January 2013: Michael Ondaatje

Obviously too early for this thread --- just wanted to have a placeholder and an easy way for people who want to secure their books early to know what author is coming down the pipeline next ...

Well, it's already mentioned in a couple threads and will soon be on the info of the group page, but okay...

I have asked the library to reserve The Cat's Table for me when it comes back. It is due in the middle of the month, so it may be a while.

I have to go to the library by the 11th, so I'll see what's there then :)

I'll be picking up The English Patient from the library in about a week.

I'll be reading Running in the Family

I've already started my Ondaatje reads as I packed Anil's Ghost for my holiday and managed to read a big section of it on the plane, I'm half way through and love it.
I also have In the Skin of a Lion on my tbr shelf and a book of poetry whose name escapes me. Having previously enjoyed The English Patient and enjoying this current book I'm looking forward to discovering more of this author's work.

I think Anil's Ghost is one of the ones my library has in English, I may be seeking out that one. :)

Anil's Ghost, I've been laying in bed finishing this for the last few hours - a perfect way to start the new year :) Anil is a forensic scientist who returns to her home country of Sri Lanka during the 1980s/90's civil war. Her return is through invitation by the Human Rights Comittee and yet she finds doorways blocked and data withheld much as you would expect. Her discovery of 'Sailor' a body buried within the last 5 years at a government restricted archeological site is the basis for the story.
The language is beautiful, the pace moves well and you are constantly kept on your toes. A recommended read.

> 7 I'm not sure how many books of poetry he has; I've got The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems coming in to read for this month.

I have The Cinnamon Peeler too

Just finished The English Patient. It is a wonderful novel and I found it much better than the two previous works I had read by Ondaatje: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter. My review.

Nice. What was it about the other titles that didn't thrill you?

#13 - They were both highly fragmented narratives about historical figures, but veering well away from the historical record in both cases. To enjoy them I think you would have to have been already caught up in the myth of the subjects (Billy the Kid & Buddy Bolden respectively) and not too concerned about what was fact, what was myth, and what was Ondaatje's invention.

The English Patient is also a fragmented narrative, but it is firmly enclosed in a chronological framework. It is long enough that you have time to get acquainted with the characters and the setting. And while it is based in part on historical characters and events, it is clearly a work of fiction so there isn't the concern about reinventing the past.

Ah that makes a lot of sense. I think I will stay away from those titles then!

I'm halfway through Running in the Family which is a memoir about his family. Fragmented it certainly is!!

I finished Running in the Family which is a memoir about Ondaatje's family. Mainly his grandparents and parents generation in Sri Lanka or Ceylon in colonial times. It is clearly written by a prose author / poet relating family lore but writen as if for a work of fiction including poems.

As a reading experience I would give it an average rating of three stars. There were some bits that were interesting and funny, thankfully a lot of those bits were in the second half, but there was a lot that might have been interesting if it were my family, but as it wasn't it was a bit 'meh'. The book was just over 200 pages and I'm glad it wasn't longer.

Thinking about it as a family memoir though I appreciate and can understand the book better. His family members will read it and be in a position to protest if he decided to 'fill in the gaps' or make it a bit more exciting. I can also see how it is structured, with half told stories, and not in any chronological order, is how we all learn about our families and Ondaajte seems to want us to experience it the same way. Not a neat and tidy ordered progression.

I mean for example my mother told me on the phone that a cousin was slowly going blind, I'm not sure how or why it came up in the converstation but it did and I was shocked and saddened, but clearly my mother had known for some time. Several years later I mentioned it to my sister who is older and closer in age to the cousin so I thought she would know and even known before me. But she had no idea so I had to dredge up from my memory the phone converstation I had with Mum which was a kind of half a story.... and thats how we learn about family and if they are no longer with us that's all we will learn.

This was one of my favourite parts of the book:

Sweet Like a Crow - Michael Ondaatje
for Hetti Corea, 8 years old

The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world.
It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line or rhythm.
- Paul Bowles

Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed
through a glass tube
like someone has just trod on a peacock
like wind howling in a coconut
like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,
a vattacka being fried
a bone shaking hands
a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.
Like a crow swimming in milk,
like a nose being hit by a mango
like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,
a womb full of twins, a pariah dog
with a magpie in its mouth
like the midnight jet from Casablanca
like Air Pakistan curry,
a typewriter on fire, like a hundred
pappadans being crunched, like someone
trying to light matches in a dark room,
the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,
a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,
the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,
like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market
like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air
like a whole village running naked onto the street
and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family
pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle,
like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle
like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory
like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep
and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.

What a cranky old man lol

I haven't been able to read any Ondaatje this week as I'm having to read Jane Eyre for University. I really like Ondaatje fragmented style, a style often used by post-colonial authors to show that history and perspectives are always just fragments of a much wider story than the one that is portrayed. I read Coming Through Slughter for university and really enjoyed this style, our tutor played lots of early Jazz to us on old scratchy records.
I'll definitely dig out his poetry this week, and aim to start In the Skin of a Lion by the end of the week.

I picked up Anil's Ghost from the library the other day, will be starting it in a little bit! :)

And finished it. That was interesting. The way he writes kept me interested, I read it very fast (essentially three periods of sitting reading 100 pgs each lol), but I wasn't fond of how it jumped around. Flashbacks/memories randomly creeping in without idea of when they were taking place, where they fit in, and jumping around from character to character's perspective. I don't like that style, and I don't think it worked well here. But I did enjoy the story told, and thought he did a good job with the emotional impact, making it clear just how much all these murders touched everyone.

