Ondaatje, Michael

Average customer rating:

'Divisadero' deserves the Booker Prize.
Disappointing
Facing "the raw truth."
simply beautiful, haunting and wonderful
A Satisfying Literary Tale of Two Broken Families, A Century Apart

Divisadero
Michael Ondaatje
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0307266354
Release Date: 2007-05-29

Amazon.com

From the celebrated author of The English Patient, comes another breathtaking, unforgettable story, this time about a family torn apart by an act of violence. Divisadero is a rich and rewarding read, one that Jhumpa Lahiri, in her guest review for Amazon.com (see below), calls "Ondaatje's finest novel to date." --Daphne Durham

<hr size="1">Guest Reviewer: Jhumpa Lahiri

<img src="http://images.amazon.com//images/P/0618733965.01.SWATCHXX.jpg" border="0" align="left"> Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award for her mesmerizing debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her poignant and powerful debut novel, The Namesake was adapted by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, and released in theaters in 2007. 

My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. I began Divisadero as soon as it came into my possession and over the course of a few evenings was captivated by Ondaatje's finest novel to date. The story is simple, almost mythical, stemming from a family on a California farm that is ruptured just as it is about to begin. Two daughters, Anna and Claire, are raised not just as siblings but with the intense bond of twins, interchangeable, inseparable. Coop, a boy from a neighboring farm, is folded into the girls' lives as a hired hand and quasi-brother. Anna, Claire, and Coop form a triangle that is intimate and interdependent, a triangle that brutally explodes less than thirty pages into the book. We are left with a handful of glass, both narratively and thematically. But Divisadero is a deeply ordered, full-bodied work, and the fragmented characters, severed from their shared past, persevere in relation to one another, illuminating both what it means to belong to a family and what it means to be alone in the world. The notion of twins, of one becoming two, pervades the novel, and so the farm in California is mirrored by a farm in France, the setting for another plot line in the second half of the book and giving us, in a sense, two novels in one. But the stories are not only connected but calibrated by Ondaatje to reveal a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes, and reflections across time and place. Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje's method is deliberate but discreet, and it was only in rereading this beautiful book--which I wanted to do as soon as I finished it--that the intricate play of doubles was revealed. Every sign of the author's genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life's most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence--subjects that have shaped Ondaatje's previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve. --Jhumpa Lahiri

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Book Description

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.

In the 1970s in Northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives.

Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos and eventually to the landscape of south-central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough hewn from the past.

Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multilayered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.

Customer Reviews:

'Divisadero' deserves the Booker Prize........2007-06-14

It is difficult to write a review for a novel that rises above superlatives. Ondaatje is one of the world's greatest living writers, and Divisadero is his finest novel. At times it rises to the level of true greatness, and it is the most challenging novel I have ever read. It is also my new favorite.

Be forewarned: this is not a light read. The prose is smooth and lyrical and unmistakably Ondaatje. The novel focuses on memory, the past, and violence as his prior works have but Divisadero takes the concept one step further: it is separated into three distinct sections, overlapping enough only to give the reader a reason to continue reading. It reads more like a collection of three novellas than it does a novel. It also travels in reverse chronological order. I considered the opening section to be the main story, with the following stories as the reflections spoken of in the novel's last line.

This is not a novel that concerns itself heavily with plot. It is an exploration of its themes first and foremost. I don't want to speak for the author, but it seems to me it was not written to be a page turner. If that is what you're expecting I think you'll probably be disappointed. Any hope of that will be gone with the abrupt end to the opening section. But don't give up because of it. There are many novels with compelling stories: there are few that treat its reader with as much respect as Divisadero. Ondaatje tells you a story, but not all of it. He leaves the unwritten to the reader to piece together. What does it mean that Coop/Anna and Segura both have blue tables they treasure? What does it mean that Coop becomes a card player and Segura names Ramon's sidekick `One-eyed Jaques'? What does it mean that the colors of Anna's five flags are all represented in Segura's story, from the color of Marie-Neige's dress to the white mucus of diphtheria? My hat is off to you if you were able to decipher their meanings on your first read. I sure couldn't. But multiple readings are exactly what this book is all about. I'm not sure I agree with Amazon's description of the links between past and present as being `explosive', but they are definitely meaningful, and I would argue they are the core of the novel. I never -- NEVER -- reread books within a year, but this is going to be a notable exception.

This novel in one word: Haunting. It will stay with you for a long time. Ondaatje is a master.

Disappointing .......2007-06-12

There's much to enjoy in this new Ondaatje novel--all his usual gifts are on display--but I was disappointed. First, it seems too many serious writers these days are obsessed with writing itself as a metaphor for life and all its existential complexity. Ondaatje tries to include the "world" in his tortured literary effort--e.g., clunky references to the two Gulf Wars--but in the end the novel and its concerns feel terribly self-involved and self-referential, like he's finally given into a private world just as his characters Lucien Segura, Rafael, and Anna have done. Art as an escape from truth. Nietzsche deserves a better interpretation! Second, I found it needlessly confusing. I know we're not supposed to admit this -- we're supposed to pretend that it all makes sense--but does it? Early on Anna recounts a shared memory in the barn with her sister Claire. She says that "even now" they remember it differently. When is even now? She runs away from home and never goes back as far as we know, so when do she and Anna get together and compare memories? Also, how can her telling of Lucien's life story contain resonances with Coop's life after she left, a life of which she knows nothing? Are we to believe in magic here, or are we to believe that the family at some point reunites?

Don't get me wrong, the book is a pleasurable serious read. I read it in one sitting (one long plane ride). But it became increasingly disappointing as it went on. He refuses to tell a straight story--I get it--but the (perhaps) unintended effect of his narrative stubbornness is that as the book went on I wanted basically one thing: to know what happened to Coop, whom he abandons at mid-book. You can't just create a character and a story line as compelling as this one and then throw it away as if it started to smell bad to you. It smacks of an author who might disdain his own readers.

And, finally, I felt the book was haunted by Ian McEwan's superior Atonement. This may be cruel, but this book felt like a convoluted knock-off of it.

Facing "the raw truth.".......2007-06-08

"We have art," Nietzsche says, "so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth" (p. 267).

