By: Michael Ondaatje Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 307 Publication Date: April 24, 2001 Release Date: April 24, 2001
Product 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’s most powerful novel yet.
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
Unsuccessful Ondaatje is a bit of a mystery to me - I hated "The English Patient" but loved "Running in the Family", so I was expecting to have a strong reaction - one way or the other - to "Anil's Ghost". Unfortunately, that was not the case. The narrative is fractured - on purpose - which I felt detracted from the story even if it added some stylistic symbolism.
For some reason, Ondaatje is not able to capture the human horror of his subject matter adequately in words - and perhaps no one could - but the powerful topic he was writing about was simply not captured in his tepid and detached, though ultimately very readable tone.
Still - it was a decent read - and I do not think there are very many writers who could have done a better job with the subject. Some history, I suppose, is so horrid as to be beyond the reach of mere words.
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.
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