| Coming Through Slaughter Contributor(s): Ondaatje, Michael (Author) |
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ISBN: 0679767851 ISBN-13: 9780679767855 Publisher: Vintage OUR PRICE: $14.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: March 1996 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary - Fiction | Biographical - Fiction | Historical - General |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 95046416 |
| Series: Vintage International |
| Physical Information: 0.43" H x 5.18" W x 8" (0.37 lbs) 160 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Southeast U.S. - Geographic Orientation - Louisiana |
| Accelerated Reader Info |
| Quiz #: 58645 Reading Level: 5.8 Interest Level: Upper Grades Point Value: 5.0 |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |