Coming Through Slaughter

A beautiful book, deeply musical in its structure and themes. Ondaatje is quickly becoming my favorite author in current literature, and even if this doesn't rise to the level of my favorite book of his ("in the skin of a lion") it still shares many of its traits. The level of description and ability to conjure up mood is, as always with him, flawless. Here's his description of a jam session, for example: "On into the night and into blue mornings, growing louder the notes burning through and off everyone and forgotten in the body because they were swallowed by the next one after and Bolden and Lewis and Cornish and Mumford sending them forward and forth and forth till, as he could see them, their bursts of air were animals fighting in the room." Like this there is lots in the book. Paragraphs that just make you stop dead in your tracks and send you back to relive them again, just wondering how he does it. The story is small, just imagining the last year and a half in the life of a musician that succumbed to schizophrenia in early twentieth century New Orleans. In the process, he draws parallels to another artist, a photographer who focuses on chronicling the inhabitants of the