Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje ISBN: 0-679-76786-X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 March, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.14 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Can Ondaatje Get Any Better?
Comment: Ondaatje's first book is a bona fide masterpiece. Pure and simple, Billy the Kid is a wonderful weave of the mythology of the old west, the darkest vines of human nature, and the poetry in all things that makes life worth living. I thought Coming Through Slaughter, which utilizes some of the same kinds of architecture in its scattered-card-like narrative, was brilliant; Billy the Kid adds mind-blowing to that!
Rating: 5
Summary: Billy the Kid Speaks!
Comment: Michael Ondaatje's sprawling sequence of verse interspersed with poetic prose exposes the persona poem as one of poetry's surest paths to honesty. Through unsettlingly precise detail and unsentimental empathy, the character of Billy the Kid is recreated-and revisited-in all its brutality and splendor. Ondaatje's unflinching commitment to honesty yields a persona that is as vibrant and realized as possible, resulting in a series of confessions that range from disturbing to revelatory.
The image, consistently startling, graphic and discomforting, carries the speaker through the entire sequence. Whereas most imagery depends on the eye for effect, Ondaatje utilizes all five senses throughout the book. We taste wine "so fine/it was like drinking ether," we feel Pat Garret's "oiled rifle" against Maxwell's cheek and hear it fire beside his ear, "leaving a powder scar on Maxwell's face that stayed with him all his life." We smell the smoke in Garret's shirt and taste the nicotine in his mouth. At times, the stunned silence of Ondaatje's unremitting narrative conjures a hush so palpable that we can "listen to deep buried veins in our palms." It doesn't take long for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid to immerse the reader in its own unique world, accessible now only through words and photographs.
Most memorable, though, are the intensely graphic images that sprout from the page throughout the book. The chicken digging for a vein in the dying Gregory's neck, the warts in Billy the Kid's throat "breaking through veins like pieces of long glass tubing," the blood caked in Tom O'Folliard's "hair, arms, shoulders, everywhere." All these paint an unmistakable landscape of a bleak and desolate New Mexico in the 1880's, a scene so haunted that even "the sun turned into a pair of hands" and pulled out hairs from Billy the Kid's head which, we're told later, is "smaller than a rat." Not one potentially enlivening detail is overlooked; not one square inch of landscape or action escapes the reader's view.
Ondaatje's ambitious project demonstrates that the recipe for great writing is precise detail compounded by believable emotion, a recipe he follows to the letter. Ondaatje executes these two devices so effectively at times that a kind of piercing, revelatory insight emerges periodically. Magical disclosures such as the characterization of Pat Garrett as one who "became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly he couldn't tell what they planned to do," help to fully realize both the character of Billy the Kid and the times in which he lived, and establish Ondaatje's book as perhaps one of the greatest attempts at persona poetry in the 20th century.
Rating: 4
Summary: COULD'VE BEEN LESS PRETENTIOUS
Comment: The book is full of desultory excerpts from Billy's diary: stories about certain people ' acquaintances, friends, foes, cops, outlaws (like the one he was) is told, which seem irrelevant until those people are referred to in some other part of the book, involved in a small incident involving Billy himself, or just Billy, shedding some more light on their persona. At times, it does feel that Ondaatje is being pretentious by making efforts to purposely disconnect fragments of the book and placing them hugger-mugger, just to make the book a little bit more outré, at other times, it is this annoying and deliberate effort by him, that adds color to this book, and forces the reader to read it more than once to get a grip of what is happening in the book; and with the book becoming more and more comestible with every subsequent reading, who could complain.
The poetry, as it seems to me, gets too vague to understand sometimes, and seems grossly out-of-context, though choice of words seem quite interesting. Moreover, it seems like one needs to know beforehand, the context of the poetry, and a brief know-how of Billy's life, both of which could not be found in the book. This makes the understanding of certain poems, a bit too hard. The simplest poems of the book, is what give it high points: like the one about swatting a fly ' in all its simplicity, this detailed poetic- explanation of how Billy killed an innocuous fly, in addition to the people he had killed, hits the reader hard, with all its earthiness. Also worth highlighting is another poetry-of-sort, which describes the snoring, sleeping friend of Billy, and how his stertorous snoring made a funny whistling sound, when the air from his mouth was forced out of the gap in between his frontal pair of teeth: unassuming, touching and effective.
The book is rather funny, in the way the various killings and encounters are described. No detail is spared, and the gore is described, exactly the way it had happened: and all this, without an iota of emotion ' stoic and cold. Amongst the bits from Billy's diary, about the people he knew, there is this interesting story about this mad-man, who used to raise 'freaky' dogs; he cross-bred them, sub-Rosa, only to be brutally killed by them. Also, the excerpt about Paul Garrett, the ideal assassin and Sallie Chisum makes one feel there were really some colorful and adorable people in Billy's life. Also, Billy's 'exclusive jail interview' is 'in-your-face', and at times, laughable.
All in all, the book is worth the money paid for it, though there are instances, where some material seem grossly out-of-context and leaves the reader lost: it could've been much better off without Ondaatje's pretentious effort to be weird.
 |
Title: Blending Genre, Altering Style : Writing Multigenre Papers by Tom Romano ISBN: 0867094788 Publisher: Boynton/Cook Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
 |
Title: Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje ISBN: 0679767851 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
 |
Title: Inland Whale Nine Stories Retold from California by Theodora Kroeber ISBN: 0520006763 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: November, 1989 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
 |
Title: The White Album by Joan Didion ISBN: 0374522219 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
 |
Title: Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life by Robert M. Utley ISBN: 0803295588 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: August, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.41 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