Michael Ondaatje (1943) has a rare talent for establishing exquisite resonances in his writing. Best known for The English Patient, Booker-Prize-winning novelist, Ondaatje's latest novel tells the breathtaking story of a single father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, who live on Northern California farm in the 1970s with a farmhand, Coop. Anna, Claire, and Coop develop an intensely-bonded triangle that is violently torn apart when the girls' father discovers Anna (at age 16) having sex with Coop (who is 20). The incident "sets fire" to the rest of Anna's life. Years later in the early 1900s, Ondaatje's now-fragmented characters Claire and Coop are reunited by chance in Nevada, while Anna is living in rural France. She has immersed herself in researching the life of Lucien Segura, a Gallic writer, while also attemting to come to terms with "the raw truth" of her own life. In the course of the novel, readers learn the novel's title not only refers to the street dividing San Francisco's Presidio from open space, but to the Spanish word "divisar," the vantage point of division. Anna's story becomes intertwined with the life of her subject, and Ondaatje's elliptical, structurally-disjointed narrative moves back and forth in both time and place, beautifully exploring the depths of family, youthful love, and becoming truly alone in the world.

Divisadero is a difficult book that becomes even more meaningful with a second reading. Parallels between the rural California and Segura stories emerge (like shards of glass that suddenly fit together), connections between the first and second half on the novel become more apparent, and many loose ends disappear. Anna finds meaning in her life only through her "contraptual dance" with Segura and his son, Raphael.

G. Merritt

simply beautiful, haunting and wonderful.......2007-06-06

A few books in my all time top ten never change. There are two Ondaatje books there, THE ENGLISH PATIENT being one, and IN THE SKIN OF A LION being the other and my personal favorite. I was disappointed with ANIL'S GHOST and picked up DIVISERADO with mixed feelings. From the first image to the last line I read this book with my heart in my mouth. I had to force myself to read it slowly and repeat sections, they were so beautiful and contained so much. I can't praise this book enough, it's totally awesome. It's next to my bed now and all I want to do is re-read it. I know it will be a long time before I read anything half as good. Just read this book - it's an amazing tapestry of life.

A Satisfying Literary Tale of Two Broken Families, A Century Apart.......2007-06-03

Divisadero, one of Michael Ondaatje's characters helpfully informs us, is a street in San Francisco, a former dividing line between the city and the open area of the Presidio. Then again, the character tells us, perhaps the name comes from the Spanish divisar, meaing to "gaze at something from a distance," from a vantage point where one can see far. While the actual street and the city of San Francisco have little significance to the story, both of these inferred meanings come into play as Ondaatje unwinds two parallel tales, nearly a century apart, of natural and acquired families, of passions and betrayals and deaths, and of orphaned children and equally abandoned parents.

DIVISADERO, the book, offers two intertwined stories, connected through the peculiar literary researches of one of the modern characters named Anna. Anna specializes in writing biographies of history's secondary characters, the unkown individuals who orbit the lives of the famous. She has chosen for her latest subject an obscure, one-eyed, turn-of-the-century French poet named Lucien Segura. Anna's explorations lead her to occupy the last house where Segura lived. While there, she meets and interviews Segura's semi-adopted son Rafael, ultimately engaging him in a sexual affair.

In a dreamlike recounting of Segura's life that appears meant to be viewed as Anna's biographical voice, we later learn that Lucien was more successful as the anonymous author of a series of light escapist fictions based on his romantic imaginings of a lost love than he was as a poet. Ondaatje launches into three more intertwined narratives centered on Segura - his lifelong enamoration with his childhood neighbor Marie-Neige and her husband Roman, his encapsulation of Marie-Neige and Roman's lives into his highly popular light fictions, and his relationship in later years with Rafael and his gypsy parents Aria and Liebard/Astolphe. Segura's frustrations over his lost childhood infatuation with Marie-Neige and his inadvertent sighting of his pregnant daughter in flagrante delicto in an outdoor shower with his second daughter's fiancé lead him to abandon his wife and family for life as a recluse. Gradually, of course, his life reopens in its new surroundings and he befriends Rafael's itinerant family, taking young Rafael under his literary wing. When Rafael's family eventually decides to pull up stakes and head north following the Great War, Segura is effectively orphaned, left in solitude to end his life in a romantically poetic fashion.

Early on in the book, Ondaatje informs us that "the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one's life like an image through a camera obscura." Not long after, Anna describes herself as the "person who discovers subtexts in history and art, where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." So naturally, Anna's life story twists like a DNA strand around Segura's, forming a complementary double helix. Anna we learn early in the novel has two "acquired" siblings, a false twin named Claire (an orphan) whom Anna's father adopts at the same time Anna was born, her mother having passed away in childbirth. The two girls share an older "false brother" named Coop, another unofficial adoptee, a farmhand whose parents had been murdered in his early youth. When Anna's father later discovers his 15-year-old daughter in flagrante delicto with Coop, he beats the young man nearly senseless and causes Anna to nearly kill her father with a shard of glass (paralleling Segura's loss of eyesight from the shattered glass of a window in his youth). Coop disappears, as does Anna, and the family unit is largely shattered. Coop, by far DIVISADERO's most engaging character, elevates his fanciful dreams of youth - striking it rich while panning for gold - into a career as a cardsharp. Claire, later working for the San Francisco D.A.'s office, unexpectedly runs into Coop in Lake Tahoe just as he endures another physical beating and his life takes a dramatic turn for the worse.

Some readers may indeed be taken by Ondaatje's impeccable prose, which gravitates from an eerily Cormac McCarthy-like voice in Coop's story to a faintly 19th Century European voice in Segura's tale. Others may be put off by the abrupt dropping of Claire and Coop's story - even Anna's story more or less fades into Segura's denoument. Parallels, of course, abound in the two story lines, from One-Eyed Jacques alluding to Coop's gambling and Coop's gambling partner The Dauphin referring to French royal lineage to Claire's tending to the damaged Coop as Segura imagines he tends to the dying Marie. In the end, however, Ondaatje tells us that life goes on, that successive generations unintentionally retell the same stories and interpret the past and their own histories in the light of one another. In DIVISADERO's closing scene over the silent lake, he writes, "Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible." Humans are little different, he is telling us.

Average customer rating:

2.5 stars. The author tries too hard and does not succeed in creating a masterpiece
pretentious
Watch the movie
GOOD between 3.5 and 4 stars
One of My Top Ten Great Books of All Time

The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0679745203
Release Date: 1993-11-30

Amazon.com

Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.

A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family.

Book Description

The Booker Prize-winning novel, now a critically acclaimed major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas. With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

Customer Reviews:

2.5 stars. The author tries too hard and does not succeed in creating a masterpiece.......2007-04-29

Before I start I have to say that I loved the English Patient film. Minghella (director) manages to capture the beautiful romance between the characters and the stark beauty of the desert like no other director has been able to.

This book however, doesn't. Don't get me wrong. Ondaatje isn't a terrible writer. He's just not great. He tries very hard to be different (speechmarks are obviously passe?) and it shows. The English Patient novel doesn't really have any of the elements that make the movie so likeable. For starters, the book isn't coherent. It jumps everywhere. Some of the jumps are clear. Others are not. One gets the feeling that they're in there just for kicks, not for any real story-driving purpose.

