work of his that I have read, it is clearly a very strong novel. The mixture of fact and fiction captured me from the first page.
However, the story lost some of it's steam toward the end. As stated in the original review from the NY Times in 1977, "When asked how he could see his sculptures in a block of stone, Michelangelo is alleged to have said that he simply chipped away everything around the image until it emerged. A novel like "Coming Through Slaughter," made up of shards of various techniques, works in just the opposite way. The author gives us all the broken pieces and leaves it to us to infer the final form."
Overall, a good read, especially with a full afternoon to pass.
For more information:
NPR story: Two Films Unveil a Lost Jazz Legend
Brick Magazine, Literary Journal edited by Ondaatje
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