Amazon.com
From the celebrated author of The English Patient, comes another breathtaking, unforgettable story, this time about a family torn apart by an act of violence. Divisadero is a rich and rewarding read, one that Jhumpa Lahiri, in her guest review for Amazon.com (see below), calls "Ondaatje's finest novel to date." --Daphne Durham

Guest Reviewer: Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award for her mesmerizing debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her poignant and powerful debut novel, The Namesake was adapted by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, and released in theaters in 2007.

My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. I began Divisadero as soon as it came into my possession and over the course of a few evenings was captivated by Ondaatje's finest novel to date. The story is simple, almost mythical, stemming from a family on a California farm that is ruptured just as it is about to begin. Two daughters, Anna and Claire, are raised not just as siblings but with the intense bond of twins, interchangeable, inseparable. Coop, a boy from a neighboring farm, is folded into the girls' lives as a hired hand and quasi-brother. Anna, Claire, and Coop form a triangle that is intimate and interdependent, a triangle that brutally explodes less than thirty pages into the book. We are left with a handful of glass, both narratively and thematically. But Divisadero is a deeply ordered, full-bodied work, and the fragmented characters, severed from their shared past, persevere in relation to one another, illuminating both what it means to belong to a family and what it means to be alone in the world. The notion of twins, of one becoming two, pervades the novel, and so the farm in California is mirrored by a farm in France, the setting for another plot line in the second half of the book and giving us, in a sense, two novels in one. But the stories are not only connected but calibrated by Ondaatje to reveal a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes, and reflections across time and place. Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje's method is deliberate but discreet, and it was only in rereading this beautiful book--which I wanted to do as soon as I finished it--that the intricate play of doubles was revealed. Every sign of the author's genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life's most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence--subjects that have shaped Ondaatje's previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve. --Jhumpa Lahiri

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Book Description
From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.

In the 1970s in Northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives.

Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos and eventually to the landscape of south-central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough hewn from the past.

Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multilayered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje's most intimate and beautiful novel to date.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (46)

To Gaze From a Distance
It's an outstanding book; this Divisadero.For the characters in this book and particularly Anna it is what was stated within; "I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see them everywhere."The impact on lives of a violent punctuation point is clear.The book becomes a bit "kaleidoscopic" in the back 1/3rd, but then again that is the point.Lives touched by loss never are quite the same and Ondaatje does a masterful job with the language to capture that sentiment.Bravo!

powerful but not perfect novel
i agree with many of the pros and cons in other customer reviews and struggled with whether to give 3 or 4 stars.

on the plus side: ondaatje is a writer's writer, his language is simple, spare and poetic. the words dreamy and atmospheric come to mind. he also creates powerful images and stories. i was particularly enamored here of coop's time in vegas as well as anna's life in france. the book is rife with wisdom and makes you think.

on the disappointing side: i found much to admire but not as much that moved me. the voice is disengaged and the characters emotions are like plastic fruit. i also found myself wandering during the last 20% of the novel.

so very good, intriguing but flawed

Elegant and deeply satisfying
In a recent interview, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje likened the work of a writer to that of an archaeologist. "How one deals with the past," he said, "has always been a very important thing in my work." His elegant and deeply satisfying new novel, DIVISADERO, offers ample support for that self-characterization in the way it focuses on the power of love and memory to sustain connections over large stretches of space and time.

The plot of DIVISADERO unfolds in two broad, loosely connected narratives. The first involves two sisters, Anna and Claire, who are raised by their emotionally distant father on a northern California farm. As a teenager, Anna falls in love with a handsome and enigmatic farmhand by the name of Coop, who the family had taken in as a child when his parents were murdered. The relationship between the two lovers is shattered by an act of violence that is barely explicable and chilling in its brutality. Coop drifts into the life of a professional poker player in the casinos and Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, and eventually reconnects with Claire, who works as an investigator for a San Francisco public defender. Anna becomes a writer who travels to France to research the life and work of an obscure French author by the name of Lucien Segura. She inhabits the farmhouse in which Segura once lived, and her lover Rafael, whose gypsy family lived on a portion of the same property, connects her life to that of the long dead writer.

The other narrative recounts the life of Segura in France in the early part of the 20th century. From Segura's blinding in a childhood accident reminiscent of the traumatic event that separated Anna and Coop, to his lifelong infatuation with Marie-Neige, a poor young woman who takes up residence with a husband twice her age in a cottage on the Segura family homestead, Ondaatje explores the beauty and isolation of the creative mind and the power of love to sustain passion for another over the course of a lifetime.

As one would expect from a poet of Ondaatje's considerable talents, DIVISADERO is suffused with radiant prose. Whether he's describing the rugged farm country of northern California or the harsh beauty and occasional cruelty of life in a French village, his eye is fixed firmly on telling sensory details that bring his settings vividly to life. One character imagines a bird's eye view of the world, picturing "petite life on earth, a drifting of voices, the creak of a wagon, the retort and smoke from a gun among the almond trees...with only the essential notes of life reaching you through that distance of air." Another contrasts her life of rural poverty with that of "a rich man on horseback who galloped across the world, riding into a forest just to inhale its wet birch leaves after a storm." In countless other passages, and in writing that is expressive without being ornate or precious, Ondaatje patiently layers one such vivid image upon another to weave a tapestry of arresting beauty.

DIVISADERO is decidedly not a work for readers seeking a fast-paced plot or tidy resolutions. Ondaatje's technique, forsaking linear plot development and resisting the temptation to make facile connections between his overlapping narratives, is likely to frustrate those accustomed to more conventional storytelling structures. Time fractures and circles back on itself, and the aftershocks of traumatic events ripple ceaselessly through the lives of the characters, "the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue," Ondaatje writes. For his characters, "the raw truth of an episode never ends." The beauty of the novel, and the reward it offers to thoughtful readers (and perhaps re-readers), is the opportunity to ferret out connections that are only hinted at with a tantalizing obliqueness in the text itself.

