Coming Through Slaughter

“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