Anil's Ghost, the story of a forensic anthropologist investigating the bones of a war victim in Sri Lanka, is a painful, beautiful book. It is also very honest: the science does not magically resolve itself, but must be worked at; the war is hideous; the cultural knowledge is first-hand; and the heroics are small, if they exist at all, and usually brutally punished.

It is as frequently frustrating, unfortunately, as it is beautiful. Maybe it's just my simple, Hemingway-esque soul, but at times I just wanted him to tell me a story without another unrelated, and usually heartbreaking, tangent. Though - not to be contrary - it was one of those tangents that sticks with me most: the vignette of the title character and her best friend diagnosing the injuries of heroes in their favorite movies. Still, I left this book unsettled, sad, and feeling strangely lost. But then, I suppose, how else are you supposed to leave a book on civil war?

Hard to recommend, and yet, I'm glad to have read it. Ondataatje's writing is worth being frustrated for.

I accidently came across this book while reading a blog (Best South Asian Books to Read Country Wise). The title instantly grasped my attention. I read only a single review and decided to read this book. It said:
“This is why I read, this is why literature matters, this, in short, is IT!...
By closing the pages Anil’s Ghost has come as close to a holy book as a novel ever should.”
Anil’s Ghost transports us to The Pearl of Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka, a country known for its rich cultural heritage, Buddhist Temples, Beaches and Colonial Architecture. But SL wasn’t the same in 80’s & 90’s as it is today. The nation was forced by the ravages of civil war, where people felt trapped in the conflict between the government, the anti-government insurgents and the separatist guerrillas. During these years, people were disappearing in big numbers, their bodies later appearing in the sea, rivers, fields or crowded hospitals. More often, they became lost forever. The three conflicting groups were the main players in this terror, none better in its methods than the other, which meant that the only way for people to survive was keeping their heads low and being silent. Not asking questions. Not looking for the answers, not wanting the truth.
In such turbulent times we find our protagonist, Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America who returns to Sri Lanka as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human-rights group to investigate the organized murder campaigns engulfing the island. She is paired for the investigation with a government-selected archaeologist named Sarath. Together Anil and Sarath find four skeletons whom they nickname Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Sailor, the last a source of obsessive fascination. The task is to give Sailor back his identity in order to incriminate the government of war crimes. Will her quest for truth be successful? Could naming one victim help her name and stand for all of them? Does it really matter which group is responsible? Can the truth be more important than peace?
Some reviews say that this book is composed of fragments. I would rather say it is composed of silences between them. So many things are untold in “Anil’s Ghost”, but can be perceived and felt so clearly. And what can better transmit the fear of the people caught amidst the civil war than silence?

The story is about Anil Tissera who has returned to her home country of Sri Lanka after many years of living in the West. She has returned as part of a human rights group during Sri Lanka's civil war, a war in which horrific abuses were conducted. She had left to study medicine and had become a forensic pathologist in America. While at an archeological site, where several skeletons have been dug up, she identifies one that appears to be a recent burial and not ancient like the others. This led her along with an archeologist, Sarath, in a search to identify and determine the circumstances of the death of the man. This is a story full of mystery and intrigue and as with all of Ondaatje's books the writing is magnificent.

I read this book when it came out several years ago. I love all his books, and found this one to be in my opinion, one of his very best, if not the best one.
It is stunning! A real window into the vicarious evil society in his country. It stays with you always, the fear and the cruelty, and the impossibility of the two sides living together in peace. That was proved out by the civil war there several years ago. It is a chilling story of death, superstition and hauntingly told. I loved it!

Onvan : Anil's Ghost - Nevisande : Michael Ondaatje - ISBN : 375724370 - ISBN13 : 9780375724374 - Dar 311 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2000

This isn’t really a review. This book tired me. It’s a short book and it took a month to read. I waded through it without feeling. I want to read a book that makes me feel alive. That’s all.

what a beautiful, tagic, and superbly delivered book... i fell into this book immediately, Ondaatje's writing is poetic (unsurprising as he is a poet, huh?) and pulls you in easily... the book takes a horrible period in the history of Sri Lanka and weaves a tale of mystery and majesty around it... not knowing much about the country and its amazing history, i found myself stopping a few times early in the narrative to look up pieces of information to help me understand the story better... i soon relaized chopping up the book like this ruined the wonder and power of the tale and so i stopped doing it... but any book that weaves history and politics through the lens of fiction and makes me want to learn more about the world is always a winner... i am quite sure i will spend several hours reading extensively about Sri Lanka... anyway... the characters drive this story, and all of them are amazingly developed... their interactions and life stories make the book a wonder to read... there are so many passages that you read, re-read, and either try to commit to memory or find yourself writing down because they are that powerful... the sections of the book give deep insights into several of the characters, and also create intriguing overlaps and unseen connections... i loved the use of Sinhala words throughout the story, as they were always seamlessly used and explained... there is a strong political undertone here, but it never overwhelms or gets preachy, allowing the reader to think for themselves about what is transpiring... bits and pieces of archaeology, forensic science, Buddhism, and family dynamics fill the book with amazing details... just a lovely book this one... very highly recommended...

Also reviewed on my Youtube channel.

This is a...complex book. It's the story of Anil, a forensic anthropologist who works with the UN and returns to Sri Lanka for the first time in fifteen years on an investigation. But while it's about Anil and the skeleton of a civil war victim that she unearths, it's more about Sri Lanka itself. It's not just Anil's story, but the story of those who help her - an archaeologist, Sarath; his doctor brother, Gamini; the statue carver, Ananda. It's the story of their experiences with the civil war, uncovering victims, working to save victims, becoming victims. We don't get a huge amount of information about the civil war outside of a "there are rebels and there are government forces and there's the government itself, and all of them can be majorly sucky". Instead, what we see is the impact that the war had on Sri Lanka's people.