Secondly...a LOT of Ondaatje's metaphors just.don't.work.

For example you have the ones that almost work:

"I don't think (Clifton) he loved the desert, but he had an affection for it that grew out of awe at our stark order, into which he wanted to fit himself - like a joyous undergraduate who respects silent behaviour in a library."

The ones that seem very high school:

"He (caravaggio) rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet."

And the bewildering:

"He (Kip) knew he was now a king...it was strange to him. As if he had been handed a large suit of clothes rhat he could roll around in and whose sleeves would drag behind him."

This is not so say that Ondaatje doesn't paint some beautiful imagery as well. He does. But those instances tend to be few and far between. He also has the infuriating tendency to marr prefectly stunning imagery. For example, at the beginning of the book, he gives you this fantastic image of a young boy dancing next to a fire. Next thing you know, semen is being picked up from the sand. ?!? He does this over and over again.

I have never said this about any book/movie, but honestly, watch the movie as it is an infinitely better interpretation of the the book, than the book itself. The characters in the movie are likeable, and the story is complex and beautiful. The same, strangely, cannot be said of the book.

pretentious.......2007-03-08

English patient has some interesting characters and the plot does have some intrigue, but please, an astounding book? Not. Too many little-finger-in-the-air chardonnays for the book review set. The author's prose is like reading a college literature student's overdone ramblings, he tries way to hard to be artful with words, which is really an inconsideration to the reader. The author's ability to be creative should be secondary to his ability to communicate. A lot of the metaphors don't work, simply leaving you puzzled. This book is like going to dinner with people who can speak the same language as you, but decide they will talk in another, company be damned.

Watch the movie.......2007-02-18

While I loved the movie, the book left me dry and perplexed. Normally I prefer the book to the movie, but in this case, it was the other way around. The story jumps around a great deal and you live in the heads of Hana, Caravagio and Kip, but only graze upon those of Catherine and Almasy. If you expect to read about that great romance, better just rent the video because it's not in the book.

GOOD between 3.5 and 4 stars.......2007-02-09

I liked this book much better than the boring movie. It was beautifully written but some parts flashed back and the ending was weird but the story was lovely about 4 lives during the war and you got into some of the characters lives. His style of writing in this book and the story was much better than Anil's Ghost which I found to be boring and redundant. A good book. I've read better but I've also read much worse.

One of My Top Ten Great Books of All Time.......2007-02-05

Canadian author Michael Ondaatje's THE ENGLISH PATIENT is a sweeping novel of memorable characters wounded by the onslaught of World War II. At the core of the novel is the consuming affair between a mysterious archaeologist/adventurer of indeterminate European origin (unknown to the reader until the final chapters) and the wife of a British spy in North Africa. A Canadian Army nurse, a thumbless Italian thief, Indian bomb expert and other Brits have their stories unraveled as well as the English patient is tended by the nurse in the ruins of an Italian villa.

Ondaatje's writing is lovely and haunting, the characters are complex and the plot fascinates. Valentine's Day TIP: Present your literate love with a copy of this Booker Prize-winning novel and follow it up with a video rental of the equally enthralling Academy Award-winning movie of the same name.

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

Average customer rating:

Very insightful
Great Read
"One Art"
Finally NOT about editing programs!
Copolla's wingman

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
Michael Ondaatje
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0375709827
Release Date: 2004-10-05

Book Description

The Conversations is a treasure, essential for any lover or student of film, and a rare, intimate glimpse into the worlds of two accomplished artists who share a great passion for film and storytelling, and whose knowledge and love of the crafts of writing and film shine through.

It was on the set of the movie adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, that Michael Ondaatje met the master film and sound editor Walter Murch, and the two began a remarkable personal conversation about the making of films and books in our time that continued over two years. From those conversations stemmed this enlightened, affectionate book -- a mine of wonderful, surprising observations and information about editing, writing and literature, music and sound, the I-Ching, dreams, art and history.

The Conversations is filled with stories about how some of the most important movies of the last thirty years were made and about the people who brought them to the screen. It traces the artistic growth of Murch, as well as his friends and contemporaries -- including directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Fred Zinneman and Anthony Minghella -- from the creation of the independent, anti-Hollywood Zoetrope by a handful of brilliant, bearded young men to the recent triumph of Apocalypse Now Redux.

Among the films Murch has worked on are American Graffiti, The Conversation, the remake of A Touch of Evil, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (all three), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The English Patient.

“Walter Murch is a true oddity in Hollywood. A genuine intellectual and renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with film making and his whole generation of filmmakers. He knows, probably, where a lot of the bodies are buried.”

Customer Reviews:

Very insightful.......2007-01-10

An excellent book. It great to be able to read editing theory, and hard to find. At times the authors comments seemed a little wordy, but Murch is very insightful.

Great Read.......2007-01-01

This is an immensely interesting read for anyone even remotely interested in film and the film making process. Includes a lot of cool behind the scenes stories about Francis Ford Coppola and his films (The Godfather, Apocolypse Now, The Conversation) as well as insight and tips about the art of film editing.

"One Art".......2006-07-20

Walter Murch may be the greatest film editor alive, having cut classic works by Coppola (THE CONVERSATION, THE GODFATHER PARTS I, II, and III, APOCALYPSE NOW, THE RAIN PEOPLE), Minghella ( THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, COLD MOUNTAIN), Kaufman (THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING) and Zimmermann (JULIA). The novelist Michael Ondaatje, whose best-known novel THE ENGLISH PATIENT was adapted by Anthony Minghella into another a film cut by Murch, had the fine idea of sitting down for a series of conversations with Murch to ask him about his little-understood, important, and intelligent art form. The result is one of the greatest series of extended conversations on film since Truffaut's interviews with Hitchcock. Part of the pleasure of the book is getting not only to see Murch's complex work described but also getting to know him as a personality: considered one of the most intelligent men in Hollywood, he comes across not only as exceptionally erudite but also unpretentious and honest. Ondaatje may be the ideal interlocutor for Murch because he is so beautiufully versed in film history and in Murch's work; his many asides about his own writings may allow him to come across at times as a bit self-enamoured, but they do allow the reader the multiple pleasure of having a major figure in world literature give insights into his own work as we also hear about Murch's. One of the best delights the book offers is ample illustrations of the examples Murch and Ondaatje discuss, which are drawn from literature and the other arts and humanities as much as they are from film: one of the best is when the book offers side by side comparisons of the first draft and final version of Elizabeth Bishop's great villanelle "One Art," which is itself a celebration of the art of editing. It is rare to see a non-academic book about film that takes its readers' intelligence for granted. As such, it is genuinely a book everyone seriously interested in film should own.

