The Collected Works of Billy The Kid by Michael Ondaatje

I felt a lot of excitement reading this novel, it completely relates to my penchant for taking historical facts and people and turning them into art. See my staunch defense of Toni Morrison's Beloved or better yet visit my own Noblewomen, these will attest for me. Ondaatje has done a fab job of playing with history in this illustrated literary collage of poems, anecdote and "remeberances" from the people that best knew the famous outlaw Billy the Kid. It's all rooted in such accurate-sounding detail and hard circumstances of frontier life and lawlessness. I like this terse image as told by Billy himself:

After shooting Gregory
this is what happened

I'd shot him well and careful
made it explode under his heart
so it wouldnt last long and
was about to walk away
when this chicken paddles out to him
and as he was falling hops on his neck
digs the beak into his throat
straightens legs and heaves
a red and blue vein out

Meanwhile he fell
and the chicken walked away

still tugging at the vein
till it was 12 yards long
as if it held that body like a kite
Gregory's last words being

get away from me yer stupid chicken

Isn't that cool? Its this kind of scientific description, that ends up depicting a surreal situation. Poems, impressions and precise character sketches combine in this boook to create a painterly, mish-mash kind of a story that manages to evoke an emotional engagement with the charaters. The writing style is distant, objective and mired in what I assume is historically accurate detail. Yet the whole impression left is as fuzzy as old photos from those days. It's a satisfying, and somehow truthful, way to portray historical figures.

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