Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

Coming Through Slaughter

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Language
  
Pages
  
159 pp

Originally published
  
1976

Publisher
  
House of Anansi Press

OCLC
  
256760805

3.9/5
Goodreads

Publication date
  
1976

ISBN
  
0-88784-051-5

Country
  
Coming Through Slaughter t0gstaticcomimagesqtbnANd9GcQT9T6ozX6iaI3qm

Cover artist
  
Coach House Press (design)

Media type
  
Print (Hardback & Paperback)

Genres
  
Historical drama, Biographical novel

Similar
  
Michael Ondaatje books, Fiction books

Coming through slaughter


Coming Through Slaughter is a novel by Michael Ondaatje, published by House of Anansi in 1976. It was the winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award.

Contents

The novel is a fictionalised version of the life of the New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. It covers the last months of Bolden's sanity in 1907, as his music becomes more radical and his behaviour more erratic. A secondary character in the story is the photographer E. J. Bellocq. Both these historical figures are portrayed in ways that draw on their actual lives, but which depart from the facts in order to explore the novel's central theme – the relationship between creativity and self-destruction.

The novel draws on the style of jazz, being structured in a fragmented, and "syncopated" form, with episodes extending in elongated "riffs" before suddenly lurching unpredictably into an apparently unrelated scene. The structure also conveys Bolden's own wild, fragmenting personality, as his schizophrenia takes hold. Bolden's manic, extroverted but self-harming behaviour is set against the introverted figure of Bellocq, who expresses his own frustrated desires in his intimate erotic photographs, but then compusively violates them with scratches.

In 2006, Variety reported that Ben Ross was adapting Coming Through Slaughter for the screen.

Coming through slaughter


References

Coming Through Slaughter Wikipedia


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