4.5 stars.

Michael Ondaatje writes perceptive, rich and eloquent stories. He never fails to create a place and the people who populate it, in a way that transports me to that other world. In Anil's Ghost he took me to Sri Lanka during their civil war. As expected the characters feel trapped by their circumstances. In Sri Lanka, at the time people were disappearing, their bodies later found washed up on the beaches, or in rivers, and fields. Many were simply gone forever. Survival required the people to hide, to be silent, to exist -- no questions, no conflicts.

The title character, Anil, is a forensic pathologist who left Sri Lanka fifteen years earlier and returns as part of a seven-week mission. She is there to investigate the violations of human rights. She partners with a local archaeologist named Sarath who struggles to trust and is equally difficult to trust due to his contacts in the government. Anil has the task of identifying a body which has gone unnamed, and she is determined to identify this victim. She is driven.

The characters in this book are beautifully drawn and my favorite is Gamini, Sarath’s younger brother. Gamini is a doctor. He doesn't sleep. He works in the hospital for hours and days on end.
He is afraid of the dead ... afraid he will know the person. He is dedicated and fearful. He is wondeful.

Ondaatje uses science and scientists to talk about death, war, and life. He reveals each character quietly, slowly and uncomfortably. He subjects the reader to the gruesomeness that is war... not with bombs and bullets but with pain, worry and emotion.

Michael Ondaatje is one of those writers who doesn't write, but paints. His pen is a paintbrush, his paper is a canvas, and he uses words like colors to paint fragments of his characters' lives; pieces of the mosaic we call a novel. Just as his prose is broken into pieces, whose gaps hide more details than what’s written, his characters often get to be these torn, damaged individuals in search of something to complete them.
In "The English Patient," a novel published before "Anil's Ghost", four characters find themselves in the ruins of an Italian villa, and through a story about a tumultuous affair, they put together a puzzle of their identities finally reaching a solution. A dying man is what keeps them together. "Anil's Ghost" has a skeleton, a remains of an unknown person, that just like the mysterious Englishman in "The English Patient" binds three characters around itself. Each character with a tragic fate is described in a way no one but Ondaatje could have done. So Sailor, a name given to him by Anil and Sarath, becomes the center of the story.
Anil Tissera, a young woman with a male name bought from her brother by sexual favors because she didn't like the one given by her parents, returns to her home country of Sri Lanka after 15 years living in the West. She's no longer the swimmer everyone knew and everyone remembers her for. She now works for the UN as a forensic anthropologist tasked with finding evidence of atrocities permeated in the bloody civil war that has been raging across the country between the three sides, neither of which is innocent.
Sarath is her partner, an archaeologist assigned by the government to help her work. She suspects he's here to cover up any evidence of the killing of civilians, and her suspicions for his loyalty are legitimate as his cousin is a cabinet minister. Sarath’s distance and coldness just amplify that notion of a mole.
Gamini, Sarath's younger brother, is a doctor at a hospital in Colombo. Hooked on amphetamines to withstand the effort of his job, he spends all his time in the emergency room. His house after his wife left him is a home for another family because Gamini chose to be a waif that lives in the hospital, in love with a dead woman that never belonged to him for she was the wife of Sarath, a brother in whose shadow he always lived in and with whom he has no contact now.
Three characters, each dealing with life and death in their way, living solitary lives in their cocoons, hidden behind work. Their loneliness is their penance, this devotion to work is an attempt to forget the past, the spirits that haunt them.
Weaving the fates of these characters, along with a few others, using his poetic style, Ondaatje offers us a novel of palpable atmosphere and strong emotions; whether he writes about the game of two lovers, about failed marriages, or vicious murders. Through the search for the identity of Sailor and his killers, they reject the loneliness with which they defend themselves and come to peace, albeit for a short time, paying dearly.
However, it is not just a novel about three damaged characters and their tragic destinies, through the craftily use of the symbolism of Ondaatje's tells the story of war and its consequences, the story of countless victims abducted in broad daylight and killed simply because they belonged to the other side or that they happened to be where they shouldn’t be, about peace, much needed in every country that went through a civil war-like Sri Lanka as well as the identity, something he likes very fond of.
Although many people will not like it because of the fragmentation of its narrative, which is still more complete than the one in "The English Patient", and may therefore feel a disconnect with the characters, "Anil's Spirit" is certainly a novel worth read more times.

