Identify Books Supposing The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
| Original Title: | The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems |
| ISBN: | 0747572607 (ISBN13: 9780747572602) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Governor General's |
| Literary Awards: | / Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général for Prose and Poetry (1970) |
Michael Ondaatje
Paperback | Pages: 105 pages Rating: 3.99 | 3561 Users | 305 Reviews
Itemize Epithetical Books The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
| Title | : | The Collected Works of Billy the Kid |
| Author | : | Michael Ondaatje |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 105 pages |
| Published | : | by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (first published 1970) |
| Categories | : | Poetry. Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Westerns. Cultural. Canada |
Ilustration To Books The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
avant-garde, postmodern, revisionist, a deconstruction, self-conscious and self-aware, prose from another planet, beautifully brutal, the kind of spikey poetry you see in some of the books of Hawke or even some DeLillo (i'm thinking Libra), the kind of book that you read and reread and remember forever. at least this reader did.all of the above does nothing to sum up the yearning and strangeness and rightness of this underrated modern classic.
i mentioned 'poetry' but i am talking about the prose. poetic prose, yes a cliche and yes wonderful when it is done right. and hey, there's actual poetry here too. 'poetry written by Billy the Kid' apparently. obviously not, but this is postmodernism or whatever so does it even matter? the poetry captures the character perfectly. perfect poetry.
Billy the Kid, vicious animal
Pat Garrett, so sane he's insane
Billy the Kid, the mythology removed and built up again
the fragmented, cut-up style is ingenius. historical records, first person accounts, news blurbs, photographs, poetry, pulp fiction... it all comes together to paint a picture of a timeless place populated with timeless characters enacting a timeless dance with fate and death. fate and death, fate and death, fate and death. is this really a Western? i suppose so, but it is so much else as well.
i'm looking through my old photocopy of the novel (thanks, Interlibrary Loan of 20 years ago) and i'm feeling a need to read this a third time. maybe i can then write a better review. oh you beautiful novel, i want to put my hands all over you again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6eSks...
Rating Epithetical Books The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Ratings: 3.99 From 3561 Users | 305 ReviewsJudgment Epithetical Books The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
What I think Ondaatje does well in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is that he doesnt tell this Western tale in the form of a traditional Western narrative. And in this case, I think it makes the collected narratives (we get perspectives from Sallie and Paulita too) more interesting. And I think this formatting says something about the way we tell and have told stories. As the reader, we hardly get a linearly structured story. I found myself reaching back to previous pages often. ForI have a theory about my difficulties with poetry. I think, because I kind of discovered prose outside of learning, I've always viewed it as past-time more anything. My parents got me reading early, I feel like I was reading books quite early. I certainly had a well-established addiction to Famous Five by the time I was in first class (seven-ish?).But never poetry. The only poetry I was ever really exposed to was in the classroom. Thinking about it like that I can understand how other kids felt
If you're looking for something along the lines of The True History of the Kelly Gang or even Lonesome Dove, this ain't that. There were bits in this mishmash that worked, but the overall effect was too disjointed and maybe even self-indulgent to make for a satisfying read. Then again, it's Ondaatje, and Annie Dillard and Larry McMurtry blurbed it, so maybe I failed the author rather than the other way around.
This is a portrait of Billy the Kid as reflected in a thousand pieces of a shattered mirror. The book is composed of vignettes, poems, photos, and fragments of prose, each of which is a little stroke of brilliance and all of which together paint an incredibly rich, violent, and moving portrait of this young man and his legend. Ondaatje is quite a conjurer here.
"Get away from me yer stupid chicken."Oh man I love this book. There's a blurb from Larry McMurtry where he admits that it "strains one's powers of descrition" which pretty much sums it up. The Collected Works explores the interior life of Billy the Kid and his relationship with Pat Garrett. It's raw, funny, and frightening all in one go. Because 1) it's so interior, 2) Ondaatje excels at this sort of characterization, and 3) Billy is bat shit crazy, the exteriors are hyperbolic and grotesque.
Traditional novels starring legendary figures out of history often fill in too many of the blanks, either inflating the legend further with far-fetched inventions or deflating the legend with mundane, unnecessary details. This book does not try to fill in all the spaces, it's a brief assemblage of images and graphic episodes. It's imperfect and difficult to follow, but so was Billy the Kid. I love his ugly-ass smiling portrait.Ondaatje did this same exercise with Buddy Bolden, the seminal jazz
I've taken to describing this book as "What would happen if William Faulkner wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a poem. Concisely. In Canada."So it's no surprise that it blew me away.
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