[.ca] Anils Ghost: 2 Cassettes, 3 Hours (ISBN 0333903293)

From 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. 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

Beautiful in parts, dissonant as whole:
Having missed out on "The English Patient" I wanted to catch up on Ondaatje with this book. I was disappointed, and below is why. The main characters, Anil (a forensic researcher educated in the west and dispatched to Sri Lanka by a human rights organization to investigate disappearances of Sri Lankans), Sarath (a native Sri Lankan archeologist assigned to work with Anil), and Gamini (brother of Sarath who is an MD), in my view, all failed to develop into concrete characters. Don't get me wrong, I found Ondaatje's prose beautiful. There were beautiful passages describing past (as opposed to the ongoing storyline, which was to identify the identity of a certain corpse) experiences of each of the characters. The problem I had was connecting any one past experience to another of the same character. It gave me the sense that the characters were manufactured, as the union of experiences that have no intersection. This was most pronounced in Anil -- I never understood her drive to uncover the identity of the corpse. In the same vein I found the novel's reference to the Sri Lankan civil war also unsatisfactory. Other than the landscape the author portrayed, there were no particular, intrinsic reason linking why the background of the novel should be Sri Lanka at all. Throughout the novel the war remained "anonymous," with no specific characteristics of its own, serving as a backdrop that justified the ongoing violence.

Worth one and a half stars. Almost obscene in its fatuity:
This is supposedly a novel about the Sri Lankan civil war. In fact it is nothing of the kind. The novel does take place in Sri Lanka, there is certainly a war going on, with people being brutally murdered by at least three sides, and the characters are supposedly involved in trying to find out who is responsible for the corpse (known as "Sailor") they have found. But there is no discussion of why this war is going on. Sri Lanka is a democracy, yet there is no politics in the book. The characters are all upper middle class professionals but they are not politically conscious, not politically active, do not debate the course of the war, do not seriously discuss proposals how to end it, or seriously ponder about the fate of their unhappy country. The contrast with, say, V.S. Naipaul is striking in revealing Ondaatje's frivolous irresponsiblity. But of course, if Ondaatje wrote a book which actually looked at the complex politics of the country where he was born in, he might lose the middlebrow readers who were so attracted to the orientalism and exoticism of "The English Patient." Ondaatje wrotes in a prose that is less lyrical than lush. And so we get a large amount of pretentious blather that can be confused for poetry. Note the drivel about truth, dream and secrets on page 259. Or consider these passages: "A paranoid is someone with all the facts, the joke went. Maybe this was the only truth here." (54) "We are full of anarchy. We take our clothers off because we shouldn't take our clothers off." (138) "But in the midst of such \otraumatic\c events, she realized, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it." (57) Consider this last passage, a textbook example of what's wrong with this book. It is not simply a good example of false profundity. It is actually false. One can think of many contemporary writers who are capable of giving meaning to this sort of violence. If not perfect, writers as varied as Gordimer, Coetzee, Rushdie, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, Naipaul, Sebald, Morrison and Appelfeld certainly do a substantially better job than Ondaatje. So what do we see in this novel about forensic scientist Anil Tissera and her colleagues as they ruminate about their lives? Well, we have a few scenes of soft-core exoticism, and there is a fashionable suggestion of incest. There are some scenes from the war which may be more powerful if they were actually accurate. The brutal assassination at the end of the novel is supposedly a historical event, but the victim's real name is not given. There is no real discussion of the motive of the crime, or even the identity of the people who murdered one of the main characters. There is an interesting scene in which a kidnapped and blindfolded man is awkwardly forced to ride along with the captor on the latter's bicycle. Ondaatje also brings in details about forensics, with limited results. We learn that if shrapnel flies through you from a bomb explosion and you are not killed or wounded, you should be all right because the heat of the explosion would have sterilized the shrapnel. We also learn that the shock wave of an explosion can flip your stomach over. One of the few scenes that show any life is a discussion Anil and a friend of hers has other wounds in movies. Is the shooting of John Ireland in "Red River" anatomically accurate? But Ondaatje is too pompous a writer to let this rare example of humour pass, and soon we see a letter about a shooting in "Point Blank," filled with all sorts of portentousness. And several times "The bone of choice would be the femur" is pompously repeated. Oh yes, Anil's friend is a lesbian and she suffers from Alzheimer's. About midpoint through the novel we learn that Anil was previously married, not to anyone really deserving of her affection. The sex was great, but they weren't really compatible and he cried too easily. I swear that is an accurate summary. It is at this point that one realizes that not only is this book simply playing at politics. It is also playing at love, emotion, moral complexity and any other concept deserving of sustained criticale examination. What makes this book so particulary contemptible is that many readers may believe that Ondaatje's rhetoric on these subjects is the real thing.

Ondaatje Challenging Hollywod: Try This!:
This book was a nice break from my study of Hinduism and Buddhism. It brings one to the world of today's Sri Lanka. Ondaatje is completely capable of painting vivid images in our heads, yet the telling must be most challenging to the hollywood screen-writers that are likely trying to figure out how to adapt this story to film. It is difficult to imagine the translation/interpretation process will be easy. Some readers may find the story's characters of walking wounded too similar to the characters of the English Patient. Still it is a beautifully written story.

An Artist Writes History:
Michael Ondaatje's latest novel, Anil's Ghost, a post-modern investigative fiction about the land of Sri Lanka, is a showcase of the author's graceful yet powerful writing. Popularly known as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka is a nation that has been torn by a bloody civil war between the Sinhalese-dominated government and Tamil separatists. There is no room for peace. The estimated 20-year toll is 17,000 dead. Anil, like Ondaatje, born a Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, represents the West's scientific but ultimately ignorant ways. The distanced and emotionally detached narrative voice thus makes sense, because the people of the West, having been raised up in a culture built on peace and stability can never fully understand the East, which has evolved deviously through endless trauma. The dominant male voice of the narrator perfectly speaks forth the author's repressed emotions with subtle ambiguity and leaves the reader feeling one has nothing to cry for and everything to cry about - perhaps this is how we are supposed to feel when death touches a part of our life, every day. Even the most experienced readers can feel intimidated by the heterotopic plot if one does not read like an archaeologist; one must dig through the fragmented and layered subtexts to unearth a truth that is stagnant, rotten and good-for-nothing. It is only natural, then, that the novel ends not with truth, but with beauty. High above the fields, Ananda chisels and paints the eyes of the statuesque Buddha; he is able to see "all the fibres of natural history around him." "He could witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wind, or a hundred-mile storm coming down off the mountains near Gonagola and skirting to the plains. He could feel each current of wind, every lattice-like green shadow created by cloud." Nothing is more harmonious and elegant than the artistic resolution of violent human history through poetry. Anil's Ghost is an affair with the English language, commanded effortlessly by a master writer.

Captivating book!:
The story is amazing! You find yourself transported to a far away country, to a forensic lab, to beautiful magical ruins. Reading this book you will be taken away in a spiritual trip to a country in the middle of a bloody civil war, and somehow you will filled with peace. This book is a movie written in the most beautiful words!