Finally NOT about editing programs!.......2006-03-09

This book is about the insights and experiences around editing, about a lifestyle and philosophy of editing. I love the many insights and Murch is good narrator. Sometimes Michael is talking too much, but on the other hand it's a conversation, not an interview... I love this book, as it creates great mood and ambience, I read it in a single (long) shot. And then again.

Copolla's wingman.......2005-07-01

If you want to see how crticial decisions affecting key scenes in the Godfather or Apocalypse Now were made, this book has great information.
For the independent filmmaker you see the struggling efforts in making a collections of shots and scenes into a WHOLE, following a theme, with pace and tone supporting.

Average customer rating:

A stark, beautiful, raw novel
MEDIOCRE
A review from someone not interested in plot or Sri Lankan affairs
Murder Mystery or Poetry or Abstract Philosphy?
Beautiful prose, with elegant restraint

Anil's Ghost: A Novel
Michael Ondaatje
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Morning Dark: A Novel

ASIN: 0375724370
Release Date: 2001-04-24

Amazon.com

In his Booker Prize-winning third novel, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje explored the nature of love and betrayal in wartime. His fourth, Anil's Ghost, is also set during a war, but unlike in World War II, the enemy is difficult to identify in the bloody sectarian upheaval that ripped Sri Lanka apart in the 1980s and '90s. The protagonist, Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan, left her homeland at 18 and returns to it 15 years later only as part of an international human rights fact-finding mission. In the intervening years she has become a forensic anthropologist--a career that has landed her in the killing fields of Central America, digging up the victims of Guatemala's dirty war. Now she's come to Sri Lanka on a similar quest. But as she soon learns, there are fundamental differences between her previous assignment and this one: <blockquote> The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was 'eighty-eight and 'eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it's secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing. </blockquote> In such a situation, it's difficult to know who to trust. Anil's colleague is one Sarath Diyasena, a Sri Lankan archaeologist whose political affiliations, if any, are murky. Together they uncover evidence of a government-sponsored murder in the shape of a skeleton they nickname Sailor. But as Anil begins her investigation into the events surrounding Sailor's death, she finds herself caught in a web of politics, paranoia, and tragedy.

Like its predecessor, the novel explores that territory where the personal and the political intersect in the fulcrum of war. Its style, though, is more straightforward, less densely poetical. While many of Ondaatje's literary trademarks are present--frequent shifts in time, almost hallucinatory imagery, the gradual interweaving of characters' pasts with the present--the prose here is more accessible. This is not to say that the author has forgotten his poetic roots; subtle, evocative images abound. Consider, for example, this description of Anil at the end of the day, standing in a pool of water, "her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her." In Anil's Ghost Michael Ondaatje has crafted both a brutal examination of internecine warfare and an enduring meditation on identity, loyalty, and the unbreakable hold the past exerts over the present. --Alix Wilber

Book Description

With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.

Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past–a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder–Michael Ondaatje’s most powerful novel yet.

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With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. The time is our own time. The place is Sri Lanka, the island nation formerly known as Ceylon, off the southern tip of India, a country steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition--and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself. Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. Bodies are discovered. Skeletons. And particularly one, nicknamed 'Sailor.' What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past--all propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a literary spellbinder--the most powerful novel we have yet had from Michael Ondaatje.

Customer Reviews:

A stark, beautiful, raw novel.......2007-05-16

I read this book over two days, and I could hardly put it down. Ondaatje's prose is lyric and clear, evoking so many emotions at once. He creates pictures, and I could feel the environment of his characters. It makes me want to go to Sri Lanka and discover this culture. Yet I also understand that all of us are in the human experience together, with the love we share with one another, and the pain we use to control one another. A gorgeous novel. Thank you Mr. Ondaatje.

MEDIOCRE.......2007-02-09

Some parts of the book weren't bad and it tells something about the war in Sri Lanka then flashes back to the skeleton man named Sailor that was found. Too vague and too much flashing back and I didn't care for the end. Some parts I really got into and were interesting but other parts were boring. I was dissapointed somewhat in this one. Didn't care for the plot. Would I read it again, NADA.

A review from someone not interested in plot or Sri Lankan affairs.......2006-12-09

I came across "Anil's Ghost" more or less by accident. An acquaintance of mine gave me the book, I sat down with it and found myself rattled. Not, however, by the brutal and monotonous descriptions of wounds and traumas the author uses to drive in his anti-war message - if you read, expect to spend plenty of time in hospitals. Nor by the loose plot: many of the very greatest novelists (Musil, Cortazar, Kundera, to name a few) wrote books "about nothing," although there is a difference between not going for plot and trying but failing. The characters, by the way, did not intrigue me, even the ones, Palipana for instance, with a little depth.

But it was the style that bothered me, the style and the praise heaped on it by authorities no lower than The New York Times Book Review. The prose of "Anil's Ghost" is simple. Too simple. Now we know, of course, an entire range of lauded simplicities in literature, from the noble harmony of Lord Dunsany to the gruff brevity of Hemingway. Come to think of it, Ondaatje's is somewhat like the latter - minus the concentrated, stored energy, where the durable power of a phrase stands in inverse proportion to the length of it. Ondaatje tries to speak of war and mutilations and fear with the terse language of a medical investigator, which is, of course, exactly who Anil herself is. Yet, having left Sri Lanka long before the civil unrest, Ondaatje is the sort of Hemingway who knows bulls by hearsay. There is no sense of a close, lived-in familiarity behind the lush exotics. The simplicity of sentence structure ("She went, he did not think" etc.) reveals in this case a sort of poverty rather than a need to pack experience tightly.

After all, Ondaatje tells very little of the actual situation in Sri Lanka. Others have already noted how the book leaves us in the dark as to the particulars, the "beef" of the conflict: the who, the where, the why. Ninjas all of the fighters, looks like. It may be "poetically" appealing to think that war begets war, and something like this Ondaatje says, yet it is true only on the level of personal vindictiveness. A novelist is in position (perhaps it is a unique position) to take a broader view, rise over the grief and pain of those actually involved and extract, with the necessary cruelty, some meaning out of the mess - not a prediction or an easy recipe but at least a diagnosis. Then, perhaps, the suffering of Sri Lanka would present itself in terrible colors to us - something that mere gruesomeness of gore can no longer achieve. It is a cliché that we have all been anesthetized by violence on the TV screen, and a novelist must turn journalist to bring back the sense of dreadful reality. To do that in earnest, however, would require a different eye and a longer book.

In "Anil's Ghost" the Sri Lankan conflict comes across as a plot device for a plot that doesn't exist.

