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Canadian Authors - General fiction - |
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Anil's Ghost |
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 Anil's Ghost byMichael Ondaatje McClelland & Stewart 307 Pages, 2000 ISBN 077106893X Reviewed by Zaheera Jiwaji Winner of the 2000 Giller Prize for Fiction. Read another review by Devorah Stone It is no small task to follow the success of a previous novel, especially if that previous novel was the hugely successful The English Patient. However, Michael Ondaatje never disappoints. Eight years later, he delivers yet another sumptuous book: Anil's Ghost. Anil Tissera, a forensic scientist, returns to her homeland, Sri Lanka. She has been sent by a human rights group to discover information about murders that took place during the civil war. Anil has been away from Sri Lanka for fifteen years, and through her eyes, we explore this sense of an expatriate coming home. Anil is, at once, the foreigner and the native. This experience is of course, Ondaatje's experience. And perhaps in this sense, the narrator and the writer are inseparable. The writing is powerful and lyrical, seeped in mystery, as we have come to expect from Ondaatje. After all, he is first a poet. The characters unfold gently, revealing new depths, secrets and complexities. Anil and her partner, Sarath, attempt to conduct their work, in a background where nothing is simple or ordinary. Ondaatje wants to remind us of what it means to be human and to be alive. This story is about survival and about going on with life under difficult circumstances. Anil's Ghost also asks us where we belong, and what is our home. We alter our opinion as Anil changes from a disinterested observer to a deeply concerned occupant of the island. Anil's Ghost is a visual masterpiece. You will want to read parts of this book out loud, and return to other parts time and again. It is not easy reading, as it is stark and haunting. Ondaatje moves us gently through, page after page, in prose that promises mystery and clarity at once. Ondaatje has done it again. |
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