Coming Through Slaughter

by Michael Ondaatje

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 .

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Music, Canada, Poetry, Literature, Novels

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, and essayist, renowned for his contributions to both poetry and prose. He was born in Colombo in 1943, to a family of Tamil and Burgher descent. Ondaatje emigrated to Canada in 1962, where he pursued his education, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto and a Master of Arts from Queen's University.
Ondaatje’s literary career began in 1967 with his poetry collection The Dainty Monsters, followed by his celebrated The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in 1970. His poetry earned him numerous accolades, including the Governor General’s Award for his collection There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1973–1978 in 1979. He published 13 books of poetry, exploring diverse themes and poetic forms.
In 1992, Ondaatje gained international fame with the publication of his novel The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize and was later adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. His other notable works include In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Anil’s Ghost (2000), and Divisadero (2007), which won the Governor General’s Award. Ondaatje’s novel Warlight (2018) was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Aside from his writing, Ondaatje has been influential in fostering Canadian literature. He served as an editor at Coach House Books, contributing to the promotion of new Canadian voices. He also co-edited Brick, A Literary Journal, and worked as a founding trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.
Ondaatje’s work spans various forms, including plays, documentaries, and essays. His 2002 book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film earned him critical acclaim and won several awards. His plays have been adapted from his novels, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter.
Over his career, Ondaatje has been honored with several prestigious awards. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1988, upgraded to Companion in 2016, and received the Sri Lanka Ratna in 2005. In 2016, a new species of spider, Brignolia ondaatjei, was named in his honor.
Ondaatje’s personal life is also intertwined with his literary pursuits. He has been married to novelist Linda Spalding, and the couple co-edits Brick. He has two children from his first marriage and is the brother of philanthropist Sir Christopher Ondaatje. He was also involved in a public stand against the PEN American Center's decision to honor Charlie Hebdo in 2015, citing concerns about the publication's anti-Islamic content.
Ondaatje’s enduring influence on literature and his ability to blend personal history with universal themes in his writing continue to shape Canadian and world literature.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

”What he did too little of was sleep and what he did too much of was drink and many interpreted his later crack-up as a morality tale of a talent that debauched itself. But his life at this time had a fine and precise balance to it, with a careful allotment of hours. A barber, a publisher of The Cricket, a cornet player, good husband and father, and an infamous man about town.”



Buddy Bolden takes ragtime and infuses it with the blues, creating a new music called Jass, an early offspring of what eventually becomes known as...Jazz. He messes around with the spirituals, too, blending in some of his hoodoo music with the voice of the Lord. There are no recordings of his music known to exist.

The music is eating him alive from the inside.

Those musical notes that dangle around in his head make off with his mind. A guy who plays like that makes some kind of deal with the Devil, and what if that deal goes beyond Bolden’s own precious soul and demands a piece of everyone’s soul that is ever touched by the sound of his horn?

Uh-huh.

It can be true.

You’d think a man who works as a barber might whisper a warning to those he clips and shaves.

“Don’t listen to what I’ve got to play.” He might say that.

Maybe that same man might have printed a word of warning in his printed rag letting everyone know his music is the voice of the Prince of Darkness.

The thing is Bolden is too busy dancing around with his own thoughts, trying to find a way back to a sane plane. When he leaves his saucy, sexy wife, Nora Bass, and disappears for two years, where does he go? He might leave N’Orleans, but N’Orleans doesn’t leave him. Those creatures, wrapped in the musical shadows of his mind, making click clack sounds with their horned toenails, will not be left behind. Even when he makes love to another man’s wife, he can’t escape those harrowing notes. ”The music was so uncertain it was heartbreaking and beautiful. Coming through the walls. The lost anger at her or me or himself. Bullets of music delivered onto the bed we were on.”

When he comes back, he isn’t no better.

Bolden has a friend named Bellocq, a man quite possibly more tortured than himself. He likes to take pictures of whores and pays them the same for a picture as he would for a screw. He wants them on their knees with his Beef Whistle in their mouth, but he is too much a gentleman to ask for that. ”Snap. Lady with a dog. Lady on a sofa half naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. Holding up her arm for the shade.”



Those whores make money any way they can. If a crippled pervert wants a picture, that is the easiest pelf they are going to make all night long. Buddy hauls E. J. around and introduces him to intriguing looking whores. ”He pulled Bellocq up the steps, the camera strapped across his back like a bow. He had seen it so often on his friend that whenever he thought of him his body took on an outline which included the camera and the tripod. It was part of his bone structure. A metal animal grown into his back.”

Those whores will even sell ragged bags of goofer dust or chipped crocks of bend-over oil. Voodoo spells that will offer protection or put a hex on your enemies. Buddy needs to be anointed with some ointment that will settle the demons in his head. Neither the church, nor Voodoo, is any help when the devil is held so close.

”Scratch of suicide at the side of my brain.”

Buddy can only abide the most alluring, the most graceful, the most magnificent. He has no patience for ugliness, unpleasantness, or the unsightly. ”As she leans against me there is the red morning on her face. Everyone who touches me must be beautiful.”

Time is short. The black sand in the hourglass is pooling at the bottom. Can he flip it when the Devil is distracted?

