 |
Canadian Authors - General fiction - |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Anil's Ghost |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Anil's Ghost byMichael Ondaatje McClelland and Stewart 311 pages, 2000 ISBN 077106893X Reviewed by Devorah Stone Winner of the 2000 Giller Prize for Fiction. Read another review by Zaheera Jiwaji Anil returns to her homeland in Sri Lanka after years of studying and working in England and the United States. Anil was a swimmer from a prominent family, and now she is a forensic anthropologist with no living family in her homeland. She comes back to a small island nation ravaged by the insanity of civil war. There she meets a native archeologist, Sarath. Together they unlock the mystery of one murdered man known to them only as `Sailor'. They piece together his identity, life and death. Anil and Sarath travel around the island searching for the truth. Through flashbacks, we also meet Anil's American friend Leaf, and discover Anil's passions for bowling and for the Southwest. After reading Anil's Ghost, I felt I knew Anil as well as I did my own sister. I knew all about her likes and dislikes, felt all her childhood secrets, her dreams and her life. Ondaatje creates reader-character intimacy through vignettes and flashbacks, to Anil's life in the West and her childhood. His sparse poetic prose describes death and carnage with both scientific detachment and humanity. This is a murder mystery in a sense that there is murder all around and the mystery is why it is happening. How can people allow it to happen. Michael Ondaatje didn't answer any of my questions about how an Island paradise with ancient proud traditions could turn in on itself. He did, however, open my mind to a myriad of possibilities. A powerful and brilliant book. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||