"With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways," Ondaatje writes. "We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can." In shimmering prose that is as evocative as it is full of truth, DIVISADERO reminds us again of this poignant reality of our existence.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

Michael Ondaatje For Christmas
Its always a present to yourself when Michael Ondaatje has a new book. Even better is getting the book at a lesser price than the book store and sending for it nine days before Chrsitmas regular mail and still getting it in time for Christmas. Thank you Amazon.com

A Eupopean point ofview
A lot of papers and magazines announced Michael Ondaatjes Divisadero. At the same time the American and German book are available. Though I'm not a native speaker I bought the American one. I remembered the great language of the translations into German of his former novels. Now I wanted to know the original language of the author. - And what happens? Starting at the very first page I got a lot of problems. All this rural words! I could not translate, I could not understand. I worked with a professional dictionary (containing 100,000 words). Imissedwords. And sometimes I found two contrary interpretations of one sentence. Not only the language, but the content gave me a lot of problems, too. The story is changing in time, forward and backward, the teller changes and the locations.

At the end, I hope I understood, because I found some similarities between my "translation" and the blurb, and I'm wondering: Michael Ondaatje, born 1943 in Sri Lanka, working and living in Torornto now, is telling us Europaenabout

- the World War
- a forgotten French writer
- life in South France

My knowledge about France and the stories of my grandfathers military service in France are quiet different.

Our life in Germany differs very strong from that in Divisadero too. We have no time to repair old wooden houses or to walk along a riverside. We do not sleep with our neighboor. We call our stepfathers, husbands and wifes by their names. We can not imagine our or the French landscape as a Hollywood movie picture. We do not know sympathical gypsies or intelligentthieves. Our life excitement doesn't come from violence and accidents.

I mean the story is not typical. It seems very strange and not authentic to me. I emphasize that the novel Divisadero is a fiction. Thank to Amazon you can publish your opinion of this book. You can answer me. Did you met Anna or Rafael? ... Read more

Book Description
Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (73)

p
I cannot say that I fell in love with this book upon first reading--in fact, had I not been stuck waiting for several hours with nothing else to do, I probably would never have made it through. It is constructed very tediously, the structure being as intricate (and perhaps, as initially inaccessible) as the stylistic language itself.

That being said, there are reasons why this has taken and retained the role as one of my favorite books. The characters have been dismissed by many others as flighty, 2-dimensional, ephemeral, unconvincing--to me, their elusive quality is an incredible and attractive one (as reflected in the style of the writing itself). In a way each character is a poem grounded in the idea of a person; the language used to weave them into spidersilk existence is inexpressibly eloquent and beautiful.

For readers of prose poems & wistful, wandering works of art, this is the book for you. Read it once. Read it twice, savoring each world. Read it a third time and look at the embryonic world around you, and you might notice that you have started to break free.

Not Ondaatje at his best
I was completely floored by Ondaatje's 'Coming through the slaughter'. It is a superb novel of interconnected stories. 'In the skin of a lion' uses the same form and surpasses Slaughter in evoking atmosphere and imagery, but failed me as a whole. It is not a tour de force like Slaughter.

But: I compare Ondaatje with Ondaatje. I certainly think he is one of the best novelists of our time. And In the Skin of a Lion is a book worth reading.

In the Skin of A Lion
Stay with this book for the first 150 pages of mostly gritty stories about building the infra-structure of Toronto in the 1920's.Then, the poetic, magic realism, dreamy writing begins and it is beautiful and kind of crazy but fun to read.Enjoyable, thought provoking and interesting, that is all I can say.

Next time I'm going to read his poems
It was quite a while since I had read something by Ondaatje. I read "The English Patient" twice, a few years ago. The first time I was enthralled. But my second reading disappointed me. With "In the Skin of a Lion" I retraced this emotional trajectory in the space of reading a single book.

I know Ondaatje doesn't want us to look for a polished, coherent story in his books. In "Skin" he warns the reader in a variety of ways for the inevitable disorder and multiplicity of his narrative universe. There's a motto (by John Berger) that prefaces the book: "Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one." Then Ondaatje frames the whole novel as a story that is being told by a man to a girl, during a four hour nightly drive in a car: "She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms. And he is tired, sometimes as elliptical as his concentration on the road, at time overexcited ..." And then halfway through the book, the author admonishes us again: "Trust me, this will take time, but there is order here, very faint, very human". And despite these warnings and caveats, after a while a feeling of dissatisfaction sets in. The problem is not really the fact that an Ondaatje novel is more a collection of vignettes than a clockwork literary edifice. The problem is that this fragmentation erodes his characters' psychology. In "The English Patient" all of the protagonists are shadowy, ephemeral and solipsistic figures, unable to reach beyond their own world. In this book they fare only slightly better. With Patrick Lewis, Ondaatje has arguably drawn an interesting character. Although Lewis is only marginally less solitary and enigmatic than the "Patient's" protagonist, something of the animal-like but appealing naiveté of this personality really shines through. On the other hand, Lewis is not a man of ideas nor really of purposeful action and his development into a wavering anarchist is sketchy and rather implausible. Also the female characters in "Skin" - Clara, Alice, Hana - remain two dimensional, more carriers of an idea or an ethos than real human beings.