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[Matt Quann · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5 Stars]

The first time I put on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew I was laying on my bed in the dilapidated housing the university passed off as residence. The walls were cold brick on three sides and thin plaster on the wall that separated me from my neighboring roommate. It was a perpetually cold room, whose prison cell-like quality was only overshadowed by the little outside light the east facing windows allowed in. This was during the time when I had a brief foray into the world of cigarette smoking in an attempt to break free of the shackles of inexperience and build a world entirely my own.

I lit up a dart, laid back on the bed, and listened.

*
I haven’t read Michael Ondaatje before, so consider me initiated.

Consider me baffled. Consider me entertained. Consider my review experimental.

That’s what we’re dealing with, right? An experimental novel whose structure parallels the fictionalized descent into madness of Buddy Bolden, who would have otherwise been a footnote in the annals of jazz were it not for Ondaatje’s novel. Ondaatje plays with structure here.

structure, of sentences

Structure of paragraphs

The way that words look splayed out on a page, spacing conventions be damned.

*
I’m not done my cigarette and I know that I’m confused. The sounds coming from the laptop’s meager speakers relay music that sounds like my tobacco was rolled in a paper doused in LSD that only affects my aural perception. Instruments start, spit, stop, go on for too long. It is all madness that I put on because it made it on to an Internet list of “The Five Jazz Albums Newbies Need to Hear.” But I’m nothing if not persistent.

I open the window to my room. We’re not supposed to be smoking inside, but it isn’t like anyone checks.

I light up another and sit with my back supported by the cold cement to steady me against a stucco wall of sound.

*
But you’ve got to ask yourself: what’s this all for?

The mind of Buddy Bolden in collapse is what came to me first. I think we’ve all read a novel where the structure or story is so strange that the only possibility is that our character has a mental illness. So, that’s no different from what you’ve read before.

What got me, what kept me reading, was the similarities to the structure of jazz songs. Tracks that seem to be piloted by saxophonists’ and trumpeters’ flights of fancy. The way Ondaatje will have two sentences on one page, a half page full on the next, spaces randomly assorted, reminded me more of jazz as it went on.

The book is Bolden falling into madness, but it is portrayed through a novel structured after the music he played.

*
It’s been years since I first listened to Bitches Brew, and years since that four-or-five pack folly made up the entirety of my smoking history. I came not only to appreciate and enjoy the album, but to cherish it for opening me up to music that I don’t know that I would have found otherwise. Plus, I could also appreciate this hilarious video.

*
So, some frustrations.

I appreciate the craft and ambition of this novel, but it isn’t always compelling. I admit to being genuinely confused as to what was happening at various points during the novel. I suppose that’s kind of the point: Bolden doesn’t know much of what is going on as he approaches his incarceration at a state Asylum. All the same, I wanted things to move in a bit more ordered approach. I wanted the book to do away with paragraphs that were one long sentence, I wanted to better connect to the characters.

But maybe that’s what this is all about. Maybe the reader isn’t supposed to be able to understand Bolden, perhaps we are just meant to bear witness to his unassailable madness. Perhaps we are supposed to mourn the genius slain in a battle against his own mind.

I can appreciate this, but I didn’t love it.

*
But I can’t say that I took from that first listening of Bitches Brew a sense of understanding, appreciation, or even enjoyment.

I had to keep coming back, again.

and again

and again.

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Ondaatje was already well established as a poet when he published this, a poet's first novel if ever there was one. It's an attempt to recreate the inner life of Buddy Bolden, a cornet player and pioneer of the new kind of American music that would soon become known as jass or jazz. No recordings exist of Bolden's playing, and very little is known of his life beyond the fact that he had a breakdown during a Mardi Gras parade, died years later in a Louisiana asylum, and was thought of by Louis Armstrong and his generation as having started their artistic tradition.

Into this creative vacuum Ondaatje pours his allusive, fluid prose, which darts about between internal monologue, interview snippets, quick conversation scenes, and modern-day investigative reportage. He paints a vivid picture of late-nineteenth-century New Orleans, around the legendary red-light district of Storyville, where ‘2000 prostitutes were working regularly,’ there were ‘at least 70 professional gamblers’ and ‘30 piano players took in several thousand each in weekly tips’. ‘Here the famous whore Bricktop Jackson carried a 15 inch knife,’ Ondaatje tells us, a tour guide asking us to look to our left, ‘and her lover John Miller had no left arm and wore a chain with an iron ball on the end to replace it.’

Like good jazz, the writing is rhythmic and improvisational, transposing viewpoints and images like key changes – and, sometimes, a little self-indulgent. But when Ondaatje is inhabiting Bolden's mind, he is very convincing, building up a detailed life and mental state from a rush of sensory impressions:

He collected and was filled by every noise as if luscious poison entering the ear like a lady's tongue thickening it and blocking it until he couldn't be entered anymore. A fat full king. The hawk its locked claws full of salmon going under greedy with it for the final time. Nicotine form the small smokes he found burning into his nails, the socks thick with dry sweat, the nose blowing out the day's dirt into a newspaper. Asking for a glass of water and pouring in the free ketchup to make soup. Sank through the pavement into the music of the town of Shell Beach.

