Anil's Ghost - Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje is the author of The English Patient, a book that became a major film. I'm not sure why I have never read the book, maybe it was one of those periods when I was working my way through a different genre. A native of Sri Lanka where this current book is based, the author moved to Canada in 1962, and has gone on to write and publish both prose and poetry. My copy of this book was published in the year 2000, following seven years of meticulous research into the period from the mid 1980's to the early 1990's when the author's home country was reeling from civil wars and incidents of brutal murder and the genocide of a particular group of people, the Tamils. I ...  Read the complete review

It wasn't long after I had fallen in love with Ondaatje's big hit best seller "The English Patient", when I saw this book in the new arrivals at the library, and I grabbed it right away. As the title of this op already tells you, I wasn't in the least bit disappointed. In fact, after I had finished reading the library copy, I went straight out and bought a copy because I couldn't stand not having this one on my shelf. That's how much I liked, or rather loved this book! A quick overview of the story - Anil Tissera is a forensic archiologist who was born in Sri Lanka (where Ondaatje himself comes from). After having been an ex-patriot for about 15 ...  Read the complete review

The newest novel by the author of The English Patient, Anil's Ghost is a carefully crafted story, in which Ondaatje invokes the personal ghosts of his own childhood in Sri Lanka as well as the collective ghosts of a country torn apart by civil war. The writer gives no historical background for the period of war in which the story is set, but this serves to focus the reader on the emotions of the characters, and enhances rather than detracts from the flow of the novel. As the general population rarely know of the politics behind a war, so too the reader is forced to experience their moments of tragedy and loss without ever fully understanding the reason why these ...  Read the complete review

I found "Anil's Ghost" a flawed and failed attempt as a novel: neither its form nor its structure seemed capable of holding its material together, and the result is a fractured and inchoate narration that does not flow nor move nor urge the reader onward. The prose is often beautiful, but it alone cannot carry the action, which at time appears pointless and contrived. The novel's background is a multifaceted civil war which may very well have no meaning other than the great brutality it engenders; still, readers need to know something about the war's underlying issues if they are to become interested and emotionally engaged in its narration. The ...  Read the complete review

i think i must be stupid. the critics raved about this book, but i found it irksome, over ambitious and not up to the author's previous standard. anil is an unsympathetic character, and i began to hate her. she has few human connections and has just left a relationship which we are told about but the relevance of which is unclear. she was a swimmer. apparently. great. the book is set against the background of what is essentially a pointless war, which only highlights the pointlessness of the book itself. if someone were to ask me what the book was about, id be pushed to tell them. i suppose its message is that of tragedy and woe, but in so many forms that it ...  Read the complete review