Beautifully poetic and haunting.

Well, I tried it. But it was way too intellectual for me. There was a good story in there somewhere, and the language was very poetic. Probably too poetic.

I like historical fiction, and I was interested in this tale about finding the bodies of the "disappeared". But Ondaatje just uses too many $50 words. You can tell he can't help himself. I envision him sitting in some Manhattan apartment with a pipe leaning back in his chair as he pontificates.

I cared a lot about the characters and they were drawn well. But I got 1/3 of the way through the book and realized I didn't have the energy to slog through two thirds more of ethereal language.

I really would have liked to have found out what happened. Maybe in another life. Or eternity, when I have more time.

Anil Tessira, a 33-year-old native Sri Lankan who left her country 15 years before, is a forensic pathologist sent by the U.N. human rights commission to investigate reports of mass murders on the island. Atrocities are being committed by three groups: the government, anti-government insurgents, and separatist guerrillas. Working secretly, these warring forces are decimating a population paralyzed by pervasive fear. Taciturn archeologist Sarath Diyasena is assigned by the government to be Anil's partner; at 49, he is emotionally withdrawn from the chaotic contemporary world, reserving his passion for the prehistoric shards of his profession. Together, Anil and Sarath discover that a skeleton interred among ancient bones in a government-protected sanctuary is that of a recently killed young man. Anil defiantly sets out to document this murder by identifying the victim and then making an official report. Throughout their combined forensic and archeological investigation, detailed by Ondaatje with the meticulous accuracy readers will remember from descriptions of the bomb sapper's procedures in The English Patient, Sarath remains a mysterious figure to Anil. Her confusion about his motives is reinforced when she meets his brother, Gamini, an emergency room doctor who is as intimately involved in his country's turmoil as Sarath refuses to be. The lives of these characters, and of others in their orbits, emerge circuitously, layer by layer. In the end, Anil's moral indignation--and her innocence--place her in exquisite danger, and Sarath is moved to a life-defining sacrifice.
This was a strange book in a way but very moving and haunting, Anil has come back to Sri Lanka to reconnect with her past but doesn't seem to know how to do it.

3.5 stars, but I rounded up because of the quality of the writing. This is an interesting story about a young forensic anthropologist returning to Sri Lanka to investigate some of the dead bodies being found there for the UN. She works with a local anthropologist and you hear about them and some of the people connected to them. It's well written and an interesting story (I'm not sure I've read anything so set in Sri Lanka), but it also felt a bit remote. As the reader I felt a bit distanced from the characters, and had trouble connecting to anyone. It almost felt more like narrative non-fiction. I wonder if part of that is Ondaatje's style, which can jump around a lot. Not my favourite by the author, but interesting.

Ondaatje transports us to Sri Lanka in a time during the 1980's and 1990's when the government was embroiled in a civil war that produced a reign of terror and plenty of dead and disappeared people. Anil returns to her homeland as a forensic expert and representative of an international human rights organization. In a plot that is a bit mystery but so much more, we come to know Anil and Sarath (an archeologist), along with secondary characters like Ananda (artist extraordinaire) and Gamini (Sarath's brother and a doctor). We see the cost of the war and a chronicle of lives lived in the remains of skeletons, for example ankle bones that reveal work in mines. We see brothers torn and bound by familial love, a young woman trying to make sense of her identity and what it might mean to love, and a society charged with the fear that is essential to war. We see doctors who are forced to work for opposing sides in the war, yet go about their days saving their enemies as they would their families. Anil's Ghost paints a picture, the outlines of which are finally hazy as they blur into our notion of war and its reckoning.

There are also lots of asides that are really insertions of historical facts. Did you know that if you place a stone on the earth above a ribcage of a corpse to act as a marker, it takes nine years for the stone to fall into the ribcage? There were "halls for the sick" in what is now Sri Lanka four centuries before Christ? And an archeological site in China: underneath stone slabs, rows of timber were cut and stripped as if for a floor, but it was a ceiling, and when the timber was removed, a water tomb was discovered, three pools of underground water.

I don't know how Ondaatje does it, because the narrative is really a bit of a muddle. A back and forth pulled along by a moving narrative, but jumpy all the same. Do we need to know so much about Anil's one-time lover, Cullis? Or Palipana, Sarath's teacher? (The Grove of Ascetics, the section that describes Sarath and Anil meeting Palipana is beautiful, though.) Also, there are italicized sections here and there and their relevance wasn't always clear to me nor how they fit with what preceded or what followed them. But my focus on the narrative's jumpiness might be because structure fascinates me. I'm always trying to learn from how a novelist puts together a story, how it's presented to us and when the rationale isn't crystal clear, it's frustrating because I feel I'm not seeing something that I should.

Ondaatje's language is beautiful and there are passages and sentences that took my breath away, not always for their beauty but for their clarity and ability to convey something profound in few words. Remembering a few:

"The hospital would run out of painkillers during the first week of any offensive. You were without self in those times, lost among the screaming."

"Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him. The woman therefore slid alongside him and clattered about in the almost empty house of his heart. She became, as she had done that night of the operation, the sole accompanist to what he thought, what he worked on."

"I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there's a story."

"When he wrote, he slipped into the page as if it were water, and tumbled on. The writer was a tumbler. (Would he remember that?) If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer's hoods and pencils and . . . you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing."

"American movies, English books--remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit."

Good background reading for a tourist heading to Sri Lanka, and a brutal analysis of the chaos of civil war, per se. But....I loved the 'English Patient' but I found this novel too disjointed, and so I was never really engaged by the characters, although I could see they were all impressive in their own way.

This review may be as disjointed and rambling as is the book. Ondaatje can put words together to form beautiful thoughts. Most of the time, but not always, these words are gathered into complete sentences. In a couple of instances these words were chosen to convey emotion and that was well done. In fact, the first two pages were such emotional gatherings of words that I expected to love the book.

The book doesn't flow. I don't mind a story that is not linear, that reaches into the past or looks to the future. I don't even mind a story that has several plot lines - note my love of Trollope. This, however, felt as if Ondaatje worked at a desk with multiple cubbyholes. He would have an idea and write a few paragraphs and file that section into one of the cubbyholes. Then, when it came time to assemble all of these thoughts for publication, he had no regard for any order whatsoever.

The story itself could have been so much more. I wondered if Ondaatje was too close to the story to write it. Now I see that he left Sri Lanka while it was still called Ceylon and well before the story takes place. Anyway, this falls far short of the story that I think he wanted told.

chilling.

I bought this book with the apprehension that I may never end up reading it. And ppl on Goodreads had described it as dense with the language being difficult and all that. Also, my experience with the author's The English Patient wasn't a happy one. Anyway, to cut the long story short I somehow got around to it. It was a really rewarding experience. It is hard to tell the story. In that way, it is structured more like connecting short stories. It is about a forensic pathologist, a woman, who comes to Sri Lanka when the civil war was at its peak and about a couple of other guys who work with her. The writing was awesome. For me, it worked on so many levels. A Part of the story was like solving a murder mystery. Some portion about the personal lives of the three characters which was also very interesting and literary, a general commentary on the war-torn life of ppl, all with archeology as the backdrop - the technical details of which I found interesting. It didn't go abt giving a political commentary on who was right and who wasn't among the warring factions. Just the consequences and how the personal lives are affected by that. So you need not have a great understanding of the Sri Lankan civil war. It is cool to pick the book without knowing anything about it. Honestly, despite being a Tamil, I didn't know it was this bad. But this is not a totally grim book. This is the kind of book that I always want to read. Highly recommend it to Literary fiction readers. Finding any faults would be nit-picking.
Actual rating: 4.5 stars

This is my first Michael Ondaatje book. Believe it or not, I have not read The English Patient.

Ondaatje is known for his lyrical prose. This book certainly meets that criterion. Unfortunately, it was hard to follow the plot.

I do know this. The heroine Anil Tissera is from Sri Lanka. She has been gone for fifteen years. She studied to become a forensic archeologist. She has been called back to research skeletons thought to be murdered by the government during the Civil War.

I read this book due to the recent Sri Lankan tragedy (250 people killed on Easter Sunday in churches and hotels). I would be very interested in a book that describes and is based on this tragedy (if it is ever written).

3 stars

Took this book with the hope that I'll gain some insights about the civil war in Srilanka. But, this book does not go into any such specific details. I felt this to be more like a thriller. Anil, a Srilankan born forensic expert who did her studies in a western country comes back to Srilanka as part of the assignment from a central agency to investigate the role of Government in the massacres that happened during the civil war. She along with her archaeological friend Sarath finds a skeleton in one of the government-owned sanctuaries and reveals that it correspond to that of a recently killed young man. It is her pursuit of identifying the identity of the skeleton is the theme of this story. But, I felt there is too much digressing here and there. The story moves in a nonlinear fashion going forward and backwards, all mixed up. This has created a lot of confusion in me. I'm not sure whether the author genuinely wanted to create this confusion. Even the name of the central character creates confusion. A male name but actually Anil is female. In this farrago, I tried my best to understand. Did I?

If I could give Anil's Ghost 3.5 stars, I would.
On the plus side, much of the writing is stunning and Ondaatje creates images that will stay with me forever. One of the novel's central themes is the idea of stone, and everything it can symbolize. All the different ways of thinking about rock are woven brilliantly into the story and I came away feeling immersed in highly complex, satisfying metaphors. The book is also about the relationship we have with our pasts and the suffering caused by war.
Yet while the novel's many gorgeous scenes are successfully strung together, there is still something missing. The writing is beautiful, but I rarely felt for the characters. And Ondaatje made weird choices when it came to leaving out certain important scenes, for example, two of the major characters are consumed with learning the identity of a skeleton they found, but when it's finally revealed, it's like, "Oh, by the way, he was this guy."
That's just one example among many. It's as if Ondaatje's plot-meter wasn't working.
Still, if you're a fan of his work, and I am, this is a worthwhile read.