Bolden's life is built up above all by the people around him: his wife, his lover, the customers in his barber's shop, bandmembers, an old friend who has become a policeman. An especially powerful subplot revolves around the photographer EJ Bellocq, whose revealing and touching portraits of Storyville prostitutes were found after his death.



Not the least prominent supporting character is Ondaatje himself, who is constantly interrogating his own thoughts as he writes and researches the book.

The thin sheaf of information. Why did my senses stop at you? There was the sentence, ‘Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade…’ What was there in that, before I knew your nation your colour your age, that made me push my arm forward and spill it through the front of your mirror and clutch myself?

One wants to write about this novel as though it were music – in terms of its solos, its tone, its timbre. Experimental and poetic, it's a mostly-successful attempt to get inside one exhausted, creative life within an exhausted, creative city.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this first novel of Ondaatje, but I am left feeling it is like a jazz improvisation that doesn’t achieve flight enough to linger long in the mind. My disappointment feels similar to looking for a Picasso Blue Period in the origins of his mastery and turning up instead an aborted Cubist Period. Still, it was worth it for me to experience this dalliance with a postmodernist structure and witness his transition from poet to novelist.

This slim 1976 book is an ambitious attempt to bring to life a seminal black jazz cornet player, Buddy Bolden, at the turn of the 20th century. His innovation of blending blues with funeral parade music has been considered a precursor to ragtime jazz. The setting is the infamous Storyville red-light district of New Orleans, which brings to light both the wayward energies of the era as well as the tough way of life for the women involved. Bolden works part-time as a barber, gathers gossip for a local weekly celebrity news tabloid, and gets in a lot of trouble with booze and women. At one point, he abandons his wife and child for a ménage with a married couple and then stops performing music for a two-year stretch living at a cabin on owed by an old friend from his wild youth. At a comeback performance in a parade, he has a break from reality and tragically ends up committed as a state mental hospital for the rest of his life.



From this sketchy history of a not very sympathetic figure, Ondaatje crafts a sketchy narrative, strong on form and improvised impressions, but light on significant insight. Of course, one can say all novels and biographies come up short in explaining the origins of creative genius. So it’s not so much that aspect which disappoints, but rather that I don’t really get a satisfying portrayal of Bolden as a human character. Other interesting key characters, such as Bolden’s policeman friend Webb and the photographer of prostitutes, E.J. Bellocq, are also not seriously fleshed out.



Instead we get a poet’s vision of Bolden’s experiences from his environment, infused with sex, alcohol, and periodic violence, and persistent renderings that reflect his passion for music. Some of this works very well and sometimes it overreaches. One particular success lies in the way Ondaatje’s narration of the tale often emulates jazz in its progressions on various themes and in the way the voice is passed around to various characters. I end with a few quotes to illustrate his prose and help potential readers decide whether to give the book a spin.

Here a fellow musician describes Bolden’s style:
He’s mixing them up. .He’s playing the blues and the hymn sadder than the blues and then the blues sadder than the hymn. That is the first time I heard blues and hymns cooked up together. …It sounded like a battle between the Good Lord and the Devil.

Here he comes to founder over binding his identity so much to his music”
You’d play and people would grab you and grab you till you began to—you couldn’t help it—believe you were doing something important. And all you were doing was stealing chickens, nailing things to the wall. Every time you stopped playing you became a lie. So I got so, with Bellocq, I didn’t trust any of that … any more. It was just playing games. We were furnished rooms and Bellocq was a window looking out.

Here his perceptions while swimming with his girlfriend exposes his growing mental imbalance:
Below our heads all the evil dark swimming creatures are waiting to brush us into nightmare into heart attack to suck us under into the darkness into the complications. Her loon laugh. The dull star of white water under each of us. Swimming towards the sound of madness.

Here a period of sobriety in the retreat at his friend’s cabin also brings interludes of unreality:
What do you want to know about me Webb? I’m alone. I desire every woman I remember. Everything is clear here and still I feel my brain has walked away and is watching me. I feel I hover over the objects in this house, over every person in my memory—like those painted saints in my mother’s church who seem to always have six or seven inches between them and the ground. Posing as humans.

For a two minute clip of Wynton Marsalis playing a Bolton tune, try this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g-1Gp...

For a 10 minute segment on the innovations of Bolton and historical images of his environment, check out this PBS clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paFK1l...

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly sets the tone of future Ondaatje novels: Fragmented, lyrical, bitter and disturbing. This book loosely based on jazz trumpet player Buddy Bolden's tragic life is a small masterpiece that carefully crafts details around a man's wounded ego and misunderstood talent. I found it difficult to put down.

My life really stops everything to read what this author has to say.

[John Darnielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give a book five stars if I unreservedly recommend it, and I give it four stars if it's recommendable with a couple of caveats, and I don't do anything under four because I think star ratings / point ratings are generally unuseful outside of some personal criteria being established. This one gets five stars from me because it's compulsively readable, contains passages that actually manage to summon the power of music from both sides of the bandstand; most writers can't write about music no matter how hard they try, and many do try, and nine times out of ten they come up very short & usually looking like they're trying too hard. But Ondaatje's success on this score is total - anybody who's been present during the early days of a musical movement will feel that energy in Buddy Bolden both as a figure spoken of in retrospect and as a presence in the novel, anybody who's played music will feel how it's both essential to and separate from the person of the player here, anybody who's listened to music will hear it in the prose. There's a weightlessness to the pacing of this book that's quite distinctive, and structurally it manages to be very careful while seeming casual, tacked-together. As novels involving music go, I don't think I've read a better one.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

The one novel on the Isle of Arran for sale that was remotely acceptable. There are no longer any remotely acceptable novels for sale on the Isle of Arran.

[Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes you read something by an author and it's very good, and you think back over their other stuff that you've read, and realise that it was all good, and some of it was even very good, or very, very good, and you see suddenly that this writer is actually one of your absolute favourites, you just never articulated the thought until now.

I haven't read anything in a while that made me wish I could write as much as this. Not to say it was perfect. It's an early work and you can see how his craft was more honed by later books. But such energy. It's more like a free-form poetry, assembled into 400-word chapters. Wonderful concrete little details dropped into a half-described narrative.

Very similar in structure, tone and theme to the Billy the Kid book but, you know, jazzy. Such a beautiful idea for a novel.

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thinking about this book, I remembered a line that's spoken near the end of the film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend".
Donald M. Marquis, in his book In Search of Buddy Bolden ,https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3..., put together probably as many facts about the legendary New Orleans musician as we'll ever come to know. Michael Ondaatje, in this novel about Buddy Bolden (which was written before Marquis' book was published) has written a haunting dreamlike version of the Buddy Bolden myth.

Donald Marquis has given us the facts. Michael Ondaatje has given us the legend. In their own way, each has given us the truth.

[Tom Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.”

Ondaatje took what bones he could scavenge about Buddy Bolden, a talented cornet player in the dawn of jazz, New Orleans, and fleshed them out in this dramatized account. I like seeing that this style of novel—minimal punctuation, no quotation marks, choppy narrative, novella length, etc.—can commercially succeed. Without doubt, Ondaatje’s palpable writing is what allows this uncommon and challenging style to find a wide readership.

The depictions of the insane asylum were heartaching. In humankind’s history, the institutionalized treatment of the mentally afflicted is appalling.

Page 90 is utterly stunning, both visceral and tangible while also ethereal; a concoction that would sound incompatible. But Ondaatje has found the right speed to mix oil and water. Turns out it’s not fast, it’s very slow. Oh hell I’ll just write the whole thing out:

Three of us played cards all evening and then Jaelin would stay downstairs and Robin and I would go to bed, me with his wife. He would be alone and silent downstairs. Then eventually he would sit down and press into the teeth of the piano. His practice reached us upstairs, each note a finger on our flesh. The unheard tap of his calloused fingers and the muscle reaching into the machine and plucking the note, the sound travelling up the stairs and through the door, touching her on the shoulder. The music was his dance in the auditorium of his enemies. But I loved him downstairs as much as she loved the man downstairs. God, to sit down and play, to tip it over into music! To remove the anger and stuff it down the piano fresh every night. He would wait for half an hour as dogs wait for masters to go to sleep before they move into the garbage of the kitchen. The music was so uncertain it was heartbreaking and beautiful. Coming through the walls. The lost anger at her or me or himself. Bullets of music delivered onto the bed we were on. Everybody’s love in the air.

MO lit that page on fire. Even just typing it, my fingers are smoking...

***
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[Nigeyb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to believe this is the same person who wrote The English Patient

I read this for my book group. Michael Ondaatje was an established poet when he wrote this short experimental debut novel about Buddy Bolden, an early 20th century New Orleans jazz cornet player. No recordings exist of Bolden's playing, and very little is known of his life beyond the fact that he had a breakdown during a Mardi Gras parade and died years later in a Louisiana asylum.

Coming Through Slaughter takes a piecemeal approach and is written in a variety of styles and from different perspectives, embracing the prostitute wife, the time working as a barber, the wilderness years, playing the cornet, the scandal sheet, the author's own view, and more. The scant details of Bolden's life are enhanced with imagined details. What emerges is an unsympathetic figure about whom we gain no real insights. Other character's like Bolden's wife Nora Bass, policeman friend Webb, and prostitute photographer Bellocq remain similarly opaque. Style over substance.

Most reviews are very positive. It's hard work and despite many attempts I couldn't get any momentum going. Mercifully short though.

2/5

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

In June 1907, Charles "Buddy" Bolden is 'escorted' by Civil Sheriffs McMurray and Jones en route from New Orleans to an insane asylum in Jackson, Louisiana. He has suffered a complete breakdown while playing with Henry Allen's Brass Band ('Red' Allen's father), marching in the Crescent City. He had broken blood vessels in his neck, and they had come through a small town called Slaughter on their way. These are some of the few hard facts known of the life of one of jazz's earliest pioneers, a life that has become the stuff of ethereal myth, legend for some. Bolden's sad story has captured the imagination of Michael Ondaatje. He tells a version of the story in a way that leaves a fuzzy glimpse of a time, a place, and a flawed musician's mental instability that leads to self-destruction. Not the last time that a force of creative talent might succumb like this.

