- Paperback: 112 pages
- Publisher: Anansi; 1 edition (Jan 1 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0887846084
- ISBN-13: 978-0887846083
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.2 x 1.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 113 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#226,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #79 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Canadian > Asian Canadian
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Twenty-five years before an international crew built highways and camps in the Tunisian desert to film The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje released The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a hybrid of poetry, prose, and photographs he once described as "the film I couldn't afford to shoot." Like the similarly polymorphous Coming Through Slaughter (1976) and Running in the Family (1982), the shape-shifting Billy is intensely concerned with sex, death, and machines.
The virtuosity of later Ondaatje characters Buddy Bolden, Temelcoff, Caravaggio, and Kip is here found in the "machine-like left hand" of the famous gunslinger Billy the Kid. As startlingly and intimately violent as Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, Billy's fusion of poetry and prose creates a uniquely associative and perspectival voice: "The hands were cold as porcelain, one was silver old bone stripped oak white eastern cigarettes white sky the eye core of sun." The carousel of changing speakers offers a vividly fractured portrait of Billy, jumping from the distance of rumour and legend to the psychological intimacy of first-hand accounts.
On the lam in an abandoned barn, Billy convalesces to the hideous sound of rats gorging themselves on fermented grain. As Billy tells it, "[I] filled my gun and fired again and again into their slow wheel across the room at each boommm, and reloaded and fired again and again." In this unapologetically observant examination of the mechanization of both violence and art, Ondaatje, a confessed "child of the bijoux," simultaneously depicts and denounces the dangerously infectious glamour of graceful villains. --Darryl Whetter
Review
“Moving and tragic. . . . Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic circular precision.” —The New York Times Book Review“The Collected Works of Billy the Kid strains one’s powers of description.... Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint.”—Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World“Wonderful.... Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.” —Annie Dillard
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
COULD'VE BEEN LESS PRETENTIOUS,
By Vish Iyer "wish_1979" (BOMBAY, INDIA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Paperback)
The book is full of desultory excerpts from Billyï¿s diary: stories about certain people ï¿ 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 Billyï¿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 ï¿ 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 ï¿ stoic and cold. Amongst the bits from Billyï¿s diary, about the people he knew, there is this interesting story about this mad-man, who used to raise ï¿freakyï¿ 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 Billyï¿s life. Also, Billyï¿s ï¿exclusive jail interviewï¿ is ï¿in-your-faceï¿, 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 couldï¿ve been much better off without Ondaatjeï¿s pretentious effort to be weird.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Came 2 weeks late, but in good condition.,
By
This review is from: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Paperback)
The book came late but it was in very good condition. I had emailed betterworldbooks about the whereabouts and they were quick to respond, although they could not tell me where it was. The book was not marked in or highlighted. Satisfied with my purchase.
3.0 out of 5 stars
When Ondaatje Wasn't Afraid to Experiment...,
By matthew robinson (UNI, Iowa) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Paperback)
...there was this book: an odd assortment of newspaper clippings, dialogue, narrative, description... It's a beautifully odd collection that captures the "idea" of this folk hero, rather than a straight story. Great reading!
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