Product Description

William Bonney first killed another man when he was just twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had slain nineteen more. He was known as Billy the Kid, a bloodthirsty outlaw; a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger in the heart and calmly walk away while birds ravaged the corpse. Drawing on contemporary accounts, photographs, dime novels and his own imagination, Ondaatje takes you inside the mind of Billy the Kid, tracing his bloody passage across the blasted landscape of New Mexico and through the battles with his captor and eventual killer, Pat Garrett.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154478 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
'Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic, circular precision a good little book, carefully crafted, thoroughly literate' New York Times Book Review 'A compassionate and convincing portrait not only of a savage individual but of the casually brutal human wilderness in which Billy was both villain and victim Sharply conceived and brilliantly carried through' Times Literary Supplement 'Wonderful Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art' Annie Dillard 'Ondaatje's eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint' Larry McMurtry, author of The Last Picture Show

About the Author
Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Toronto. The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into an Oscar-winning film directed by Anthony Minghella.

Customer Reviews

A real tour de force--stunning in its effect.
This early (1970) "novel" by Michael Ondaatje is a collage of poetry, narrative, memoir, photography, journalism, and fiction surrounding Billy the Kid. Ondaatje poeticizes Billy's thoughts, giving us "insight" into the inner man, while, at the same time, creating a kind of suspense about the inevitable outcome.

By constantly shifting the narrative focus and point of view from Billy to some of his cohorts, the women who loved them, and the "lawmen" who sought them, Ondaatje avoids the need for transitions which would normally challenge the biographer of a legend. And by allowing time to be circuitous, rather than linear, Ondaatje is able to give flesh and bone to the impressions he creates by enlisting the reader's help in "organizing" his material. In short, this is an impressionistic word-painting which gives freshness and vibrancy to an old saga of the Wild West.

Rambling
The author has presented this book as if Billy had written a series of notes and observations, some are poetry, some are about women, some are accounts. My main problems with the work is that it does tend to ramble on and also that the author doesn't seem to know much about frontier life unless the subject is a cowboy - I doubt very much that Sallie Chisholm lived in a bungalow with running water and collected exotic animals.