I'm not so sure that this is "the best jazz novel ever written" (as one blurber has it), but it is certainly a moving suggestion of a New Orleans at the dawn of the 20th century. Bolden was jazz's first 'cornet king'. Apparently at the forefront of improvisation, sadly no recordings of his music exist (if any were ever made), and only the one known photograph survives - used as the book's cover (Bolden is back row with his band, 2nd from the left). The first 'celebrities' of that music cite him as the great unknown influence who shaped the earliest departures that melded gospel with ragtime and the blues.

Ondaatje writes poetically. This was his debut novel and the writing is memorable in passages. The structure here is a jazz performance. Sometimes rhythmic, but sometimes jarring, or perhaps even discordant. He shows us Bolden's view, but also those of his wife, and his friends: Webb - a detective who is trying to find what happened to him, and his tragic associate Bellocq who photographs Storyville prostitutes. We move in time back and forth, and sometimes can't be sure - until the refrain returns.

There is a narrator in the shadows, watching over proceedings. There are love triangles: Bolden, his wife Nora and her former pimp Pickett; then another while in a self-imposed exile of two years at out of town Shell Beach. It can be confusing. But an impression undoubtedly emerges. Buddy is unpredictable and volatile - tender and subdued, intense and impassioned - alcoholic and then sometimes violent.

The book pieces together episodic vignettes. From those who knew him, and those that link together the scant facts concerning his life.

"'Then I hear Bolden's cornet, very quiet, and I move across the street, closer. There he is, relaxed back in a chair blowing that silver softly, just above a whisper and I see he's got the hat over the bell of the horn...Thought I knew his blues before, and the hymns at funerals, but what he is playing now is real strange and I listen careful for he's playing something that sounds like both. I cannot make out the tune and then I catch on. He's mixing them up. He's playing the blues and the hymn sadder than the blues and then the blues sadder than the hymn. That is the first time I ever heard hymns and blues cooked up together...

...The picture kept changing with the music. It sounded like a battle between the Good Lord and the Devil. Something tells me to listen and see who wins. If Bolden stops on the hymn, the Good Lord wins. If he stops on the blues, the Devil wins.'"

Although the brief chapters can be beautifully rendered, it is the piecemeal approach of the narrative that let the book down a little for me, and will doubtless dishearten some. Near the end is an afterword of sorts, set in the modern day as the author searches for traces. It weaves itself in with the final points of view:

"The street is fifteen yards wide. I walk around watched by three men farther up the street under a Coca Cola sign. They have not heard of him here. Though one has for a man came a year ago with a tape recorder and offered him money for information, saying Bolden was a 'famous musician'. The sun has bleached everything. The Coke signs almost pink. The paint that remains the colour of old grass. 2 pm daylight. There is the complete absence of him - even his skeleton has softened, disintegrated, and been lost in the water under the earth of Holtz Cemetery. When he went mad he was the same age as I am now."

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read a lot of Ondaatje's work and in this book I see the inflection point of the poet trying to become a novelist.The transitional formula seems to be:take small vignettes of a tragic jazz player's life, set it in an impoverished and immoral backwater like New Orleans at the turn of the last century and wrench the heck out of all the pathos inherent in that situation with poetic intensity, and do it to an improvised jazz beat; then stick the pieces together in a photographic collage and voila, a novel! Good attempt, I thought - but not quite.

The novel weaves from various first person accounts (mostly Bolden's and some unknown people), to third person accounts (also of Bolden and some of his buddies) of the two years before his mental breakdown while playing in a parade. His decline in the mental institution where he was subsequently incarcerated for almost 24 years receives only a few pages. And the chronology of the story hangs on medical records, interviews, photographs, and other loose family records of Bolden, all woven in at strategic points to give context to the scenes.

Bolden's voice gets mixed up with the author's poetic voice at times, and I wondered whether this was deliberate or accidental.

The traditionalists would argue whether this is a novel at all - it's too short for one thing, about 150 pages - and some pages are one liners. There is little character development beyond Bolden and Webb, and even there, they just fade away, unresolved. What about the five-stage structure, tense, POV, movement, balance yadda, yadda, yadda? On closer inspection, one could argue that there is a narrative arc, hidden in there somewhere, and that there are multiple points of view, with lots of movement, and there is also (most importantly) a tragic hero on his journey to extinction. And taking the liberty of the poet, Ondaatje plummets deep into emotion, using punctuation, words, and sentence structures like improvised jazz. I even thought of a new title as I read: "Being Bold with Bolden."

So why do I say, "not quite"? I wished Ondaatje had extended his book by 50 more pages and rounded off some of his characters and shown us their learning and transformation through the tragic life of Bolden, I wished he had blown up some scenes that were ripe with promise - Bolden's homecoming to Nora, for example, or his original attraction to Robin. A lot of the "why"s were left open to interpretation. Or are madmen not supposed to have a "why" to their actions?

I recommend this book for those looking to experiment with language in writing a novel and who wish to throw out the rule book and write it jazz style.