Ondaatje's mastery of prose is ultimately what one keeps involved. His language is suggestive and brilliantly refined (although sometimes it spills over into the ridiculous: how on earth is the "flight of a post-coital bat" supposed to look like?). Apparently he started out writing poems and I think this, rather than novels, is his real trade.He spins his narrative out of hypnotic images, some of which come back in various guises across different novels. For example, the image of a person hanging from a rope in a deep void is iconic image in the "English Patient" and it plays an important role in "Skin" too. Likewise, I thought of Ondaatje's description of a deserted Naples in the former book when reading the final scenes that play out in the monumental, cavernous Toronto waterworks in "Skin of a Lion".

So it's mixed feelings again after finishing this book. I'd give it 3,5 stars. The next book by Ondaatje I pick up will be one of his early collections of poems.

"I used to be a searcher.I can work dynamite."
"I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion."

Before winning the Booker Prize in 1992 for The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje (1943) wrote In the Skin of a Lion (1987) (the novel's title is from The Epic of Gilgamesh). The English Patient may be read as a sequel to In the Skin of a Lion in that it continues the characters of Hana and Caravaggio, and reveals the fate of the earlier novel's main character, Patrick Lewis.

The adventurous romance novel opens with Lewis as a young boy living with his father (Hazen Lewis) on a farm. As a boy, Patrick helps his father by rescuing a runaway cow from a freezing river and and by dynamiting log jams on the river (a skill that resurfaces later in Patrick's life).At one point, eleven-year-old Patrick follows a blue moth and watches loggers skating on the ice with lit cattails. At 21, Lewis moves to Toronto where he searches for a missing millionaire, Ambrose Small, which leads him to Small's mistress, Clara Dickens, an actress. Clara seduces Patrick before introducing him to another actress, Alice. When Clara leaves on a train, warning Lewis not to follow her, he falls into a three-year despair, that is, until Alice seduces him and mentions that Clara's mother might know where she is. Patrick begins his search for Clara, eventually finding her living with Small. Small attempts to set him on fire, but Patrick escapes to a hotel room where Clara dresses his wounds, shaves his face, and then seduces him again before returning to Small.Ondaatje demonstrates his rare talent when writing about sex as an act of love.

Later, in 1930, while working on a tunnel under Lake Ontario dynamiting rocks, Patrick again encounters Alice Gull and her 9-year-old daughter, Hana.Through a series of events revealed later in the novel, Patrick finds himself in prison with Buck and Caravaggio, a thief.After his release, Patrick assumes responsibility for the care of now sixteen-year-old Hana.She tells him Clara has called. Small is dead. Hana asks him about Clara, which prompts Patrick to tell her his entire story. Caravaggio and Patrick conspired to commit the violent act of dynamiting the Toronto Filtration Plant, a plan that results in Alice's accidental death.The book ends with Patrick saying "Lights."Written with poetic flourishes, Ondaatje's novel is a flat-out stunning adventure.

G. Merritt ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

"and then the past is erased"........
.....We are told on the first page of "THE STORY".

Children are given forty days of dreams of previous lives and then "the past is erased".

This is a beautifully written and illustrated little book that teases out questions and follows with elegiac whispers of the memories, the histories that were present before the maps were buried.

The poem takes us to a place we have already been trained to enter and conquer, only any projection past that point is unknown..... thus at the end we are left to reflect and wonder.....and hope for our future.

Michael Ondaatje magically takes the reader into his hands and transports him gently through his poem in a dreamlike haze.

This lovely little book would make a wonderful gift and knowing that all royalties go directly to a fundraising project for World Literacy of Canada is an added bonus! ... Read more

Book Description
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel, a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth, about William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid, " a bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint. "Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets."--Annie Dillard. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

horrible
This is one of the most disgusting books I have ever been forced to read. I believe college professors can find something better to use as examples in their classes. Stay away....if you know what's good for you, STAY AWAY!!

Great Book For the Non-serious BTK Fan!
The book is very fun to read, but is not for the serious Billy the Kid fans.It holds your interest well, as long as, you don't take it too serious.The author is good at what he does and this book is well written.But, don't look for any new, serious information on Billy because it is not there.My review is written strictly from a nonfiction point of view and should be read with that in mind.I read the complete book and enjoyed reading it, but there is nothing in it to really grasp as fact.

A Postmodern Western
"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" creates a beautiful and visceral written collage about the legendary Billy the Kid.Written in a mixture of prose, poetry, clippings and interviews, the reader may not always be sure of whose voice they are hearing and whether the pictures being painted in their head are based on reality or fiction; or both.You can feel in your very skull the heat of the mid-day sun...This is the wonder that is Ondaatje's postmodern take on the Western.

It is a book to be experienced; read and re-read.Each time you return you will find something new to consider and move with.The language Ondaatje uses is among the most compelling that I have ever read.Best consumed with the suspended need for the linear and clear.

Oh, for yesteryear
There was a time, pre-English Patient, when the innovative work of Michael Ondaatje appeared assured of standing the test of time, as this slender, groundbreaking volume of poetry, prose, and prose-poetry, now some 35 years old, makes clear. It is, arguably, if not the best--that would be Coming Through Slaughter--then certainly the most felicitous work in Ondaatje's ouevre, and one would be hard pressed indeed to describe it as anything less than a work of sparkling genius.

That the author's more recent, utterly conventional efforts--first Patient, then Anil's Ghost--have, by comparison, evidenced such a precipitous decline, is only sad. But, if you want to read Ondaatje at the near-height of his powers, you could do far worse than Billy the Kid. (Or Slaughter. Or Running in the Family.)

Those were the days. And they were better days. And ballsier days. And brassier. Far better days indeed than Mr. Ondaatje's nowadays. It is the author's express lack of nerve, the lack of nerve expressed in his recent work, that one now deplores. But when Ondaatje was great, he wrote Billy the Kid, the great work of a once-great writer. And in those days, few, few indeed, were greater.