Anil has been away for years, and more or less considers herself a westerner now. While she still remembers the basics of the language and the culture, she's been away for the duration of the war and doesn't understand that her actions have consequences. Where others are cautious and careful about what they say and where they say it, Anil stumbles through making demands and questioning processes.

Near the end of the book, Gamini passes comment that in western films and books, the story always ends with the western hero boarding a plane and flying home, usually with a girl at his side. For the hero, the war is over, and therefore it's the same for the audience. But that's not the truth that's reflected on the ground. People still have to live there, whether it's fighting for survival or picking up the pieces. And it's this that Ondaatje shows us here. While the book is billed as "a riveting mystery" about the hunt to identify the victim whose skeleton they find, that's really only a minor piece of the puzzle.

It's not a particularly easy read - the story is fragmented between the four main characters, unravelling in pieces over the course of the three hundred-ish pages. Ondaatje's writing is beautiful but very literary and heavy on the description. It's definitely not a book that will appeal to everyone, but it's a powerful book all the same.

"One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims."

Anil Tissera, a forensic pathologist, returned to her native Sri Lanka after studying abroad. She is sponsored by a human rights group to investigate the mysterious deaths and disappearances during the civil war. The people were living in constant danger with atrocities committed by all three groups fighting in the 1980s war--the government, the separatists, and the insurgents.

Anil is paired with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena. They unearth four skeletons in a government-controlled area which they nickname Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Sailor. The first three skeletons are ancient, but Sailor is a recent victim who has been reburied. Sarath is immersed in history while his brother, a surgeon, deals with the victims of terrorism on a daily basis.

"Anil's Ghost" is partially a detective story as they work to identify Sailor. But this is literary fiction written in Michael Ondaatje's style with small glimpses or fragments of events, mixed with flashbacks, that all come together at the end. This is a story about identity, grief, and the futility of war. The characters are loners, devoted to their work, but often overwhelmed by tragedy. The beauty of the island of Sri Lanka, south of India, contrasts with the darkness of the story. Ondaatje, who is also a poet, wrote the book in beautiful prose. A glimmer of hope at the end kept the story from being relentlessly tragic.

I've always been interested in Sri Lanka and troubled by the unrest there. It is only in recent years that I've realized that the government was guilty of its own abuses. So I enjoyed this book to learn more about the issue. But--and this may be a function of having listened to the book on tape instead of reading it--it seemed too disjointed and the ending far too open. Only the dead characters achieved resolution.

"There are so many bodies in the ground now, that's what you said...murdered, anonymous. I mean, people don't even know if they are two hundred years old or two weeks old, they've all been through fire. Some people let their ghosts die, some don't. Sarath, we can do something..."

Anil Tissera was born in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, to a prosperous family, where she achieved a small degree of fame by winning a notable swimming race as a school girl. She left at 18 to attend medical school in England, and she later trained to become a forensic pathologist there and in the United States. After a brief failed marriage and the early deaths of her parents she is rootless and restless, despite her successful career. She applies and, to her surprise, is accepted as a forensic specialist for an international human rights organization that plans to send a team to Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, during the height of the country's civil war. The government is engaged in fierce and bloody battles with the Tamil Tigers to the north and with separatist insurgent forces to the south simultaneously, and the bodies of thousands of soldiers on all sides and innocent civilians caught in the middle have been turning up with alarming frequency throughout the country. Intense international pressure is put upon the Sri Lankan president to investigate the claims of atrocities by the government and the rebels, and he reluctantly agrees to an investigation, while he and other officials vehemently deny that the Sri Lankan Army is involved in the torture and slaughter of insurgents and civilians.

It has been 15 years since Anil left her homeland, and Sri Lanka is both familiar and distant to her. She is paired with Sarath, a local archeologist who acts as both an older guide and as a temporizing influence on her inpatient tendencies. Later she meets Sarath's younger brother Gamini, an emergency medicine physician who is haunted by his experiences caring for hundreds of patients with traumatic injuries and seeing nearly as many corpses in the hospital's morgue.

Anil and Sarath come upon an ancient burial ground, and they discover a body that doesn't seem to fit with the others. Anil suspects that it has been placed there recently, and since soldiers guard the site she and Sarath conclude that the man, a local resident who has been brutally tortured before his death, was killed by government forces. Sarath senses the extreme danger of this discovery, and urges Anil to act cautiously, but she is outraged and insists that the government, the Sri Lankan people, and the international community must know what is happening there.

Anil's Ghost begins slowly, as Ondaatje carefully creates a rich tapestry of the lives of the main characters and teaches the reader about the essential techniques of archeology and forensic pathology, which was occasionally of little interest to me. However, the tension and drama progressively build throughout the second half of the book up to its momentous ending. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, but I was left with several unanswered questions, particularly about the motivations and fates of the three main characters that cannot be discussed in this review.

I'm not sure one can enjoy reading about the horrors of war affected individual people in a country (Sri Lanka in this case), but it is important to know about these things. The book doesn't focus on those, but they do appear. I had a hard time with some of the sudden dropping back to the past of various characters; sometimes it worked for me but sometimes it didn't. Anil's story didn't always seem to fit and felt irrelevant, possibly because she didn't live in Sri Lanka during the war and felt like an outsider.