[Aolund · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this novel, enticed by the promise of lyrical writing and a look into the life of New Orleanian jazz musician Buddy Bolden. All I found was a rambling, imitative style (think Nabokov, Faulkner, but less tightly written), and incessant focus on sex and women-as-sex-objects; almost every sex scene included violent language and felt misogynistic. While a motif of sex and sexuality would have been nothing to complain about in and of itself, it seemed a shame that this motif so utterly trumped the inclusion of Bolden's music, and that the female figures in the book were continually robbed of power/objectified/subjected to rhetorical violence by the writing style.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

English Patient, who? Now THIS is more like it. Experimental, impressionistic prose in the wild subjective to convey the surging, elemental sensibility of one of the deeply mythological founders of jazz...love that kind of thing and it necessitates this kind of writing. Very much enjoyed...

[Michael Livingston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant short book that stitches together historical records, various perspectives and tenses into a short and moving fictionalised biography of Buddy Bolden, credited with many as the inventor of jazz. It's a breathtaking technical achievement, but it's also just a deeply human book.

[Ned · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lyrical, rhythmic story about real events, in the first decade of the 20th century. Many credit Charles "Buddy" Bolden as the creator of jazz, that most truly original American contribution to the arts. Ondaatje tells the story using a facsimile of the language of the time, and splays it out upon the page as if a jazz chart. It was fun, but bracing in its hardcore plundering and physical destruction of the human body and brain, the latter in the form of the shocking schizophrenia that hit him suddenly at the apex of success. I learned a great deal about the street life of the fabled Storyville district of New Orleans. The author captures the beauty of freeform jazz improvisation and mixes it cleverly with the encroaching insanity of our protagonist. Ondaatje is a favorite of mine, and he always stretches and challenges the reader with unique streams of consciousness and a well structured pastiche of storyline. This was 3.5 stars, it was just a little too cool and I could not feel for Buddy when his schizophrenia approached since there was insufficient character development up to that point. But overall a quick, fun yet innovative read.

[TaraReadsBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Went in absolutely blind on nothing but a good friend’s recommendation and omggggg this might be one of the best books of all time. Told in 3 chapters and written in a style that feels uniquely its own, this novel tells a fictionalized version of the life of Buddy Bolden, the father of American jazz. A mindblowing exploration of the lines between love and violence, fame and identity, and creativity and self-destruction. Obsessed.

[Francesca kikkatnt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Che dire, semplicemente meraviglioso. Sono veramente felice di aver scoperto grazie ad un gruppo di lettura un autore che non conoscevo, un libro che non conoscevo, la biografia di un musicista che non conoscevo.
Ma andiamo con ordine. Come anticipato appena sopra, il libro racconta, in forma romanzata e alquanto atipica, la vita di uno dei primi (se non il primo in assoluto) inventori del genere jazz, Charlie "Buddy" Bolden.



Purtroppo sia della sua vita, sia della sua musica si sa molto poco.
Primo fra tutti perché non ha mai avuto la possibilità (principalmente) finanziaria di registrare la sua musica; poi perché all'età di 31 anni, quando ancora doveva arrivare all'apice della sua carriera, è stato internato in ospedale psichiatrico.
L'autore cerca di ricostruire le vicende sulla base dei ricordi dei suoi amici e delle persone che gli erano vicino, questo però quasi a 40 anni dalla sua scomparsa. In effetti il libro è abbastanza scarno di riferimenti e sicuramente molte delle parti raccontate sono inventate, dando maggior rilievo al mito, al personaggio.
Una storia drammatica, fin dall'infanzia di Buddy, nato povero in una New Orleans al limite del degrado, in cui erano presenti solo bordelli, fumerie d'oppio e sale da gioco. A vent'anni, i soldi che racimolava con il suo lavoro di barbiere venivano spesi principalmente in donne e alcool. A venticinque si sposa con una prostituta e ha 1 figlio (charlie jr). I suoi migliori amici sono un poliziotto (che lo aiuterà molto durante il suo primo periodo di crisi) e un fotografo E.J. Bellocq, tra i primi ad immortalare le prostitute nelle sue fotografie (neanche ho fatto in tempo a finire il libro che già avevo acquistato Bellocq: Photographs From Storyville,The Red-Light District of New Orleans). A 31 anni, mentre suona impazzisce e nel giro di qualche mese viene internato nell'ospedale statale della Louisiana Orientale. Morirà circa 30 anni più tardi, dopo essere stato abbandonato a sé stesso, torturato, stuprato e lasciato vivere nelle misere condizioni.

Curiosità:
ho cercato su wikipedia e ho scoperto diverse cose interessanti..
Il suo stile è stato in seguito immortalato nel brano, classico del jazz, Buddy Bolden's Blues (I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say), basato sul tema della canzone Funky Butt dello stesso Bolden (da qui anche l'origine del titolo del libro).
Le condizioni mentali di Bolden furono presupposti determinanti che portarono all'attitudine dell'improvvisazione, da cui nacque il jazz; Bolden non era in grado di leggere la musica, quindi improvvisare era l'unico modo in cui potesse suonare. Dalle parole del Dr. Spence psichiatra:
«Forse doveva improvvisare perché non sapeva suonare le note in una maniera utile»
«Non sapeva leggere la musica ed era obbligato a fare a modo suo»
«Se non ci fosse stata questa musica improvvisata, essa avrebbe continuato ad essere ragtime»

Secondo questa teoria (qui citata per la sua vasta diffusione in internet), il jazz sarebbe stato suonato per la prima volta a causa degli handicap cognitivi di un malato mentale.