COULD'VE BEEN LESS PRETENTIOUS
The book is full of desultory excerpts from Billyýs diary: stories about certain people ý acquaintances, friends, foes, cops, outlaws (like the one he was) is told, which seem irrelevant until those people are referred to in some other part of the book, involved in a small incident involving Billy himself, or just Billy, shedding some more light on their persona. At times, it does feel that Ondaatje is being pretentious by making efforts to purposely disconnect fragments of the book and placing them hugger-mugger, just to make the book a little bit more outré, at other times, it is this annoying and deliberate effort by him, that adds color to this book, and forces the reader to read it more than once to get a grip of what is happening in the book; and with the book becoming more and more comestible with every subsequent reading, who could complain.
The poetry, as it seems to me, gets too vague to understand sometimes, and seems grossly out-of-context, though choice of words seem quite interesting. Moreover, it seems like one needs to know beforehand, the context of the poetry, and a brief know-how of Billyýs life, both of which could not be found in the book. This makes the understanding of certain poems, a bit too hard. The simplest poems of the book, is what give it high points: like the one about swatting a fly ý in all its simplicity, this detailed poetic- explanation of how Billy killed an innocuous fly, in addition to the people he had killed, hits the reader hard, with all its earthiness. Also worth highlighting is another poetry-of-sort, which describes the snoring, sleeping friend of Billy, and how his stertorous snoring made a funny whistling sound, when the air from his mouth was forced out of the gap in between his frontal pair of teeth: unassuming, touching and effective.
The book is rather funny, in the way the various killings and encounters are described. No detail is spared, and the gore is described, exactly the way it had happened: and all this, without an iota of emotion ý stoic and cold. Amongst the bits from Billyýs diary, about the people he knew, there is this interesting story about this mad-man, who used to raise ýfreakyý dogs; he cross-bred them, sub-Rosa, only to be brutally killed by them. Also, the excerpt about Paul Garrett, the ideal assassin and Sallie Chisum makes one feel there were really some colorful and adorable people in Billyýs life. Also, Billyýs ýexclusive jail interviewý is ýin-your-faceý, and at times, laughable.
All in all, the book is worth the money paid for it, though there are instances, where some material seem grossly out-of-context and leaves the reader lost: it couldýve been much better off without Ondaatjeýs pretentious effort to be weird. ... Read more

Amazon.com
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.

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 WilberBook Description
With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.

Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war.Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past–a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder–Michael Ondaatje’smost powerful novel yet.
Download Description
With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.The time is our own time. The place is Sri Lanka, the island nation formerly known as Ceylon, off the southern tip of India, a country steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition--and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself.Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island.Bodies are discovered. Skeletons. And particularly one, nicknamed 'Sailor.' What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past--all propelled by a riveting mystery.Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a literary spellbinder--the most powerful novel we have yet had from Michael Ondaatje. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (173)

Beautiful
I love this book. Michael Ondaatje writes about loss and grief and passion, and he does it with devastating quietness. This is a beautiful book, and one I have returned to again and again.

Searching for meaning in the darkness of the human heart.
"One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims" (p. 176).

In its examination of human brutality, this is a powerful novel that searches for meaning in the darkness of the human heart. The horror, one is reminded, the horror. Best known for his Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient, Philip Ondaatje's (1943) fourth novel, Anil's Ghost (2000), tells the story of 33-year-old Anil Tissera, a westernized native Sri Lankan, who returns to Sri Lanka to investigate claims of international human rights violations in the form of political massacres. The novel is set in the in the 1980s and '90s, while the government, anti-government insurgents, and separatist guerrillas are secretly eradicating the fearful population. With the help of a 49-year-old government archaeologist, Sarath Diyasena, Anil--a forensic anthropologist--attempts to identify skeletal bones (nicknamed Sailor) she suspects are the remains of a recent victim of Sri Lankan governmental murder. "The central truism" of Anil's work is that "you could not find a suspect until you found the victim" (p. 16). As Anil pursues her fact-finding investigation into the mystery surrounding Sailor's death, she becomes intwined in a suspenseful web of politics, paranoia, and tragedy, and it is difficult for her to know who to trust. Even Sarath's motivations are confusing, if not suspect. Through a series of flashbacks, as the title suggests, Anil is forced to confront her own ghosts, which is really the center of Ondaatje's novel. The plot unfolds with the tension of a thriller, and with Ondaatje's characteristic subtle, poetic flourishes along the way. (When he describes the "starkness of the desert" in the rain, you can smell the "toxic quality" of the creosote, pp. 148-49.) It is his stunning writing style that has made me a loyal Ondaatje reader.

G. Merritt

The human face of the news we don't want to hear...
In order to maintain our sanity, we live on the very margin of our conscience, barely conscious of the world around us. If we want to step deeper inside this world, the revelations will ruin us for the lack of solutions for the ever existent human crises. A mere glimpse into the world will make us longing for the peace of mind we once had, to find an easy solution or forget the truth of life altogether. The absent minded happiness and peacefulness of the middle class is the healthiest/least self-destructive of all available ways to ignore the world. This book is about the people who can't escape the truth, either because they live in the midst of it or because they were thrown in and forced to face it.

Whatever is lacking here in the quality of a solidified prosaic form is irrelevant due to the immediacy of the human tragedy that is happening in Sri Lanka and other countries. Read it just to become part of the real world, nor for any other reason.

