Wednesday, May 23, 2007
At the end of January, I wrote a final exam and opted to not sign up for another course until post-baby. Though I miss the studies, I know I made the right decision to focus on health, work and rest. What I don't miss is the reading... oh, you know... required reading. Despite the fact that most reading in my studies interests me, it's a great relief to now have the luxury to read for FUN!
I started and finished a book this week written by Michael Ondaatje titled Coming Through Slaughter. I had purchased this book with Christmas money from 2004 but forgot about it among the home mini-library. I enjoy Ondaatje and now, having read another of his pieces, I remember why. His fiction reads like poetry (which he does publish half the time) since he gets away with not finishing sentences and yet somehow, those sentences don't feel incomplete. I wonder if he is more choosy about his words and as a result just eliminates them completely from the sentence. I also wonder if Ondaatje is really fantastic at leaving wads of characters and places to our imagination by being vague and elusive in his word decisions or or if he tells it so clearly and concisely that I can smell, taste, touch and see the image he's created.
Anyway, the book is luscious. It's a story about Buddy Bolden, a legendary cornet player and apparent barber by day who also publishes a gossip rag called The Cricket. Buddy is a loud man, a hard-living and hard-loving man who exudes the spirit of the city in which he lives, New Orleans. The story takes place in the late 1800s - early 1900s, and smells like sweat, cajun food and cigarettes. Having been in New Orleans, I enjoyed the flavour of the book because it's so unforgiving to the town that just has a deep dark hole of a soul.
What really got me is that the book is fiction but isn't entirely fictional. Apparently, Charles "Buddy" Bolden was a legend in New Orleans jazz at the turn of the 20th century. Ondaatje simply opted to build the story of a legend with some truths to it and some imagined. Ondaatje experiments with Bolden's demise and comes out apparently controversial. At any rate, the joy of the crude read, which has little in the way of redemption, is the art of the writing. As for me, Michael Ondaatje continues to demonstrate his skills as an exquisite wordsmith. Even though it's hard reading of content that is typically less than beautiful, it's always worth the effort.
I started and finished a book this week written by Michael Ondaatje titled Coming Through Slaughter. I had purchased this book with Christmas money from 2004 but forgot about it among the home mini-library. I enjoy Ondaatje and now, having read another of his pieces, I remember why. His fiction reads like poetry (which he does publish half the time) since he gets away with not finishing sentences and yet somehow, those sentences don't feel incomplete. I wonder if he is more choosy about his words and as a result just eliminates them completely from the sentence. I also wonder if Ondaatje is really fantastic at leaving wads of characters and places to our imagination by being vague and elusive in his word decisions or or if he tells it so clearly and concisely that I can smell, taste, touch and see the image he's created.
Anyway, the book is luscious. It's a story about Buddy Bolden, a legendary cornet player and apparent barber by day who also publishes a gossip rag called The Cricket. Buddy is a loud man, a hard-living and hard-loving man who exudes the spirit of the city in which he lives, New Orleans. The story takes place in the late 1800s - early 1900s, and smells like sweat, cajun food and cigarettes. Having been in New Orleans, I enjoyed the flavour of the book because it's so unforgiving to the town that just has a deep dark hole of a soul.
What really got me is that the book is fiction but isn't entirely fictional. Apparently, Charles "Buddy" Bolden was a legend in New Orleans jazz at the turn of the 20th century. Ondaatje simply opted to build the story of a legend with some truths to it and some imagined. Ondaatje experiments with Bolden's demise and comes out apparently controversial. At any rate, the joy of the crude read, which has little in the way of redemption, is the art of the writing. As for me, Michael Ondaatje continues to demonstrate his skills as an exquisite wordsmith. Even though it's hard reading of content that is typically less than beautiful, it's always worth the effort.
# posted by tfoxfan @ 8:51 PM 