Poco tempo fa ci hanno fatto un film: Bolden

Un pò di materiale dell'epoca con tanto di piccola ricostruzione storica. Peccato sia in inglese senza i sottotitoli.

[Carl R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Ondaatje won't stay put. I've followed him from San Francisco (Divisadero) to Sri Lanka--one of his native lands--(Anil's Ghost) to the bowels of a Sri Lanka-to-England-to-Canada cruise ship (Cat's Table) to historical Toronto (Skin of a Lion) and finally to New Orleans for Coming Through Slaughter. Every Journey has been full of edification and delight.

Before Louis Armstrong and all of them there was Buddy Bolden, said to be the hottest trumpeter in all the Big Easy. He was never recorded, his active days being done before the technology was available. However, his legend was, well, legendary. Buddy grew up and lived, naturally, in the Storyville section of the city, where you could shop for prostitutes in a directory not only by name and address but by race and skin shade. Buddy fell in love with one, married her, had a couple of kids. He cut hair by day, played his horn by night.

He was an erratic guy, turning up here and there whenever it suited him. He played with some groups, or rather alongside them. Sort of what the pre-school handbooks call "Parallel Play." Many times the other players didn't know when he would start or stop or understand what he did in between. When it came parade time, he preferred to wait along the line of march, then jump in some place or another, either in concert or completely beyond the parameters of whatever group was marching beside or behind him. Not everyone loved what he played, but they all applauded his skill and inventiveness, and they agreed no one was louder.

We know little more about his life than we know about the sound of his music. He was said to be here. Be there. Disappeared for a couple of years. Reappeared. Moved in with his wife and her new partner. Resumed an affair with the wife of a friend. Perhaps. And here's where Ondaatje's genius makes Coming Through Slaughter such a superb piece of writing. Our knowledge of Bolden's life is elliptical, full of spaces, and so is Ondaatje's prose. Diving beneath the surface, coming up again, looking around. Searching. Moving toward shore or toward somewhere. Perhaps toward the sound of a voice. We often aren't sure whose.

Webb twenty and Bolden seventeen . . . they spend all their money on girls ... stock beer, gradually paste their characters on to one another.

First, in Bolden's voice, a skinny dip with his friend's wife. . .

Below our heads all the evil dark swimming creatures are waiting to brush us into nightmare into heart attack to suck us under into the darkness into the complications . . . Swimming towards the sounds of madness.

Then, in someone else's voice ..

See Tom picket.

Why?

Cos he, cos Buddy cut him up.

The narrative ties together, but not in an easily distinguishable pattern. Just as Buddy Bolden's life and music--what we know of it--are not plain and simple.

We do know that Bolden finally went mad and was incarcerated in the East Louisiana State Hospital. To get there, you had (have to?) to go through a town called Slaughter. That's the metaphor of the title, which Ondaatje saves till almost the end, unless you know it already. It's during this period of imprisonment that Ondaatje presents some of the documentation behind his story--tape recordings, mostly, memories of Bolden from acquaintances, fellow musicians. It makes for an odd post script--though not really a post script because it's essential to the story--but entirely fitting for this odd and fascinating story told by one of the supreme writers of our day.

[Q · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming Through Slaughter rating 3.5

This audiobook was recorded in 2019. The reader did an excellent job. It’s about Buddy Bolden, a grandfather of what would become New Orleans style jazz. Buddy played circa 1900. The audio recording fit. It’s a short book - about 3 1/2 hours- with long chapters often rolling, sometimes melodic, sometimes disjoint; like Buddy and like jazz. This was Michael Ondaatje’s first fiction novel. His first segway novel was “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” which was very creative in language and used many styles- and showed the imaginative lyrical poet that he is. This book too was historical fiction. There were no record recordings of Buddy Bolden but on YouTube there are some videos of Wynton Marsalis playing like Buddy. (A thanx for this info goes to GR Michael- he shared it in his 2013 review). There are lots of oral legends about Buddy still. Wikipedia had a list of other creative pieces about Buddy Bolden.

Michael Ondaatje had to do research and used his imagination and creativity. And that’s why I think he did an excellent job. Lots of sounds and sensations and smells came into play not just in his musical instrument playing. It also showed around womens body’s and sex and violence and references to coke. This too probably entered his music.

What was rough for me to take in was the kind and extent of violence (especially to women in the trade). There was a lot of delusion and mental illness interwoven in for Buddy. The effects of alcohol institutionalized him . There was often an edginess too. And mood swings at times. Two of Buddy’s male characters were creepy. One much more so. So I am surprised (yet glad) I stayed the course and finished this. I wanted to read it for a long time. I very much appreciated the writing. Must of been quite a debut back in 1967. It’s one of those books I’ll remember as it It was unique.

[Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are few books that I say I will read again that I actually do (my opinion is that there are far too many books to re-read), and even fewer that I actually do read them again. This is one book that I believe will be one of those select few.

Often the heart is the one thing about poetry I actually understand. In this novel Ondatji's poetic heart comes through in a form I can relate to. Matters of genre-defining aside, this is truly a beautiful book of words and story.

I was moved and "in" from the first.

[Barth Siemens · Rating 1 out of 5]

This novella leaves me wondering:

Am I a prude?
OR
Did Ondaatje rely too much on vulgarity rather than digging for story?
OR
Both?

