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Marguerite Hargreaves's Reviews > Anil's Ghost
Anil's Ghost
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I tried to read this before, but I couldn't get much past page 80. This time, I couldn't put it down, which just reinforces my belief that there's a right time and a wrong time to read each book. This time, I'd been prepared by The Ministry of Special Cases and "The Caretaker," a story in Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector. I wonder, now, about my recent attraction to refugee fiction or desaparecido fiction. What, exactly, am I looking for? What have I lost, or left behind?
Ondaatje's characters are as complex and interesting as Sri Lanka. I think the shifting perspectives in the different sections might have put me off the first go-round. When I stopped reading for the night at the end of a character's section, the book made more sense. The events and constant suspicion/paranoia that are inevitable in an environment where people keep disappearing while the "enemy" is an unknown held the different sections together nicely. The lack of perfect resolution at the end fit, too.
Ondaatje's writing is frequently lyrical:
"Patterns of death always surrounded him. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea. So the removal of a wise sixth-century head, the dropping off of arms and hands of rock as a result of the fatigue of centuries, existed alongside human fate. He would hold statues two thousand years old in his arms. Or place his hand against old, warm rock that had been cut into a human shape. He found comfort in seeing his dark flesh against it. This was his pleasure. Not conversation or the education of others or power, but simply to place his hand against a gal vihara, a living stone whose temperature was dependent on the hour, whose look of porousness would change depending on rain or a quick twilight.
"This rock hand could have been his wife's hand. It had a similar darkness and age to it, a familiar softness."
This gave me a lot to think about: a fifth-century Chinese society that put music at the heart of its civilization, the qualities of any writer, temple stones being the recipients of confessions, understanding gained by studying weaknesses, not strengths.
I'd like to read more by the author, who's published more poetry than anything else.
Ondaatje's characters are as complex and interesting as Sri Lanka. I think the shifting perspectives in the different sections might have put me off the first go-round. When I stopped reading for the night at the end of a character's section, the book made more sense. The events and constant suspicion/paranoia that are inevitable in an environment where people keep disappearing while the "enemy" is an unknown held the different sections together nicely. The lack of perfect resolution at the end fit, too.
Ondaatje's writing is frequently lyrical:
"Patterns of death always surrounded him. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea. So the removal of a wise sixth-century head, the dropping off of arms and hands of rock as a result of the fatigue of centuries, existed alongside human fate. He would hold statues two thousand years old in his arms. Or place his hand against old, warm rock that had been cut into a human shape. He found comfort in seeing his dark flesh against it. This was his pleasure. Not conversation or the education of others or power, but simply to place his hand against a gal vihara, a living stone whose temperature was dependent on the hour, whose look of porousness would change depending on rain or a quick twilight.
"This rock hand could have been his wife's hand. It had a similar darkness and age to it, a familiar softness."
This gave me a lot to think about: a fifth-century Chinese society that put music at the heart of its civilization, the qualities of any writer, temple stones being the recipients of confessions, understanding gained by studying weaknesses, not strengths.
I'd like to read more by the author, who's published more poetry than anything else.
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Reading Progress
June 13, 2008
– Shelved
Started Reading
July 1, 2008
–
Finished Reading
December 27, 2011
– Shelved as:
contemporary-fiction
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I too had the same experience of once trying to read this book and subsequently not being able to forget it. I have written of a similar era in Sri Lanka See (Pete Mitchell’s ‘Darwin’s Wake). I wished I had studied Ondaatje earlier.
Ministry of Special cases is also a brilliant novel!
I had the exact same experience. I was very disappointed at first because I was looking forward to reading another Ondaatje book. I've enjoyed everything of his I've read thus far. Fast forward a year, I picked Anil's Ghost back up and loved it. It's amazing how different books just feel right at different times (which is why I'm drowning in stacks of books, they are waiting for the right moment!)