Download high-resolution image

Coming Through Slaughter

Part of Vintage International

Author Michael Ondaatje

Paperback

$16.00 US

Knopf | Vintage

5.18"W x 7.96"H x 0.46"D | 5 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Mar 19, 1996 | 160 Pages | 9780679767855

Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

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.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE is the author of seven novels, including Coming Through Slaughter, The Cat’s Table, and Warlight; a memoir, Running in the Family; a nonfiction book on film-editing, The Conversations; and several books of poetry, including A Year of Last Things, The Cinnamon Peeler, and Handwriting. Among the international accolades, for all his work, The English Patient received the Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into a film by Anthony Minghella. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto. View titles by Michael Ondaatje

Available for sale exclusive:

• Guam

• Minor Outl.Ins.

• North Mariana

• Philippines

• Puerto Rico

• Samoa,American

• US Virgin Is.

• USA

Available for sale non-exclusive:

• Afghanistan

• Aland Islands

• Albania

• Algeria

• Andorra

• Angola

• Anguilla

• Antarctica

• Argentina

• Armenia

• Aruba

• Austria

• Azerbaijan

• Bahrain

• Belarus

• Belgium

• Benin

• Bhutan

• Bolivia

• Bonaire, Saba

• Bosnia Herzeg.

• Bouvet Island

• Brazil

• Bulgaria

• Burkina Faso

• Burundi

• Cambodia

• Cameroon

• Cape Verde

• Centr.Afr.Rep.

• Chad

• Chile

• China

• Colombia

• Comoro Is.

• Congo

• Cook Islands

• Costa Rica

• Croatia

• Cuba

• Curacao

• Czech Republic

• Dem. Rep. Congo

• Denmark

• Djibouti

• Dominican Rep.

• Ecuador

• Egypt

• El Salvador

• Equatorial Gui.

• Eritrea

• Estonia

• Ethiopia

• Faroe Islands

• Finland

• France

• Fren.Polynesia

• French Guinea

• Gabon

• Georgia

• Germany

• Greece

• Greenland

• Guadeloupe

• Guatemala

• Guinea Republic

• Guinea-Bissau

• Haiti

• Heard/McDon.Isl

• Honduras

• Hong Kong

• Hungary

• Iceland

• Indonesia

• Iran

• Iraq

• Israel

• Italy

• Ivory Coast

• Japan

• Jordan

• Kazakhstan

• Kuwait

• Kyrgyzstan

• Laos

• Latvia

• Lebanon

• Liberia

• Libya

• Liechtenstein

• Lithuania

• Luxembourg

• Macau

• Macedonia

• Madagascar

• Maldives

• Mali

• Marshall island

• Martinique

• Mauritania

• Mayotte

• Mexico

• Micronesia

• Moldavia

• Monaco

• Mongolia

• Montenegro

• Morocco

• Myanmar

• Nepal

• Netherlands

• New Caledonia

• Nicaragua

• Niger

• Niue

• Norfolk Island

• North Korea

• Norway

• Oman

• Palau

• Palestinian Ter

• Panama

• Paraguay

• Peru

• Poland

• Portugal

• Qatar

• Reunion Island

• Romania

• Russian Fed.

• Rwanda

• Saint Martin

• San Marino

• SaoTome Princip

• Saudi Arabia

• Senegal

• Serbia

• Singapore

• Sint Maarten

• Slovakia

• Slovenia

• South Korea

• South Sudan

• Spain

• St Barthelemy

• St.Pier,Miquel.

• Sth Terr. Franc

• Sudan

• Suriname

• Svalbard

• Sweden

• Switzerland

• Syria

• Tadschikistan

• Taiwan

• Thailand

• Timor-Leste

• Togo

• Tokelau Islands

• Tunisia

• Turkey

• Turkmenistan

• Ukraine

• Unit.Arab Emir.

• Uruguay

• Uzbekistan

• Vatican City

• Venezuela

• Vietnam

• Wallis,Futuna

• West Saharan

• Western Samoa

• Yemen

Not available for sale:

• Antigua/Barbuda

• Australia

• Bahamas

• Bangladesh

• Barbados

• Belize

• Bermuda

• Botswana

• Brit.Ind.Oc.Ter

• Brit.Virgin Is.