One alternative to journalism is, of course, character and textual study, a careful management of all levels of one's writing. From novel to novella and across the genres, there is space for allusions, for breaking sentences up, for humor and idiosyncrasy. Sarath, Anil, even Sailor could be actors in a drama. War or peace, the human mind is a fine and inept thing, bloated and full of itself, ironic, branching into minute obsessions, habits and rituals, not random, but bound and indebted to each other by history. The way someone ties his shoes can speak volumes... but not this volume. Ondaatje does not choose this second path, nor a third one - he builds dialogues and chooses mannerisms according to rules of symbolism. As a result, even quirks such as Anil's past as a "swimmer" and her dance in the rain much later in the book begin to MEAN something - embracing her heritage, in this case. Everything fits a little too smoothly into Ondaatje's general plan. When characters spell out some kind of message, it is a sure sign that the writer lacks interest in them for their own sake. The war in "Anil's Ghost," then, is not a backdrop for character study. But if Sri Lanka is neither scenery nor, in its total vagueness, the subject of the novel, what is it?

Something is wrong, something is lacking, and I'm searching here for that missing element. Why is it, I ask myself, that I only give it 3 stars (which it deserves, not being a "bad book")? How did Ondaatje annoy me into reviewing? And the best I can come up with is the following: there is something monstrous about writing, something involving a re-arrangement of consciousness into new forms, something similar to re-making a world. To write fiction is not to simply to tell what happens or might/would have happened. It is to trap with words, to draw into a realm that breathes and moves in a kind of unsettling semi-independence. A novel is a cat of hidden and delicate tastes - where it goes, no one knows, and it starves on a diet of INTENTIONS - especially on the thin milk of ideology. This is all quite generic, not too helpful and, of course, whether an attempt to breed a world succeeds cannot be seen in advance. Yet, if successful, the true masterpiece more fairly deserves, and more easily carries, the accusations of solipsism and density than the sort of insufficiency that gasps on these pages.

To conclude, I was reading Bytov's "Pushkin House" the other day. (Aside: it's funny how mediocre novels get 169 reviews - 170 with this one, and counting, but one of the most magnificent pieces of Russian literature has received exactly -1- comment. At least it's five stars.) This phrase of Bytov's drew my eye: "...The writing was plain, but with occasional lucky finds, which he seized on, developed and so nearly approached artistry..." I remembered it now in connection with the "lucky finds" of Ondaatje, who has put out thirteen books of poetry. Beauty frequents "Anil's Ghost": the vigor that Ondaatje's prose is missing bubbles in his metaphors. He should have assembled them into a fourteenth collection instead.

This contrast between prose and poetry in "Anil's Ghost" is bewildering. What is more, the figures are more often than not superfluous - not to say excessive, but they do little for the rest of the scene. Frequently they are inappropriate for the context or just make little sense, Ondaatje being too preoccupied with the "lucky find" itself to examine it. I quote from page 101: "She had one arm up, holding on to the rafter above her head. She herself felt like a whip that could leap out and catch something in its long finger." Feeling like a whip, ready to catch, is intuitively correct and understandable, but comparing a whip to a finger is, I think, "wrong." It does not work - the things compared operate in completely different ways. Both are long already, granted, but a whip lashes out, and even when it snatches (think Indiana Jones), it is flexible, tail-like or, perhaps, trunk-like.

A finger, on the other hand, is thicker, can snatch nothing by itself and bends only one way. Then there is the dubious grammar of "catch IN the finger." Ondaatje bravely takes these risks, but the two images, juxtaposed side by side in a reader's imagination, are not likely to mesh very well, or all that well. In short, the metaphor is so-so. Yet in this instance and always Ondaatje seems to be of the opinion that the more, the merrier, and that better a random figure than none at all. He is not aware of the silent crowd-like presence of the surrounding text, whose approval is the rite of passage for a sentence.

At other times he simply does not know when to quit. Consider the quote from the Amazon review: "...her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her." Beautiful, yes, although there is something with perspective here (reading, I never knew whose voice I heard, it seemed neither the author's nor the characters'). And the question of fitness remains. No sentence is an island: what does this one aim to do, what does it follow, in what does it result, are these all important in the overall melody and in the melody of the scene... the author never shows a sensibility for looking that far.

Assuming no conflicts there, how I wish Ondaatje had STOPPED after the word "day"! "Her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day." Nothing more: one could end a paragraph, an entire chapter with this. The second half of the sentence adds nothing new. And while something can be said for "layers," the glorious expression "undressed the day" comes just before it, leaving the reader no respite, no two-second break to catch his breath, climb down from the height of admiration for "stripped" into the quiet gulf between it and "layers." There he could combine the two figures, observe them together for double the fun. But the tropes blend, overreach, and the result is begging for excision.

And yet it is considered "quite well-written"... Something's rotten in the state of Denmark.

On the other hand, I suppose it is good to know that someone can still produce imagery, even if he does not know what to do with it. Better misplaced poetry than another Grisham - that unhappy sentiment, I would guess, usually funds the praise reviewers heap on the countless books they must sort out. The bar has been seriously lowered... Near the beginning I mentioned a few of the literary giants. It is hard to say how they would fare with today's critics. Would "The Man Without Qualities" earn "acclaim," when a book such as this earns it as well? Is there some greater badge of merit, some superlative award and reward? Even the Nobel Prize falls into odd hands sometimes. Really, what kind of fame can the most talented writer on Earth (let us imagine him) hope for in the year 2006 or 2007? But, perhaps, the hour is too late for the label "great literature" to be assigned.

Murder Mystery or Poetry or Abstract Philosphy?.......2006-10-24

The plot is (seemingly) interesting and will arouse your curiosity right away. The story chugs along and many characters are introduced and developed. Most of these characters are not germane to the story plot. In fact, the story itself is very loose, diversifies into multiple abstract branches and swings back between the past and the present.
The book is a confluence of personal stories, forensics, poetry and politics. All are interwoven and meshed into an undistinguishable mass. At times the prose seems very abstract and confusing making it a very difficult read. The story dwindles into a fuzzy concept halfway through the book and from then on, Ondaajte comes into his own with an abstract prose that tethers on the verge of purposeful poetry. This book requires considerable time and attention and cannot be read cover to cover in one sitting.

Beautiful prose, with elegant restraint .......2006-07-22

I love Sri Lanka, it is a country of extraordinary contrasts, and Ondaatje captures that very well. The generosity of the people combined with the breathtaking violence they are capable. And for me, this wasn't a story in the traditional narrative sense, but was a meditation on how war has changed, from the glorious old battlefields that Anil describes early on, where there is a sense of honor for those that died, to civil war today, where many go missing and there is no closure. I loved the images early on, when Anil is working in Guatemala, and Ondaatje describes the way the family members stay by the sites, looking for their dead.