This book pulls you in. It grows on you. The writing is straightforward, understated, as it describes the meticulous, repetitive work of forensic scientists working in Sri Lanka, in the 1980s, laboring to find and identify victims of human rights atrocities, political violence, and war, and to treat survivors. But then you begin to realize that the story is about much more than senseless human cruelty. It's about what witnessing such inhumanity does to human relationships -- how it impairs the ability to express or even feel love.

June 16 2024 -June 2024

Anil’s Ghost
MIchael Ondaatje

I decided to reread Anil’s Ghost by MIchael Ondaatje while waiting for library ebook copy of V. V. Ganeshananthan “Brotherless Night.” She won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction last week. They are both set in Sri Lanka and are about human rights.

Michael Ondaatje is one of my favorite authors. He writes so beautifully. There are sentences and images in this book that are gorgeous and sensuous. They sometimes helps to break up the edge of the horror of this war and add humanity. His books are usually non- linear which I usually find adds dimension and/or different points of view. Here there is a flow to the story. He does go back in time to help give the characters a past and set and to show how much Sri Lanka has changed with the war.He was raised in Sri Lanka so he knows the culture and you feel it.

He has 4 maincharacters. Anil is a forensic scientist who is working for an international
humanitarian agency. She was looking to find a body/bodies that could verify the loss of human rights. She would need to sneak it out of country. She works with an anthropologist ( Sarath) who brings in the history and culture of the areas. They go to the ancient monastic areas and non monastic parks where bodies are often dumped. She also works with a doctor (Gamini) who treats people in a bulging hospital who were affected by the violence of the war. He is quite the character! And like the others very dedicated to helping people and finding peace in their homeland.

One of my favorite characters and scenes was in the beginning. “The epigraphist Palipana was for a number of years at the centre of a nationalistic group that eventually wrestled archaeological authority in Sri Lanka away from the Europeans.”…While the West saw Asian history as a faint horizon where Europe joined the East, Palipana saw his country in fathoms and colour, and Europe simply as a landmass on the end of the peninsula of Asia.” He is now old and blind and a very kind ad wise man.

The 4th is Ananda an artist and craftsman who can give a skeleton a face and can restore historic statuary; in this case a huge ancient Buddha that had been recently bombed.

They are All artists in their crafts. Each character and each place they go to has a history. Each character has made a significant change in their Iife that led to why they are doing this work that they love. These are not your typical characters. I really enjoyed how Michael Ondaatje developed the characters. And I enjoyed learning more about the Sri Lankan culture and ways of life. I enjoyed this book more my third time than ever before. There are a lot of peaceful places in the story as well as horrible situations. Michael Ondaatje wrote with a lot of humanity. He did a lot of research on this. It was interesting to me to read the notes at the end to see all the people and organizations he talked with.

A Sri Lankan expatriate / western-trained forensic anthropologist returns to her native country to uncover the truth of the horrors of local guerrilla warfare and government-sanctioned slaughtering.

Purely beautiful writing; brings to light the harsh realities of violent warfare in Sri Lanka while simultaneously highlighting the strength & warmth of the human spirit amidst chaos.

"They had brought him nine-month-old twins, each shot in the palms and one bullet each in their right legs -- so it was no accident, a close-range job and intentional, left to die; the mother had been killed. In a couple of weeks those two children were peaceful things, full of light. You thought, what did they do to deserve this? And then...what did they do to survive this?"

This book was very, very slow. I had a hard time getting through it but something kept me reading. It was rather hard to read in that it was written in fragments and pieces, not so linear, lots of character backstory. It felt kind of anti-climatic, but it was more of a character-driven, literary novel.

I enjoyed learning about Sri Lanka and the civil war that occurred during the 1980's and 1990's. I had no knowledge of this prior to reading the book. It's very sad to learn that such horrible things go on in the world.

It was quite depressing, but there were some very beautiful words and ideas. It wasn't the most exciting story, but there was a haunting quality about it that will stay with me.


