As I said, it may not be to everyone's taste. If you're looking for discipline and structural form, expecting that every scene will be complete in itself and thus slowly build the entire picture, you're going to be disappointed. But if you're willing to sit back and let it wash over you, knowing that you are before a master portraying an early master, prepared to listen and wait and wait and listen, then at the end, all the seemingly staccato, stuttering fragments suddenly come together like mercury finding itself. An hour later, a day, you will find yourself seeing the whole of it, with brilliant pieces echoing and reverberating endlessly in the mind - and that is the nature and stamp of great jazz.
Ondaatje tells of Buddy Bolden's descent into his own hell, unwitting or self-created we do not know, but, in the process generating a level of art and beauty unsurpassed in its time and which endured and influenced the music of several later generations. It is a story of despair, madness, loneliness, of the viciousness of life affecting high art, of art struggling to transcend life's miseries, not always successfully, but ultimately a tale of aching lyricism. It is, thus, itself great jazz.
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Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Very interesting - thanks and welcome!
2 - Jan Eggers
Wow. I must read this book. I just hope that it's not a case of the review being better written than the book. Well done.
3 - alisa
i luv this book so much - bought it at a used book store in oahu to read on the flight home - it was like i accidentally dosed on morphine & stumbled into the looking glass - unexpected, lovely and sweetly sad - it's short, i read it slow to make it last XOXOXO