From what everyone is saying this month, it sounds like Ondaatje really likes to play with form and style in his novels. I'm glad I picked up one of his books of poetry instead. I haven't gotten very far yet (other books to read, other time constraints), but I'm enjoying it so far.

Yeah it definitely seems clear that he doesn't like to tell a story in a straight line. I don't mind when a story is told from a few perspectives and then they all come together later on, or like how Dracula is with the various characters' journal entries where it's quite apparent whose text we're reading now, but I really am not fond of the fragmented bouncing style he used. It was a nice read, but I don't think I'll be looking into any more of his work.

Yes, I don't mind disjointed narratives or multiple perspectives sometimes, provided it's well done. (Dracula is a great example.) But I have so much stress in my professional and personal life right now, I don't want to have to *work* at my pleasure reading also! Perhaps some other time I will tackle some of Ondaatje's prose, but right now I'm quite happy with his poetry instead.

The month is almost over, has anyone read any (more) Ondaatje? Any more comments to add on his books/writing?

I picked up The Cat's Table on Monday, finally. I'm about 1/4 through. A bit fragmented, perhaps, but it fits the journey.

I'm still planning to read The English Patient but I'm still in the middle of two long books that are holding me up. If I read it in February, I'll post my thoughts in case anyone is still around the thread.

I'm still reading The Cinnamon Peeler and really enjoying it, I haven't had time to start In The Skin of a Lion as I had university books to read and now bookrings for bookcrossing, a shame because I loved Anil's Ghost

>26 japaul22: No worries, the thread isn't going anywhere! Post whenever you read! :)

I just finished The cat's table . The fragmented style mentioned above works here. The narrator is an adult remembering the ship voyage from Colombo to London he had taken as a boy. He remembers, as one does, disconnected incidents on board, and also later encounters with the people he knew then. The later encounters are explained by the events on the ship, but also bring them into clearer focus.

I should mention that in the decade after this book takes place I travelled by ship, first from New York to Liverpool, and then, after a week in England, from Liverpool to Bombay. The book brought back the sounds of nighttime arrival in Egypt, the tricks of the Gully Gully man in Port Said, and leaving the ship for a day in Aden. My ship was very different from his, and I was with my family, but the feeling of being out of time was familiar.

I enjoyed this book.

Nice. I can see how the style could work in some ways, but I'm still just not sure I'd personally really enjoy reading much of it. Glad everyone seems to be enjoying their reads, though! :)

I chose this one, thinking that the style, which I normally don't care for, was more likelly to work here. Also to see if he caught something of what I remember from the ship(s).

> 29 Sounds like an interesting read. How fun that you could connect it with your own experiences.

I'm more than a bit behind with my reading so I just finished up The Cinnamon Peeler this week. Here's a snippet of my review of the book:

The poems contained here are largely pulled from two earlier collections, There’s a Trick with a Knife that I’m Learning to Do and Secular Love. While poems scattered throughout this book were interesting in a variety of ways, I tended to prefer the ones from Secular Love as they were more engaging. Overall, the themes and subjects he keeps returning to are: family, loves/lovers, friendship, writing, authors, memories of days gone by, and music. Sometimes his poetry took on a rather prose-like storytelling, other times they were much more like random words strung together and I have to confess that some of these made absolutely no sense to me. At any rate, none of his poems fit a standard type of poetry (i.e., sonnet) but were free form. Some of them really did resemble a prose (very) short story rather than a poem.

Ondaatje could be quite funny at times in his poetry, like this bit from “7 or 8 Things I Know about Her—A Stolen Biography”: “For a while in Topeka parrots were very popular. Her father was given one in lieu of a payment and kept it with him at all times because it was the fashion. It swung above him in the law office and drove back with him in the car at night. At parties friends would bring their parrots and make them perform what they had been taught: the first line from Twelfth Night, a bit of Italian opera, cowboy songs, or a surprisingly good rendition of Russ Colombo singing ‘Prisoner of Love’. Her father’s parrot could only imitated the office typewriter, along with the ching at the end of each line.” Of course, this passage is also a good example of how prose-like his poems could be, for it sounds like it could have easily been taken from a short story or novel.

I think this is the first time since I was a child and devoured Lucy Maud Montgomery's books that I've read any Canadian literature so that was a slightly different aspect here for me. (I read one of Margaret Atwood's scifi books and Carol Shields' biography of Jane Austen but neither were set in Canada so I'm not counting those.) I can't recall now who suggested Ondaatje originally, but thanks! I don't think I would have picked up any of his works on my own but this book of poetry was a fun foray.

I'm pretty certain I'd never have picked him up on my own either, and I always like to try new things, so I agree, it was a good pick of something different to try! I'll not go back for seconds, but that's okay. :)

Yeah, I probably won't go back for a second try either as everyone's comments here about his fragmented/disjointed narratives in his prose writing doesn't sound like my cup of tea. But I did enjoy this book so I'm happy to have picked it up.

I also finished the Cinnamon Peeler a while back now. I loved some of the poems about his family but found others annoying.
I still love him fiction and plan to read more of him in the future.

> 36 Yeah, they weren't all winners, but overall I enjoyed the collection. I agree, the ones about his family were some of the best.