It was a very moving book that really brings home the tragedies of civil war. Its clear that Ondaatje loves Sri Lanka very much.

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Book Sucks
Deeply disappointing
Magical
Near perfection; truly evocative storytelling

In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Running in the Family
Anil's Ghost: A Novel
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ASIN: 0679772669
Release Date: 1997-01-14

Book Description

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

Customer Reviews:

Poor.......2006-11-19

I grew infuriated (and bored) with this novel when I discovered that, about halfway through, that it had no idea where it was going. The small elements of the book that deliver actual story are some of the most engaging efforts at fiction I have come across in years. It is genuine, deeply interesting, and swolen with careful, careful writing.

Unfortunately, "In the Skin of the Lion" strays far too often into a kind of lazy poetry-prose, a landscape where every notion is ephemeral and fleeting. In some parts, this book is not so much a novel but a dull soliloquy on the helplessness, bravery and romance of the people we are supposed to be interested in reading about.

Book Sucks.......2006-02-11

I've read many a good book....this is not one of them. For those that are rating it highly, I see them as those fools who said the King was wearing splendid clothes when in fact he was parding down the road naked; they think they are intellectuals when in fact they are misleading others. Granted, of the 240+ pages in my copy there may be ten with good content. I kept turning to the back inside cover to see the picture of the moron who wrote it!

Deeply disappointing.......2005-12-05

I was really looking forward to reading this novel -- I loved the English Patient (the movie), I had heard wonderful things about Michael Ondaatje and since I live in Toronto, (near the Bloor Viaduct bridge described in the novel), I really did want to like this book. But honestly, I think watching the snow melt in my backyard would have been a more pleasurable experience than reading this book. And just so you know, I don't generally read fluffy books -- I have a degree in English Literature, so I've read (and enjoyed) my share of ponderous, weighty, well-crafted novels.

I found the first 50 pages one of the most cruelly tedious introductions to a novel I have ever read in my life, but I trudged on and did find brief (all too brief) glimpses of magic. In particular, I was drawn in by the interplay between Clara and Patrick. In fact, Ondaatje is at his best when writing about relationships and at his worst when describing scenes with painstaking, mind-numbing detail. Yes, he's evidently done his research and so, can confidently drone on about the 'rivets, sheering valves and crown pins' involved in bridge building, but quite frankly, who cares?

There were a number of events in this novel that I just found so implausible, as though their only very obvious purpose the furthering of the plot. In particular, the scene where a nun is improbably blown off the edge of the under-construction bridge, only to be magically, single-handedly plucked out of the air by Temelcoff, hanging below in his harness, made me throw down the book in dismay. Then to add to the silliness, although Temelcoff has had his arm "ripped...out of its socket" by this Superman-type rescue, the two traipse on down-- not to the hospital as one would imagine would be necessary-- but to a Macedonian bar to drink brandy and say not much of anything to each other. Oh brother!

Although others have described Ondaatje's style as lyrical, I just did not feel that at all. I found so much of the writing stilted, choppy and self-conscious. The dialogue frequently banal and senseless. Here's a random sample:
-You awake?
-What time is it? she said
-Still night.
-Ahh.
-I love you. Were you ever in love? Apart from Ambrose?
-Yeah.

If you want to read a truly talented Canadian author who really does have a lyrical sensibility, read any of Margaret Atwood's books.

Magical.......2005-04-11

Michael Ondaatje is a wonder. His Toronto is a place of mystery and magic: nuns falling out of the sky, midnight puppet shows and self-disappeared tycoons. It was a pleasure to read - each word is perfect, and paints a picture of love, despair, and what it means to find yourself.

This should appeal to people who liked Jonathan Safran Foer's sparkler "Everything Is Illuminated", although this novel is not as humorous. Both books, however, are examinations of how a person finds himself and what it means to have a history. Lovely, lovely work.

Near perfection; truly evocative storytelling.......2005-03-05

Nobody writes prose quite like Michael Ondaatje. In The Skin of a Lion blends its various storylines together so seamlessly, so effortlessly, that the reader can scarcely help but be swept along by the easy narrative.

Ondaatje writes rather more like a poet than a novelist, and his descriptions of setting and characters achieve with an economy of words what would otherwise be lost through excessive detail. Witness his taut overview of the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct:

"Men in a maze of wooden planks climb deep into the shattered light of blond wood. A man is an extension of hammer, drill, flame. Drill smoke in his hair. A cap falls into the valley, gloves are buried in stone dust."

Apart from the sheer technical brilliance of the book, In The Skin of a Lion also serves as a sympathetic exposition of the immigrant experience in early twentieth century Toronto. While the city does better than most others in recognizing and preserving its ethnic roots, I would wager that most Torontonians (and as an ex-resident I count myself among them) have little more than a passing knowledge of the contribution made by early residents to the physical -- not to mention social and cultural -- infrastructure of the city.

Ondaatje's work gently encourages, rather than browbeats, the reader to reconceptualize the sweep of events that lay behind the establishment of modern-day Toronto. Just as importantly, it does so without sacrificing any of the overarching storyline, so that even the casual reader will find himself or herself immersed in a well-woven tale.

Like all truly great novels, this one reimagines the place and time in which it is set while still preserving enough realism and deference to actual events to ring wholly true.

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The Story
Michael Ondaatje
Manufacturer: House of Anansi Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Vintage Ondaatje

ASIN: 0887841945

Book Description

Michael Ondaatje's poems have been celebrated by readers and writers alike for containing some of the most memorable and moving verse written in the past half-century. The Story combines Ondaatje's sensual writing with watercolor illustrations by celebrated painter David Bolduc, making a unique item. Left-hand pages contain Bolduc's art while right-hand pages contain Ondaatje's poem — both typeset and in the author's own handwriting. This elegant housing is a fitting accompaniment to Ondaatje's elegaic poem, which follows his larger themes — love, memory, family, exile — even as it unfolds into "our dismantled childhoods," and offers readers the opportunity to extend its narrative into their own lives.

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Remembering Family
hit and miss.
Pictures of yesterday
delicious
What a family!

Running in the Family
Michael Ondaatje
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0679746692
Release Date: 1993-11-30

Book Description

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Customer Reviews:

Remembering Family.......2006-12-08

I read this book for a Canadian fiction class and really liked it. The language was so interesting and different from anything I had read before. It is a wonderful story about a wacky family. There are good times, bad times, funny stories, tragic stories, and just plain wacky events. It really makes you want to take a look into your own family and find out all of the "juicy" details. I really liked the book and I would recommend it to anyone looking for an interesting story.

hit and miss........2006-10-24

fans of michael ondaatje's poetry will no doubt like this book; however, do to the hit and miss nature of each chapter, i doubt that this book would win him many new fans. an impressionistic collage of place & family members, this book is closer to the ethic of poetry, forsaking narrative structure for short pieces that jump here and there to paint a family in an exotic place and time. plenty of good prose, but lots of the pieces are too random and are just not interesting. worthwhile, but not highly recommended.

