Michael Ondaatje, Coming through Slaughter

Daniel Findlay Bedggood (University of Canterbury)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 10.3.5: South Asian Diasporic Literature and Culture, 1800-present.
Vol. editors: Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Pavan Kumar Malreddy (J W Goethe University of Frankfurt), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège), Muneeza Shamsie (Independent Scholar - Asia), Niaz Zaman (Independent University Bangladesh)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1976

Places

Canada (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Biography (literary)
Metafiction
Novel

Resources

Michael Ondaatje’s continued engagement with historical representation is evident in this novel in the character of the famous jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans milieu he inhabited, and his subsequent end in the “bug house” (105). The novel, published in 1976, won the Books in Canada First Novel award for that year, and gives an account of Bolden’s life in the early years of the twentieth century immediately before and after his fall into madness, also taking in other historical figures, such as the photographer Bellocq.

Bolden was an early jazzman known for his innovation, showmanship, sheer volume and “madness”, who nonetheless went largely “unrecorded”. Ondaatje’s work poses questions about how …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3645 words

Citation: Bedggood, Daniel Findlay. "Coming through Slaughter". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 November 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5878, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Save this article