A stark, beautiful, raw novel
I read this book over two days, and I could hardly put it down.Ondaatje's prose is lyric and clear, evoking so many emotions at once.He creates pictures, and I could feel the environment of his characters.It makes me want to go to Sri Lanka and discover this culture.Yet I also understand that all of us are in the human experience together, with the love we share with one another, and the pain we use to control one another.A gorgeous novel.Thank you Mr. Ondaatje.

MEDIOCRE
Some parts of the book weren't bad and it tells something about the war in Sri Lanka then flashes back to the skeleton man named Sailor that was found. Too vague and too much flashing back and I didn't care for the end. Some parts I really got into and were interesting but other parts were boring. I was dissapointed somewhat in this one. Didn't care for the plot. Would I read it again, NADA. ... Read more

Book Description
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (30)

Irritating
Ondaatje seems to be trying too hard. The language is overly flowery and the plot is often lost beneath the mound of words. It does have a few good moments, some funny, some touching. But in general, I spent most of this book irritated by the grandois manner of the author, as if by writing in a vague and pretty-fied manner, his words will sound important and deep.
Maybe it's just me, but I find that vague does NOT equal meaningful.

Remembering Family
I read this book for a Canadian fiction class and really liked it.The language was so interesting and different from anything I had read before.It is a wonderful story about a wacky family. There are good times, bad times, funny stories, tragic stories, and just plain wacky events. It really makes you want to take a look into your own family and find out all of the "juicy" details.I really liked the book and I would recommend it to anyone looking for an interesting story.

hit and miss.
fans of michael ondaatje's poetry will no doubt like this book; however, do to the hit and miss nature of each chapter, i doubt that this book would win him many new fans. an impressionistic collage of place & family members, this book is closer to the ethic of poetry, forsaking narrative structure for short pieces that jump here and there to paint a family in an exotic place and time. plenty of good prose, but lots of the pieces are too random and are just not interesting. worthwhile, but not highly recommended.

Pictures of yesterday
Considering that this is in fact an autobiograpy, one can not judge it's contents. After all, you can not judge ones life, either you like it or not in a sense of discussing literature. But, what you can discuss is the manner in which that biography is written. Ondaatje present's life of his family trough generations who lived on Ceilon (Shri Lanka), in a series of random images, which are more like picture, than prose. Many times he stops to grasp certain individual and present his little history, his life, which than influenced the rest of the family in some perverse way. When reading this book, experienced reader will find such compositions that corresponds in that what crtics call 'modern', others will find interesting and compelling story, which never grows in boredom, with fluent narrative style that keeps ones eyes fixed on pages long after the lights went out.
Comparing the Ondaatje with other authors of the modern world,
Ondaatje lacks the one thing that he "must" have when presenting himself in a way he does. By focusing himself merely on a problems of his own, of a personal character in every (which, of course, includes this one)book, he voluntarily forgets that there is other life, other world going around him. When tending to write intelectual prose, one should, at least in one way, give some focus on that matter too.
But, when all this comes to conclusion, if you like (auto)biograhies - buy this one, if you don't, skip it. It's simple as that...

delicious
both the style and the subject of this novel are easy and enjoyable to absorb. mostly a memoir including some letters and poems. it has a great sense of humor and is full of passionate, and most importantly interesting accounts of the definatly NOT run of the mill family history Ondaatje has. ... Read more

Book Description
The Conversations is a treasure, essential for any lover or student of film, and a rare, intimate glimpse into the worlds of two accomplished artists who share a great passion for film and storytelling, and whose knowledge and love of the crafts of writing and film shine through.

It was on the set of the movie adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, that Michael Ondaatje met the master film and sound editor Walter Murch, and the two began a remarkable personal conversation about the making of films and books in our time that continued over two years. From those conversations stemmed this enlightened, affectionate book -- a mine of wonderful, surprising observations and information about editing, writing and literature, music and sound, the I-Ching, dreams, art and history.

The Conversations is filled with stories about how some of the most important movies of the last thirty years were made and about the people who brought them to the screen. It traces the artistic growth of Murch, as well as his friends and contemporaries -- including directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Fred Zinneman and Anthony Minghella -- from the creation of the independent, anti-Hollywood Zoetrope by a handful of brilliant, bearded young men to the recent triumph of Apocalypse Now Redux.

Among the films Murch has worked on are American Graffiti, The Conversation, the remake of A Touch of Evil, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (all three), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The English Patient.

“Walter Murch is a true oddity in Hollywood. A genuine intellectual and renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with film making and his whole generation of filmmakers. He knows, probably, where a lot of the bodies are buried.”


From the Trade Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

This book is about creativity, not just film or sound
I loved this book because it is intensely literary and thoughtful.It gives great insights into the creative process which transcends film, sound, and writing;and Ondaatje's thoughtful questions are a huge part of what makes the book great.If it were just a 'normal' author interviewing Murch, they wouldn't have gotten to half the interesting topics which they end up covering.This book is also wonderful because it's such a departure from other books -- it's not trying to fit a type or a genre of writing, so it seems to end up in this essential but interstitial place in between 'how to' 'memoir' and 'philosophy of'.The first couple dozen pages are a bit slow as Ondaatje finds his footing, but after that, the book is compelling.

Accessable to everyone
This is not a technical film editing manual, but should prove invaluable to someone beginning in film and interesting to anyone on an intermediate level.Filled with fascinating stories of what it takes to make the cut.An excellent read.

Very insightful
An excellent book.It great to be able to read editing theory, and hard to find.At times the authors comments seemed a little wordy, but Murch is very insightful.

Great Read
This is an immensely interesting read for anyone even remotely interested in film and the film making process. Includes a lot of cool behind the scenes stories about Francis Ford Coppola and his films (The Godfather, Apocolypse Now, The Conversation) as well as insight and tips about the art of film editing.