Pictures of yesterday.......2004-03-08

Considering that this is in fact an autobiograpy, one can not judge it's contents. After all, you can not judge ones life, either you like it or not in a sense of discussing literature. But, what you can discuss is the manner in which that biography is written. Ondaatje present's life of his family trough generations who lived on Ceilon (Shri Lanka), in a series of random images, which are more like picture, than prose. Many times he stops to grasp certain individual and present his little history, his life, which than influenced the rest of the family in some perverse way. When reading this book, experienced reader will find such compositions that corresponds in that what crtics call 'modern', others will find interesting and compelling story, which never grows in boredom, with fluent narrative style that keeps ones eyes fixed on pages long after the lights went out.
Comparing the Ondaatje with other authors of the modern world,
Ondaatje lacks the one thing that he "must" have when presenting himself in a way he does. By focusing himself merely on a problems of his own, of a personal character in every (which, of course, includes this one)book, he voluntarily forgets that there is other life, other world going around him. When tending to write intelectual prose, one should, at least in one way, give some focus on that matter too.
But, when all this comes to conclusion, if you like (auto)biograhies - buy this one, if you don't, skip it. It's simple as that...

delicious.......2002-08-04

both the style and the subject of this novel are easy and enjoyable to absorb. mostly a memoir including some letters and poems. it has a great sense of humor and is full of passionate, and most importantly interesting accounts of the definatly NOT run of the mill family history Ondaatje has.

What a family!.......2002-03-19

This book was just so enjoyable and hilarious but yet so beautifully written. From the beginning till the end Ondaatje opens up to the reader (in a journal entry) this magical and beautiful world. Onddatje's adroitness to include the reader right there in the conversations he has with various family member will bring you to tears. His captivating sytle takes the reader back in time with him trhough such tear jerking and amusing experiences.

This memoir will give you a deatiled verbalization of each city and place in Ceylon, so that the reader has a clear picture of what it was like to actually be there. His simple structure of setting things up, will make you feel the temperature and jungle like atmosphere by his entailed descriptions.

Book Description

Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.

In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.

Customer Reviews:

What is a Creole?.......2005-05-20

In light of the confusion of the use of the term "Creole" in this book, readers must understand that the first usage of the term was by the Portuguese (crioulo) to describe their mixed offspring in Cape Verde and elsewhere. Eventually, it was used to describe any peoples born in the New World. In Louisiana, it was used first to describe all peoples born in Louisiana, and later used to distinguish French Louisianans from Cajuns and Americans. Free people of Color, who were also of French descent, did not begin to use this term until after the Civil War. They used it for the same reasons as their French cousins, to distinguish themselves from the Americans.

What is a Creole?.......2005-01-28

I read the book not because I'm a fan of detective fiction, but because I wanted to learn a bit more of the history of Jazz and New Orleans: Fulmer's book more than fulfilled my expectations. Now I want to read his latest book to see what additional glimpses of Jazz and New Orleans Fulmer describes in it.

A few have criticized Fulmer because he called St. Cyr a Creole. Their argument is that St. Cyr is partially black and Creoles are never even partially black. However, they are wrong. The true origin of the word Creole is Spanish. This was the name given to the descendant of a Spanish-born mother and father when their child was born away from Spain. Later the term Creole was also used by the French to indicate a person born away from France whose parent were both born in France.

The original Creoles were indeed not mixed. However, the term Creole also has for some time been used as Fulmer uses it. It is a name given to the mixed blood descendants of blacks and the original French and Spanish settlers. Check your dictionary.

Coming Through Slaughter: Ondaatje's musical novel.......2004-06-27

I originally read this book as part of a fiction workshop. Unlike some other class-assigned readings, this book became a treasured part of my personal collection. Its form is rather unconventional -- it's rather like reading a novel of poetry. Admittedly, it can be hard to "get into," but I found that the more I read in one sitting, the greater impact Ondaatje's prose had on me. For me, Coming Through Slaughter was one of those rare gems that hovers over you until you've completed it. You find yourself thinking of Ondaatje's characters even when you've put the book away; they linger after the last page in the same way they seem to exist in the realm of the book -- a dream-like haze.

The story is one of Buddy Bolden, a real jazz musician in New Orleans in the early 20th century. None of his music survives, but he is said to be one of the founders of jazz. And so Ondaatje explores the small pieces of Bolden's historical truth, creating a character and an entire book that revolves around his life, his love affair with music, his love affair with a woman, and the audience's love affair with him. Other historical characters emerge from the text, like E.J. Bellocq, a man who photographed prostitutes from the Storyville area of New Orleans.

There are a lot of beautiful descriptions of abstractions, particularly of music (the way it looks, its color, the way it's created) and of emotion. As some other reviewers have suggested, they are descriptions tangible enough for a deaf person. And yet there is an ethereal element in Ondaatje's writing that makes it seem as though something much greater eludes you; it adds to Bolden's presence in the book.

This is the first book I've read by Ondaatje, and I hope to read more.

Zippity-do-dah-crap.......2004-02-06

I've been forced to wade through a lot of boring crap in my life: Thomas Hardy, Jane Urquhart's Changing Heaven, Leviticus, and this book was one of the biggest bores of them all. Nobody seems willing to admit to the fact that everything Ondaatje writes is tedious, self-indulgent and overdone. This guy sits around for 10 years with this thumb up his ass and at the end of it this is all he has to show for it. True, he's not bad looking for an old Sri Lankan guy, but that's no reason to let this guy continue churning this stuff out. My advice to him would still be that it's never too late to go into a new line of work.

Question.......2002-12-10

Hello - This isn't a review, but a solicitation for advice. My girlfriend is an infrequent reader, but she read this book as part of an English class assignment and absolutely loved it. Can anyone out there recommend anything similar in style and/or subject matter (not necessarily about Bolden, but perhaps New Orleans and/or Jazz, etc)? I've made my own suggestions to her but none could pique her interest quite as much as this book has. Any and all serious recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Book Description

Michael Ondaatje’s new selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.