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1976, this novel, Ondaatje's debut, I believe, is a fictionalized look at Buddy Bolden, a pioneering New Orleans trumpet player, circa 1900. He is considered to be one of the first to play "modern" jazz. He also suffered from mental issues and had a severe breakdown while performing and spend the rest of his life in a sanatorium. The writing style is experimental, presented in a jazz style- fragmented, and syncopated. It may not suit all readers but I found it intriguing and beautifully done.

[Joy D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fragmented “experimental” novel published in 1976 that explores the (fictional) life of Buddy Bolden, a legendary jazz musician from New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. Ondaatje presents an impressionistic portrait of Bolden using a nonlinear in structure, which (I presume) is intended to mirror the improvisational nature of jazz music. It is written using multiple perspectives, documentary-style interludes, and a stream of consciousness style. The novel examines the thin line between artistic genius and mental instability. Buddy Bolden is portrayed as brilliant but deeply troubled. My main issue with this one lies in its depiction of the few women characters as sex objects or prostitutes. It is a little too “macho” for my taste. I am reading through Michael Ondaatje’s back catalogue since I have very much enjoyed many of his books, but this one ranks at the bottom of my list.

[Patrick O'Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a fictional story based on the rich, the tragic, and true life of the New Orleans Jazz Musician Buddy Bolden. A historical figure of whom we know very little, of whom there is only one extant photo, and no recordings. Yet we know he eventually goes mad.

Michael Ondaatje weaves a captivating story from only shreds of evidence through a form of prose that I have never quite seen before. The narrator is constantly shifting, as is the chronology, as is the word form. Parts of this read like historical records, others as coventional narrative, and others in the impressionistic style of poetry.

At times a little hard to follow, as in modern Jazz, the story requires, at times, intent listening, and at others, just simply letting the notes wash over you.

Contemporary accounts of Bolden's musical style described it as "searching for the note that wasn't there", perhaps a metaphor for his life, and for me conjuring up thoughts of the playing style of Jazz's modern greats.

In the end, I was left with the impression that this book, while the curious story of a long-lost Jazz musician, was as much an inventive Jazz composition itself, one that at times searches for notes, but never quite loses the melody which is the story of the life of Buddy Bolden.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a book!

I haven't read Ondaatje before, or at least not much, and I don't know what I expected, but the level of lyricism from page to page, paragraph to paragraph was really stunning and made this a really rather incredible read.

There are places where I have issues with it, or at least think I do (what happens to Webb, or the fact that the insanity seems so, I don't know, underconsidered-- maybe it's just me, but the link between these romantic triangles Bolden found himself in and the music he played was never clear?), but there's so much here to like-- It's got bits of Jean Toomer in here, but also WG Sebald and hints of what is to come in Toni Morrison's Jazz. An accomplished and deeply satisfying reading experience.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beautiful, lyrical, poetic writing and the original, inventive form evoke a time, place and mood that really works.

[Darryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

The cornetist Buddy Bolden (1877-1931) is widely credited as being one of the creators of the music now known as jazz. He was born in New Orleans and formed a band in 1895, which was centered in the red light district known as Storyville and soon became one of the most popular ones in the city (Bolden is seen with his band, standing second from the left in this 1905 photograph). He was influenced by ragtime music, the blues and music from the church, and combined these elements into a unique form which was later termed "jazz". Bolden was a man of several trades, working as a barber and the publisher of a scandalous paper based on information he received from his customers and friends. Unfortunately he was also plagued by alcoholism and mental illness, and his health deteriorated in 1906, when his band was at the peak of its popularity. He suffered an acute mental breakdown the following year, and was admitted to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum, where he was confined for the remainder of his life.

Michael Ondaatje, a confessed lover of jazz, provides us with a fictionalized account of the life of Buddy Bolden, in the form of an improvised riff led by a childhood friend, who became a police officer outside of town and came back to investigate Bolden's increasingly bizarre behavior and downfall. Ondaatje provides the reader with foggy and staccato-like glimpses of Bolden, his wife and mistress, and several other characters who were close to him. Although this was an interesting technique, it did not work for me, as the main character became an elusive spirit who came into and out of focus, which prevented me from understanding the man, his music or his troubled life. This was a commendable effort, but one which frustrated and will quickly be forgotten by this reader.

[Deb · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to classify. It's based on a real person, but too fictionalised to be called biography or non-fiction. It's prose, but it's very experimental - as Ondaatje's first novel, I can see how he's still very much writing with a poet's mindset. And it's confusing, which might, I suppose, be intentional, given that it tells the story of how Buddy Bolden lost his mind. It's also meandering - again, perhaps this is intentional, as it does have the feel of listening to a skilled jazz performer who's got one piece of music to play tonight and by the end of his hour on stage he'll probably bring you back to the end of that piece, but in the meantime, is going to improvise his heart out and take you everywhere. Anywhere.

I found that all of this made it a difficult book to read. As it was, I came back to it two or three times, because it's short and because it's Ondaatje - in all honesty, had it been another author, I probably would not have finished it. But it makes for an impressive debut novel; the writing is definitely skilled, and if you are the kind of reader who looks for that above all else, you might love it.