"One Art"
Walter Murch may be the greatest film editor alive, having cut classic works by Coppola (THE CONVERSATION, THE GODFATHER PARTS I, II, and III, APOCALYPSE NOW, THE RAIN PEOPLE), Minghella ( THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, COLD MOUNTAIN), Kaufman (THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING) and Zimmermann (JULIA). The novelist Michael Ondaatje, whose best-known novel THE ENGLISH PATIENT was adapted by Anthony Minghella into another a film cut by Murch, had the fine idea of sitting down for a series of conversations with Murch to ask him about his little-understood, important, and intelligent art form. The result is one of the greatest series of extended conversations on film since Truffaut's interviews with Hitchcock. Part of the pleasure of the book is getting not only to see Murch'scomplex work described but also getting to know him as a personality: considered one of the most intelligent men in Hollywood, he comes across not only as exceptionally erudite but also unpretentious and honest. Ondaatje may be the ideal interlocutor for Murch because he is so beautiufully versed in film history and in Murch's work; his many asides about his own writings may allow him to come across at times as a bit self-enamoured, but they do allow the reader the multiple pleasure of having a major figure in world literature give insights into his own work as we also hear about Murch's. One of the best delights the book offers is ample illustrations of the examples Murch and Ondaatje discuss, which are drawn from literature and the other arts and humanities as much as they are from film: one of the best is when the book offers side by side comparisons of the first draft and final version of Elizabeth Bishop's great villanelle "One Art," which is itself a celebration of the art of editing. It is rare to see a non-academic book about film that takes its readers' intelligence for granted. As such, it is genuinely a book everyone seriously interested in film should own. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Sumptuous, steamy, downright sexy: on the blush-o-meter Ondaatje scoresa 10. Those who can't get enough of his melodious prose--most notably in The English Patient, which earned him the Booker Prize in 1992--will find the same lyrical genius in his verse. In his 10th collection, Ondaatje transports us to his childhood home of Sri Lanka. With strikingly sensuous imagery, he conjures a land of bangles, cattle bells, stilt-walkers, and a 1000-year-old buddha "buried in Anuradhapura earth, / eyes half closed, hands / in the gesture of meditation... roots / like the fingers of a blind monk / spread for two hundred years over his face." As the title suggests, Handwriting is an elegiac tribute to the ancients who in "wild cursive scripts... spent all their years / writing one good book"; whose "physical yearning / became permanent" and "desire became devotional." In his Sanskrit and Tamil love poem, "The Nine Sentiments," Ondaatje not only proves most definitively that music is the key to unlocking a reader's heart, but also argues for poetry's healing powers in times of strife:

The brush of sandalwood along a collarbone
Green dark silk
A shoe left
on the cadju tree terrace
these nights when "pools are
reduced by constant plungings"
Meanwhile a man's burning heart
his palate completely dry
on the Galapitigala Road
thinking there is water in that forest

Customer Reviews (13)

Lovely, Lyrical, and Lusty


Michael Ondaaatje walks with you into his Sri Lanka where the richness there inspires the lush lingering prose that issues from his pen.

In "THE SIYABASLAKARA" he begins....

"In the 10th century, the young princess
entered a rock pool like the moon

with a blue cloud

Her sisters
who dove, lit by flares,
were lightning

Water and erotics

The path from king to rainmaking"......


It is indeed a rich and luminous landscape that he portrays.

Follow him there!

This captivating, powerful little book will both delight and seduce at the same time!

He's past his prime
I might be impressed by this book if I understood a single thing he wrote.Most of it is deliberately obscure and private with lots of 12 syllable Sri Lankan place names thrown in to ensure that it's impossible for anyone to read aloud.Nothing really stood out or inspired much interest.If you're still curious then get it from a library, don't shell out hard-earned cash for it, it's not worth it.

Good for V-Day
I could recommend this slim volume as a nearly perfect Valentine's Day gift based almost on the attractive appearance and reasonable price, alone. The content has merit as well, and I'm basically glad I read it. As I look at the reviews above, I find I agree with all of them- both the positive and the negative: they say the same things. Ondaatje hasn't written verse for fourteen years, devoting himself mostly to well-crafted prose fiction, and it shows. He has good control of topic and theme, an eye for detail and incident, and a very sensual command of the language. Any verse-craft is not at all in evidence- but it's easy reading in any case, so it is as much as most people may care.

"?"
Here in Canada the name Michael Ondaatje elicits homage, and his readers are a dedicated, faithful lot. This year, his 1987 book "In The Skin Of A Lion" was selected (by Canadians) as the book all Canadians should read, or in other words... "thee great Canadian novel" in a national project known as "Canada Reads."
Confession: I'm Canadian and I've never read any Ondaatje fiction. (GASP)!
But in honor of the Canada Reads project I bought "In The Skin Of A Lion" and just haven't read it yet. So, forgive me.
(And now, for the unforgivable)...
I thought I'd start off with delving into some of his poetry first.
Bad idea.
I picked up his "Handwriting" (poems written between 1993 and 1998, dealing mostly with a recollection of his homeland, Sri Lanka)... and I think I approached the book with as open or non-judgmental of an attitude as is possible.
But poem after poem I waited for some image or experience to provide meaning beyond the mere succession of words and snatches of unfinished thought, and nothing really worked for me. I finished the volume convinced that no reader can fully appreciate what is going on in these poems unless perhaps they happen to live within a ten mile radius of the events and scenes these poems describe.
Everything is in free verse, not a rhyme in the lot.
Note the following representative example, complete with a title nearly as long as the poem itself:

Driving with Dominic in the Southern Province We See Hints of the Circus

The tattered Hungarian tent

A man washing a trumpet
at a roadside tap

Children in the trees,

one falling
into the grip of another

Now come on, let's be serious, I could compose such a sequence in my own head in the time it takes to light a cigarette and blow out the match... and I don't even smoke!
I realize that Ondaatje fans will find those comments offensive, and it may be arguable that I am just too dense to appreciate Ondaatje's "delicacy and power" and "whimsical precision and authority" that the dustjacket promises to those that read beyond it... but, at the same time, I am not easily convinced of my own stupidity. I think I do know good poetry when I see it. And I do not judge Ondaatje AS A POET, especially since I have not read his other nine or ten published books of poetry, but I am singling out "Handwriting" as the only thing I've read so far. And I give it two stars for its occasional beauty:

The curve of the bridge
against her foot

her thin shadow falling
through slats
into water movement

Will this book keep me from reading that other stuff of his? Not at all. In fact, I look forward to finding his other work as memorable as this was forgettable.

Gods Buried and Unburied
If there is a central image in these three sequences of poems it is one of burial, unearthing and renewal - of statues of the Buddha, of water, of emotions, memories, a life that counts. Ondaatje starts us on this road of memories from his childhood home of Sri Lanka with a series of historical anecdotes and detail, a different place where "We believed in the intimate life, an inner self" and "3am in temples, the hour of washing the gods" led to a God being dragged from temples "by one's own priests" to be buried while wars, treasure hunters and fifty year feuds went by, so that "roots/like the fingers of a blind monk/spread for two hundred years over his face."

In the third and most anecdotally direct, least oblique sequence the image of the dug up Buddha reappears transformed:
"In the sunless forest/of Ritagala...nine soldiers on leave/strip uniforms off/and dig a well.../In the sunless forest/crouched by a forest well/pulling what was lost out of the depth." And immediately before that anecdote, in one of the achingly simple lyrics that litter this thatch of stories and semi-parables, Ondaatje tells of "the last Sinhala word" which he lost, "the word for water" and the wet nurse "a lost almost-mother in those years/of thirsty love" who he has no photograph of, has not seen sinceage eleven, whose grave he can find no trace of. He now wonders who abandoned who.

Now and then the concerns of a writer surface and you realise these are the meditations of a writer returning to buried wounds and springs to be renewed: the poets who "slept, famous, in palace courtyards/then hid within forests when they were hunted/..and were killed and made more famous." Or in the second sequence "The Nine Sentiments", which corresponds to the nine sentiments of Indian love poetry (romantic/erotic, humorous, pathetic, angry, heroic, fearful, disgustful, amazed and peaceful - as I'm sure you knew) there comes this very modern, writerly unease: "Where is the forest/not cut down/for profit or literature.." and lines later "Where is there a room/without the damn god of love?"

These poems are of the haunted and of the haunting, of what you cannot escape from and when Ondaatje uses techniques of Indian poetry, even language and references you do not as a Westerner quite own, such is the sensual certainty of his grasp that you take them on faith. He will talk of what you do not know and then of "gold ragas of longing/like lit sequin/on her shifting green dress". The notes at the back did not explain what a "raga" was but, frankly, I don't need to know. I will fall under Ondaatje's daze as he recalls what was lost in his own half dreaming sleep.

Where the poems take longest to work their magic is in the opening, where you do not have a framework of emotions to connect all these anecdotes to and the details may seem merely colourful. As the book progresses he unpacks before you both the good and the bad memories, the pains of history and personal loss and the quick, effortless watercolours capturing exotic scenes like some British traveller of the last century or the one before - of "women of the Boralesgamuwa" singing "songs to celebrate the washing/of arms and bangles...the three folds on their stomachs/considered a sign of beauty" on afternoons when they "try out all their ankle bracelets". And in some pure love lyricshis style becomes that of the immitated so there is no more than a hair's breadth between him and the model, not a crack to see light through between him and the heights of say Arthur Waley's classic Chinese poetry translations in lines like: "her fearless heart/light as a barn owl/against him all night."

A central poem of the first section starts simply with the line: "What we lost." This he continues to catalogue in some detail as a whole way of life, of civilisation and love and ways of loving "burned or traded for power and wealth". In the closing poem "Last Ink" Ondaatje closes in on what remains:

"the dusk light, the cloud pattern,
recorded always in your heart

and the rest of the world - chaos,
circling your winter boat."

The rest, he concludes, is only love. And momentary, sought out opportunities for leaps and bowing, in the darkness. ... Read more

Book Description
In his novels, poetry, and memoirs, Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje moves from the blasted landscape of Billy the Kid in 1880s New Mexico to the New Orleans jazz world of the legendary Buddy Bolden at the turn of the century, from his native Sri Lanka to the African desert of World War II. Compassionate, lyrical, spellbinding, the work he has created unfolds with mystery and eloquence and enlarges our literature.

Included in Vintage Ondaatje are portions of the novels Anil’s Ghost, In the Skin of the Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The English Patient; the memoir Running in the Family; sections from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; and a selection of the poetry.

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

And the best is yet to come.
I wish there was a way I could give a copy of this book to everyone who wants to write in America.I don't know how many years I've been reading Ondaatje's books, but it must have been in college I picked up a copy of his BILLY THE KID book and plunged in, getting high on the strangeness and weirdness and, what I didn't immediately perceive, its Canadianness.The poetry of the book made its story come alive in dazzling ways, like great gardens of tumbleweeds springing up from the sand and beginning to roll at a word.VINTAGE ONDAATJE brings together a lot of work from the beginning of his career to excerpts from his latest novel, ANIL'S GHOST, which I'm sure will rank as one of his finest achievements, even though it didn't have perhaps the cultural oomph of its predecessor, the Booker Prize winner THE ENGLISH PATIENT.

