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Product Description
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
From the jazz obsessions of Buddy Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter to the ministrations of the physician Gamini in Anil's Ghost and the craftperson's shared curiosity in The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje has always been a poet of work as much as love, and never more so than in In the Skin of a Lion. In his story of four characters and their labours, as bridge builder, explosives expert, actress and revolutionary, and thief, Ondaatje rewrites the history of Toronto between the wars in his most Canadian novel.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Amazon.ca
Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion uses its Toronto setting in the way that Martin Amis's London Fields uses London or Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz uses Montreal. In Skin, Toronto is a main character, although it's a character few of us have seen before. Set in the 1920s and '30s, the novel replaces the official history of Toronto's industrial adolescence, a history of commissioned architecture and suited politicians with ceremonial shovels, with an immigrant's history of crushing labour, repressive laws, a new language gleaned from matinee plays, and crowded apartment buildings where "a bottle of fruit whiskey" could often be found on summer nights dangling on "a long piece of twine" from fire escape to fire escape for all to share.
A quartet of vibrant characters animates Ondaatje's reclaimed Toronto. Farm-boy Patrick Lewis relocates to Toronto with a dual inheritance: a habit of solitude and a marketable skill with dynamite. Nicholas Temelcoff is a daredevil builder on the Bloor St. Viaduct eager for the most dangerous and acrobatic jobs. Alice Gull transforms the dedication of an early vocation into the passions of an actress and a political revolutionary. Italian thief David Caravaggio robs "the mean rich, the soft rich" and (literally) paints his way out of prison.
Virtuosos in isolation, the characters are beset by forces beyond their control. Ondaatje's tale ends up questioning the very abilities that it so delights in depicting: might the "solitary" strength of a hero be a curse rather than a blessing? Rewriting as it does the history of a growing, multicultural metropolis, In the Skin of a Lion plays with public history and private passion to examine the very fabric of community. --Darryl Whetter --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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