- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart; 1st Edition edition (April 22 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 077106893X
- ISBN-13: 978-0771068935
- Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 14.7 x 3.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 567 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (136 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #539,858 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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:
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.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 --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
While he is generally considered a Canadian writer, Booker Prize-winner Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and he has chosen to set his powerful and resonant new novel in that country during its gruesome civil war in the mid-1980s. Written in his usual cryptic, elliptical style, much of the story is told in flashbacks, with Ondaatje hinting at secrets even as he divulges facts, revealing his characters' motivations through their desperate or passionate behavior and, most of all, conveying the essence of a people, a country and its history via individual stories etched against a background of natural beauty and human brutality. Anil Tessira, a 33-year-old native Sri Lankan who left her country 15 years before, is a forensic pathologist sent by the U.N. human rights commission to investigate reports of mass murders on the island. Atrocities are being committed by three groups: the government, anti-government insurgents, and separatist guerrillas. Working secretly, these warring forces are decimating a population paralyzed by pervasive fear. Taciturn archeologist Sarath Diyasena is assigned by the government to be Anil's partner; at 49, he is emotionally withdrawn from the chaotic contemporary world, reserving his passion for the prehistoric shards of his profession. Together, Anil and Sarath discover that a skeleton interred among ancient bones in a government-protected sanctuary is that of a recently killed young man. Anil defiantly sets out to document this murder by identifying the victim and then making an official report. Throughout their combined forensic and archeological investigation, detailed by Ondaatje with the meticulous accuracy readers will remember from descriptions of the bomb sapper's procedures in The English Patient, Sarath remains a mysterious figure to Anil. Her confusion about his motives is reinforced when she meets his brother, Gamini, an emergency room doctor who is as intimately involved in his country's turmoil as Sarath refuses to be. The lives of these characters, and of others in their orbits, emerge circuitously, layer by layer. In the end, Anil's moral indignation--and her innocence--place her in exquisite danger, and Sarath is moved to a life-defining sacrifice. Here the narrative, whose revelations have been building with a quiet ferocity, assumes the tension of a thriller, its chilling insights augmented by the visceral emotional effects that masterful literature can provide. More effective than a documentary, Ondaatje's novel satisfies one of the most exalted purposes of fiction: to illuminate the human condition through pity and terror. It may well be the capstone of his career. 200,000 first printing; Random House audio. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A masterpiece,
By
This review is from: Anil's Ghost (Paperback)
Ondaatje is a master of subtlety, of the ambiguity of life, of the grey that washes extreme situations. He is at his best in Anil's Ghost.The story itself is a simple one: a woman (Anil) searches for the identity of a skeleton she finds when on an international human rights mission in war ravaged Sri Lanka. But as with most stories Ondaatje tells, simplicity becomes weighted with the emotional enganglements of both political and personal history. There is a conversation beneath the dialogue, a narrative never told but eloquent in its silence. In some ways, I was reminded of Geoff Ryman's The King's Last Song. There is that same sense of a country unable to celebrate its vibrant history, left only with silent screams of those slaughtered on the altar of political expedience, and their ghosts. There is an eeriness in the environment Ondaatje creates. Deserving of it accolades, Anil's Ghost is a masterpiece.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, yet detached.,
By
This review is from: Anil's Ghost (Paperback)
Michael Ondaatje is a special author. He gives us the opportunity to explore ideas and places that few modern authors are capable of. Anil's Ghost is a collage of images reflecting pain, joy and quite often dispair and hopelessness. However, this is not a novel for every reader.Ondaatje presents the reader with an unlikely collection of characters each of Sri Lankan origin and carrying their own unique baggage and pain. The story is set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war and incorporates a romanticised picture of ancient Sri Lankan history. It is history that Ondaatje has used to tie this entire story together. Each character's past is revealed to illustrate how they became who they are at the point the story takes place. This is purely a character based novel. Ondaatje makes no effort to explain or justify the war. It is only presented as the setting. We only see it in so much as it effects the main characters directly. As I read this novel I was capitivated by it's optimistic tone regardless of the misery that impacted and surrounded these people. Each of them maintained a beauty of character. That said, I felt left out as the reader. Much of this novel was like looking at a painting. Beautiful and moving but static and easy to walk away from. I was never drawn into any of the characters and at no point did I really empathize with any of them either. It's for this reason that I don't think this book is for everyone. If what I've said has made you curious by all means read Anil's Ghost. But don't grab it on a whim, you're likely to be disappointed.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Specters and Secrets,
By "novelolic" (Kansas City, MO USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Anil's Ghost (Paperback)
I am an avid Ondaatje fan, and this book fulfilled my expectations. Once again, the author has created a haunting tale of loss and memory, a tale inhabited by living phantoms who each must come to grips with his or her own ghosts. Set against a background of mysterious disappearances and the violence of Sri Lankan conflicts, this novel touches both the personal and the political, yet remains intensely intimate as it explores the lives of its three central characters--an archeologist, a doctor, and a forensic specialist. Ondaatje's sparse and suggestive style adds a mystic dimension. One of the year's best reads.
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