Loved some of the quotes, including one of the last lines:

"A small brave heart. In the heights she loved and in the dark she feared."

Not for the first time, one observes how much more meaningful is description of horror in the hands of the fiction writer than in those of the statistician. From this point of view, the novel has won. I feel impelled to read about the history of Sri Lanka, about which I am completely ignorant.

But....

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres...

n  Set text for universityn

Forensic-specialist Anil returns to Sri Lanka, her homeland, to examine archaeological remains and discovers the bones of a victim found in a government-protected area. With the help of her investigation partner Sarath, Anil is determined to establish the corpse as a victim of government forces.

Having been away for 15 years living in Europe and North America, Anil has returned to a country now ravaged by civil war, murderous conflict, mass disappearances of innocent people and mutilated corpses appearing across the worn-torn land. As a result, memories of her youth clash with what lays before her.

Anil as a character wasn’t particularly interesting, but rather, functioned as a narrative device to explore the relationship we have with our pasts and the suffering caused by war. I also found it harder to enjoy due to the fragmented narrative; recounting different memories, offering different perspectives. Although, I was moved by the insight into Gamini’s background: a doctor incapable of sleep, snatching a quick doze on the hospital ward when possible and unable to find peace anywhere else.

Anil’s Ghost evolves slowly, unveils characters' hidden truths, unlocks the hidden past, and takes us on a tiresome, evocative journey through a maelstrom of civil war.

round three was a wild ride. touched me much more than previously, but also annoyed and frustrated me a lot at times.
hoped to gain more clearity but i'm just as confused as before, if not more. don't know how to make sense of this

I made it to page 40 of this book before I quit. Even those 40 pages were exhausting, as though reading them required the same amount of effort as does swimming through an ocean of mud. There was no hint at a redeeming point for me in those 40 pages, even; I should not have to rejoice in finishing a mere page of a novel simply because it means that I am a page closer to finishing it and being done.

This book has a lot to say about the human rights discourse and the question of "blame" that consistently surrounds wartime. In the face of war, we constantly look to determine who is "right" and who is "wrong," as Anil does while she works in Sri Lanka. I guess that by showing his audience the horrors of the Sri Lankan civil war, Ondaatje sought to blur the lines (or make entirely irrelevant) the question of blame in favor of getting to know the humans (in this case, the characters) associated with the war... It makes the research that Anil and her fellow scholars are doing nearly obsolete, as though the human rights movement that has sent Anil to help the dead is missing the whole point by overlooking the living (who are still in danger) in the process...

If I'm being truthful, I don't think that Ondaatje would have gotten away with publishing this book had he not previously harvested so much success with The English Patient. I did not gain anything from the fictional aspect of this story or the characters that it involved; much of the fictional backstory seemed so superfluous and unnecessary. Maybe what Ondaatje was really more interested in was writing a nonfiction book, but he also wanted a space to show his poetic chops. I'm not sure. My own thoughts on this text seem to be as disjoined and confused as the text itself.

I was born in the July of 1989, during the infamous ethnic riots. My Dad drove my pregnant Mum through the University of Peradeniya and asked her to keep her eyes closed and her head down. But Mum saw, as the van turned a roundabout, severed human heads stuck on poles in a perfect circle. The insurgents stopped our van at a checkpoint but let my parents go because they saw there was a baby coming.

I was born on a day of blood. I was born on a day many, many young people died.

Though the book is a work of fiction, the violence in Anil's Ghost is very real. It all happened, and though I grew up hearing sugarcoated versions of it, I wasn't prepared for the magnitude of my horror.

It's an opportune time to read this book, just when the carbon dating from a recently discovered mass grave of 300 or more skeletons was thought to be the bones of sons of the North and East, Tamil boys gone missing during the 26 year civil war, whose parents have now begun their 10th year of silent daily vigils, demanding some closure. Turns out the bones were from the 1700's. The parents move on:

"There was always the fear, double-edged, that it was their son in the pit, or that it was not their son — which meant there would be further searching"

While the book itself meandered and banked, as Ondaatje's stories are wont to do; and the protagonist Anil was a bit of a wet blanket, a woman written by a man, this book remains striking in its relevance, 19 years after it was first written.

History remains stagnant, what a bleak outlook that is.