Even from the limited sections printed here in VO, ANIL'S GHOST reveals itself slowly, deliberately, as though emerging from a film of water, or through the smoke of burning sandalwood.If throughout his body of work Ondaatje has celebrated and critiqued the modern world's nomadism, ANIL'S GHOST reworks some familiar concepts and makes them new again.Cunningly the poems sometimes serve as a sort of garnish for the longer prose works, and at other times the poems themselves seem like the polished, rafined quintessences of glorious mystery.I think of him as I think of D H Lawrence, a marvelous poet whose artillery, or arsenal of poetic effects and knowledge are even better put to serve in the making of a series of brilliant modern novels.That's not to say I'd throw out BIRDS, BEASTS AND FLOWERS to make room for, say, WOMEN IN LOVE, I'm just saying you couldn't have the latter without the former.

I can't believe I'm the first to speak up about this book.As I say, I hope that in the future everyone will receive a copy of this book at birth.It should be an essential human right like access to clean water and no more circumcision. ... Read more

Book Description
Reading selected texts by Michael Ondaatje, including the novels In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient and the poem "Birch Bark," Annick Hillger demonstrates how his writing both answers and challenges attempts to delineate the idea of a Canadian national self. She sets Ondaatje's work within the context of theoretical and philosophical ideas, developing the notion of a "literature of silence" concerned with finding a ground for self beyond the realm of language.Not Needing all the Words looks at Ondaatje's work in relation to the post-Cartesian idea of the modern subject as split and alienated. Highlighting the distinction between aesthesis and logic, Hillger traces the ways in which Ondaatje responds to the continuing process of silencing art in the modern age of reason. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
Michael Ondaatje’s new selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

One of Ondaatje's Best Poems
I had the opportunity to hear Michael Ondaatje read his poem 'The Concessions' from this book at the Blyth Festival season launch and this poem is very beautiful. Not only is it a connection that is like no other with the area that it was written for. Ondaatje has really gotten into the sprit of the area as he pin points local figures 'the mystic from Millbank' we all knew who these people were that he was pin pointing which was very lovely. I was very pleased to have had the opportunity to have hear that poem that I went out and bought this book right away because of that poem. I recommed that you buy this book there are many other lovely poems but that one 'The Concessions' will forever stand out in my mind.

A Beautiful Collection
The wonderful collection of poems that comprise The Cinnamon Peeler were written by Michael Ondaatje during a twenty-year period.They are works of deep intimacy and dazzling beauty.

Not being a poet myself, I enjoyreading Ondaatje's gorgeous poetry to my novelist wife.

More than lovepoems, these works contain wonderful twists and turns that are both painfuland funny.Ondaatje has obviously turned to both Rousseau and WallaceStevens for inspiration, but he also contributes his own sense of the noveland his awareness of social strata.

This is a charming book, with a mutedsense of humor.With The Cinnamon Peeler, Ondaatje takes us deep insidehis own mind and heart.It is trip worth making.

To understand Michael Ondaatje, read his poetry!
Michael Ondaatje knows how to write poetry.Primarily, he is a poet.Secondly a novelist.This collection contains a great variety of poems about day to day life, love, marriage, deep observations about children,humour, history and many more.

My favourite poem is ""To a SadDaughter"which has a universal appeal.Once, I read this poem to mywife just replacing the poet's daughter's infatuation: ice hockey playerswith our daughter's hobby. My wife remarked:"Great poem.So youwrite good poetry too!"

I also like other poems including "TheCinnamon Peeler","A House Divided", "Women LikeYou", "Billboards" and "Postcard From PiccadillyStreet".

Michael Ondaatje shares his great intimate moments with usincluding love, his recollection of places and relationships with us.Ifyou want to understand Ondaatje's prose, one must begging with his poetry. For anyone `The Cinnamon Peeler' is an entry into a dark and deep labyrinthpainted with human experience.When you come out of it, you'll be adifferent person.

This book is a one I read over and over again when I'mboth sad and happy!

A wonderful, readable mixture of poems
Michael Ondaatje knows how to mix humor, beauty, sadness, and acute observation together to make lovely works of art.This collection contains a great variety of poetry, from simple and touching observations about hischildren, to deeply imagined distant moments of wonder.My favorite is"Pure Memory/Chris Dewdney" which actually made me cry twice fortwo different reasons when I first read it.I will say no more here. "Elimination Dance" is also a fun one to read out loud. "The Cinnamon Peeler" itself is a fantastic love poem.There isso much good stuff in this.

his train of thought is so complex yet so simple...
I don't have much to say, but I must state my immense admiration for micheal ondaatje and his thought...his way of thinking reminds me of my own, like when he says in one of his poems with no name, "how we movedfrom thin ceramic to such destruction".I feel such romance and lovefrom almost every single poem, even rat jelly!He doesn't restrict himselfto using a certain amount of lines in his stanzas, and there's no rhyming. That makes his poetry more "true" and honest, like all poemsshould be.His works read rather like a novel and he could probably writea novel for each poem he's written, but they'd all be thrown in togethereventually into one book, since they're all in a way connected.I lovereading his poetry over and over again, the effect never wears out.Ican't remember the name of my favourite poem from this book, but it'ssimply about him and his wife kicking each other in bed for the covers andthe space, and how he says that she got pregnant, he's sure, just so shecould get the space...it's such a simple subject that no one else wouldthink of writing about...no other poets that I've read have succeded inbeing able to pour out their thoughts in a way that I would actually beinterested to read them.I applaud you, Micheal Ondaatje...all my love. ... Read more