Customer Reviews:

One of Ondaatje's Best Poems.......2005-09-08

I had the opportunity to hear Michael Ondaatje read his poem 'The Concessions' from this book at the Blyth Festival season launch and this poem is very beautiful. Not only is it a connection that is like no other with the area that it was written for. Ondaatje has really gotten into the sprit of the area as he pin points local figures 'the mystic from Millbank' we all knew who these people were that he was pin pointing which was very lovely. I was very pleased to have had the opportunity to have hear that poem that I went out and bought this book right away because of that poem. I recommed that you buy this book there are many other lovely poems but that one 'The Concessions' will forever stand out in my mind.

A Beautiful Collection.......2000-07-07

The wonderful collection of poems that comprise The Cinnamon Peeler were written by Michael Ondaatje during a twenty-year period. They are works of deep intimacy and dazzling beauty.

Not being a poet myself, I enjoy reading Ondaatje's gorgeous poetry to my novelist wife.

More than love poems, these works contain wonderful twists and turns that are both painful and funny. Ondaatje has obviously turned to both Rousseau and Wallace Stevens for inspiration, but he also contributes his own sense of the novel and his awareness of social strata.

This is a charming book, with a muted sense of humor. With The Cinnamon Peeler, Ondaatje takes us deep inside his own mind and heart. It is trip worth making.

To understand Michael Ondaatje, read his poetry!.......2000-05-28

Michael Ondaatje knows how to write poetry. Primarily, he is a poet. Secondly a novelist. This collection contains a great variety of poems about day to day life, love, marriage, deep observations about children, humour, history and many more.

My favourite poem is ""To a Sad Daughter" which has a universal appeal. Once, I read this poem to my wife just replacing the poet's daughter's infatuation: ice hockey players with our daughter's hobby. My wife remarked: "Great poem. So you write good poetry too!"

I also like other poems including "The Cinnamon Peeler", "A House Divided", "Women Like You", "Billboards" and "Postcard From Piccadilly Street".

Michael Ondaatje shares his great intimate moments with us including love, his recollection of places and relationships with us. If you want to understand Ondaatje's prose, one must begging with his poetry. For anyone `The Cinnamon Peeler' is an entry into a dark and deep labyrinth painted with human experience. When you come out of it, you'll be a different person.

This book is a one I read over and over again when I'm both sad and happy!

A wonderful, readable mixture of poems.......1999-12-18

Michael Ondaatje knows how to mix humor, beauty, sadness, and acute observation together to make lovely works of art. This collection contains a great variety of poetry, from simple and touching observations about his children, to deeply imagined distant moments of wonder. My favorite is "Pure Memory/Chris Dewdney" which actually made me cry twice for two different reasons when I first read it. I will say no more here. "Elimination Dance" is also a fun one to read out loud. "The Cinnamon Peeler" itself is a fantastic love poem. There is so much good stuff in this.

his train of thought is so complex yet so simple..........1999-07-09

I don't have much to say, but I must state my immense admiration for micheal ondaatje and his thought...his way of thinking reminds me of my own, like when he says in one of his poems with no name, "how we moved from thin ceramic to such destruction". I feel such romance and love from almost every single poem, even rat jelly! He doesn't restrict himself to using a certain amount of lines in his stanzas, and there's no rhyming. That makes his poetry more "true" and honest, like all poems should be. His works read rather like a novel and he could probably write a novel for each poem he's written, but they'd all be thrown in together eventually into one book, since they're all in a way connected. I love reading his poetry over and over again, the effect never wears out. I can't remember the name of my favourite poem from this book, but it's simply about him and his wife kicking each other in bed for the covers and the space, and how he says that she got pregnant, he's sure, just so she could get the space...it's such a simple subject that no one else would think of writing about...no other poets that I've read have succeded in being able to pour out their thoughts in a way that I would actually be interested to read them. I applaud you, Micheal Ondaatje...all my love.

Average customer rating:

Great Book For the Non-serious BTK Fan!
A Postmodern Western
Oh, for yesteryear
COULD'VE BEEN LESS PRETENTIOUS
Billy the Kid Speaks!

Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Michael Ondaatje
Manufacturer: Marion Boyars Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0714527084

Book Description

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel, a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth, about William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid, " a bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint. "Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets."--Annie Dillard.

Customer Reviews:

Great Book For the Non-serious BTK Fan!.......2006-06-28

The book is very fun to read, but is not for the serious Billy the Kid fans. It holds your interest well, as long as, you don't take it too serious. The author is good at what he does and this book is well written. But, don't look for any new, serious information on Billy because it is not there. My review is written strictly from a nonfiction point of view and should be read with that in mind. I read the complete book and enjoyed reading it, but there is nothing in it to really grasp as fact.

A Postmodern Western.......2005-06-01

"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" creates a beautiful and visceral written collage about the legendary Billy the Kid. Written in a mixture of prose, poetry, clippings and interviews, the reader may not always be sure of whose voice they are hearing and whether the pictures being painted in their head are based on reality or fiction; or both. You can feel in your very skull the heat of the mid-day sun... This is the wonder that is Ondaatje's postmodern take on the Western.

It is a book to be experienced; read and re-read. Each time you return you will find something new to consider and move with. The language Ondaatje uses is among the most compelling that I have ever read. Best consumed with the suspended need for the linear and clear.

Oh, for yesteryear.......2004-07-29

There was a time, pre-English Patient, when the innovative work of Michael Ondaatje appeared assured of standing the test of time, as this slender, groundbreaking volume of poetry, prose, and prose-poetry, now some 35 years old, makes clear. It is, arguably, if not the best--that would be Coming Through Slaughter--then certainly the most felicitous work in Ondaatje's ouevre, and one would be hard pressed indeed to describe it as anything less than a work of sparkling genius.

That the author's more recent, utterly conventional efforts--first Patient, then Anil's Ghost--have, by comparison, evidenced such a precipitous decline, is only sad. But, if you want to read Ondaatje at the near-height of his powers, you could do far worse than Billy the Kid. (Or Slaughter. Or Running in the Family.)

Those were the days. And they were better days. And ballsier days. And brassier. Far better days indeed than Mr. Ondaatje's nowadays. It is the author's express lack of nerve, the lack of nerve expressed in his recent work, that one now deplores. But when Ondaatje was great, he wrote Billy the Kid, the great work of a once-great writer. And in those days, few, few indeed, were greater.

COULD'VE BEEN LESS PRETENTIOUS.......2003-06-12

The book is full of desultory excerpts from Billyýs diary: stories about certain people ý 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 Billyýs 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 ý 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 ý stoic and cold. Amongst the bits from Billyýs diary, about the people he knew, there is this interesting story about this mad-man, who used to raise ýfreakyý 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 Billyýs life. Also, Billyýs ýexclusive jail interviewý is ýin-your-faceý, 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 couldýve been much better off without Ondaatjeýs pretentious effort to be weird.

Billy the Kid Speaks!.......2003-04-25

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.

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