• Brunei

• Canada

• Cayman Islands

• Christmas Islnd

• Cocos Islands

• Cyprus

• Dominica

• Falkland Islnds

• Fiji

• Gambia

• Ghana

• Gibraltar

• Grenada

• Guernsey

• Guyana

• India

• Ireland

• Isle of Man

• Jamaica

• Jersey

• Kenya

• Kiribati

• Lesotho

• Malawi

• Malaysia

• Malta

• Mauritius

• Montserrat

• Mozambique

• Namibia

• Nauru

• New Zealand

• Nigeria

• Pakistan

• PapuaNewGuinea

• Pitcairn Islnds

• S. Sandwich Ins

• Seychelles

• Sierra Leone

• Solomon Islands

• Somalia

• South Africa

• Sri Lanka

• St. Helena

• St. Lucia

• St. Vincent

• St.Chr.,Nevis

• Swaziland

• Tanzania

• Tonga

• Trinidad,Tobago

• Turks&Caicos Is

• Tuvalu

• Uganda

• United Kingdom

• Vanuatu

• Zambia

• Zimbabwe

"Really a remarkable piece of writing. . . . Brilliantly wrought."
—Toronto Star

"A spectacular breakthrough into a new prose form."
—Globe and Mail

“Marvellously embroidered . . . vivid and arresting. Ondaatje’s oblique approach to Bolden’s mind is as resonant as it is ingenious.”
—Canadian Fiction Magazine

"Anybody who cares about good writing . . . should get this book and luxuriate in it."
—Minneapolis Tribune

"One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time."
—The Observer

"A beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written."
—The Sunday Times

"Coming Through Slaughter is told so well—so stuffed full of the dolour and lust that both buoys and blemishes a life—it reads like a story dying to be told. . . . A classic psychological novel. . . . Coming Through Slaughter displays a knowingness of the unspeakable and how we are each freighted with the dark particulars of history, with the obscene, terrible consequences of time and place goose-stepping us from birth to death."
—Books in Canada

"[Coming Through Slaughter] represents an imaginative feat of a high order: a transcending of cultural and racial and historial barriers. . . . The texture of the book itself has that fertile, driving, improvisational quality, rich with its own pleasure in language and human complexity. . . . A fictional work of uncompromising existential power."
—Canadian Literature

"The book moves very much like a dream. . . . Always, when pure mood threatens to submerge the tale, Ondaatje counters with fact, historical incident, a verbatim fragment of an old jazzman's recollection, and the novel never loses its balance."
—Rolling Stone

“The writing is so skilful that unlikely similes seem inevitable; whole sensations of a hot, ramshackle river town live in small phrases. There is a heartstopping description of Canal Street’s prostitutes; this is no clumsily romantic memoir of a ‘jazz age’ but something much
harder. . . . Ondaatje describes the bizarre flashes of rage, an almost poetic tenderness and the inarticulate fire of music in a way that makes Bolden at once human and mythic.”
—New Musical Express

“Ondaatje packs an amazing amount into very few pages. . . . But he also gets down to the grit, giving us the smells and the textures, the atmosphere of brothels, the rasp of alcohol, the sweat of lovers, among which the imagined thought processes of the musician are slipped like concrete facts. . . . The cumulative effect is one of mesmeric rhythm somewhere between prose and poetry, a musical effect, with twists and turns and bursts of momentum.”
—Topical Books

“The vignettes are precise and memorable. . . . The book combines the precision of Raymond Chandler with the intensity of a suicide note. . . . Marvellous.”
—Books in Canada

“The downtown world of bars, whores, streetlife bursting with music is evoked so vividly, so pungently, you seem to breathe in the atmosphere. . . . I haven’t been so excited by a writer for a long time.”
—Time Out

“[Ondaatje] can make a phrase sing.”
—The Guardian

“Quick . . . vivid . . . sharply written. Ondaatje’s prose is detailed and exact, and at its finest each vignette, like a musical phrase, is intense and biting, unpredictable but appropriate. . . . Ondaatje fulfils his artistic obligations splendidly.”
—Malahat Review

“Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet.”
—Chicago Tribune

About

Creators