Coming Through Slaughter

By Michael Ondaatje,

Book cover of Coming Through Slaughter

Book description

Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday Times

Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Coming Through Slaughter as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Another work that is wonderfully and winningly hard to pin down, Coming Through Slaughter is an imaginative and fragmentary collage of monologue, memoir, interviews, lyrics, photographs, archival material, hospital files—and white space—that builds a novelistic portrait of the mythical dark life and hard times of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the originators of jazz in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. From the little that is known about Bolden and his music, Ondaatje shapes an audacious story that is short, cinematic, dream-like, and devastating, a book that incontrovertibly proved once again to me that there are…

From Philip's list on jazz (and a whole lot more).

As a Louisiana native and music lover, I grew up knowing Buddy Bolden’s name. Yet I knew almost nothing of his life and was elated to find that one of my favorite writers had written about Bolden’s life in New Orleans. This slim, elegant novel taught me how creative a work of historical fiction can be—and how to tell a large story in compact form.

From Elise's list on that lie to tell the truth.

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