4,5 tähteä. Lyyristä, fragmentaarista, vakavaa. Upea kirja!

Anilin varjossa ollaan Sri Lankassa, Ondaatjen kotimaassa. Ja siksipä kirjassa kuvataan vaikuttavalla tavalla ceylonilaista maisemaa, ihmisiä ja kulttuureja. Minua eivät haittaa matkakirjamaiset piirteet vaan ihan päinvastoin.

Tämä on rakkaustarina kotimaalle, mutta sydänverellä kirjoitettu. Sukujen rasitteet, ihmissuhteiden ohuus ja se kaikkein kamalin - sisällissota.

On todella outoa lukea sisällissodasta runollisesti. Sotaa ei käsitellä osallisten vaan sen seuraukset kohtaavien näkökulmasta. Se on nappivalinta: paha olo kuristaa rintaa lukiessa.

Kirjan keskushenkilö Anil on oikeuslääkäri. Ammattikin oli poikkeuksellinen valinta ja wow, miten kiinnostavasti ja uskottavasti Ondaatje kuvaa hänen työtään.

Minusta Anilin kirja oli myös haastava kommentti siirtomaakysymykseen. Kuka lähtee ja kuka jää? Kuka moralisoi ja kuka kärsii?

Ondaatje on ollut minulle lähes tuntematon suuruus. Harmittava juttu. Tämän aion lähitulevaisuudessa takuuvarmasti korjata!

3 Stars.
It started out as a complicated and fragmented plot structure. For the first hundred pages or so, it kept switching between past and present, conversations and memories, all within the same chapter. It was hard to keep up.
It gets better, post 150 pages. It picks up pace, however there are very few civil war, LTTE- Sinhalese references. The evidence is there, stories about the popular politicians are very easily identified as well, but Gamini is the only one through whom you get an insight into the turbulence in Sri Lanka.

But, this book really hit its mark in the end. You aren't left confused, or clueless. The plot comes a full circle.
I have mixed feelings about this book though, but because I really admired the smooth writing style, and easy way of explaining, I liked it. It's worth a shot.

As the reader, I felt as though the author was flipping me around a pinball machine - forensics, archaeology, religion, civil war, medicine, history, culture, geology, painful childhoods, painful relationships, politics, murder - it’s exhausting.

The premise is that Anil, a forensic anthropologist, is appointed by The Centre for Human Rights in Geneva to go to Sri Lanka to investigate claims of atrocities made by Amnesty International and others. Under pressure from their Western trading partners, the Sri Lankan government has agreed to the appointment and pairs her with Sarath, a local archaeologist. Both are Sri Lankans by birth but Anil left to study and hasn’t been back in the intervening 12 years or so. It is now 1992 or thereabouts.

The central theme is the discovery of a more recent body in an archaeological site containing much older burials. The skeleton is brought back to Colombo for analysis, although Anil and Sarath end up travelling elsewhere with it to work on it and to try to identify the person. It’s interesting to learn many of the techniques that are used to do this but proving, if they could, that this man was murdered was going to achieve very little. The dead man was simply the tip of a bottomless iceberg. There were plenty of witnesses to the extent of the atrocities but little likelihood that the perpetrators would ever be brought to justice. Their efforts seem quite pointless, therefore.

Moving around the country allows Ondaatje to educate us about Sri Lankan history and culture. I found that interesting, especially as I had bought this book to read prior to visiting the country (a holiday that was cancelled due to political unrest elsewhere). Civilians were the subjects of countless atrocities and they lived in constant fear -

n  In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed. If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was the scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was unfinished so you could not walk it through. There had been years if night visitations, murders or kidnappings in broad daylight. The only chance was that the creatures that fought would consume themselves.n

I learned a great deal about the country on several levels and I appreciate that. I found the book disjointed however, with too much veering off into the personal backgrounds of those involved, information that did not seem altogether relevant to me. The character of Sarath’s brother, Gamini, is simply to allow Ondaatje to describe the awful conditions under which medical staff worked. His story takes up a significant part of the book but much of it is about his personal life which serves little purpose. The sometimes sordid details of Anil’s past relationships and friendships are also mostly irrelevant and it is clear that Ondaatje has a bit of an obsession with women getting their long hair wet as I lost count of the number of times she showered and then wrung her hair dry!

For me, this could have been a much better book if the author had been more focussed. There is so much of interest and so much to learn. In the end, although feeling enriched through learning more about the country and sadly overwhelmed by the extent of the atrocities, I was underwhelmed by the book.

I loved this so much. Reminded me of the careful and brutal poetics of Boochani and the beauty within the terror of Welcome to Chechnya (both harrowing but worth the time)

There are pietas of every kind.

And there are many bodies to be held in this Sri Lankan tone poem. The holders, to say the least, are complicated. As are the geopolitics. No happy endings. And no answers.

I sat in a parking spot in Clarion, PA, on a warming May day, and read the last 100 pages in lieu of lunch. This was moving, and incomplete, and poetic, and while I knew this was more a prose poem than a novel, I loved the voice that could say,

There are pietas of every kind.

Hold me.

Postlude: I learned how to torture a passed-out drunk. Put a pair of headphones on him or her and crank up Tom Waits singing 'Dig, Dig, Dig' from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Una historia ambientada en medio de los treinta años de cruenta guerra civil en Sri Lanka. El recorrido de los investigadores nos lleva a conocer, en medio de un presente de guerra civil, la rica historia del país, recuperada a través de numerosos sitios arqueológicos. Se pone en tensión los deseos de Anil de llegar a la verdad sobre las desapariciones forzadas, y el crudo realismo de quienes padecen la guerra día a día, y ven su gesta como ilusoria: "Nadie es inocente".
La novela pierde mucha de su carga dramática por el afán de detallar los antecedentes de vida de cada uno de los personajes, sin que esto agregue gran cosa a la comprensión y riqueza de la historia.

n  

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear.

n
The Sri Lankan Civil War lasted for over 25 years -- resulting in the deaths of 80 000 - 100 000 people -- and while it was still raging, Sri Lankan-Canadian author Michael Ondaatje set his fictional characters the task of uncovering the truth of the conflict; discovering to what degree the Sri Lankan government was murdering its own citizens. In Anil's Ghost, the main character Anil is an ex-pat Sri Lankan -- a forensic pathologist, trained and employed in the West -- who has returned to her homeland after fifteen years at the request of a human rights organization. She is teamed with a local archeologist named Sarath who, with a mysterious demeanor and known government contacts, Anil is wary of trusting. When they find a skeleton that might prove the government's involvement in a murder and its coverup, Anil is forced to trust Sarath as he leads her to various locations and involves local experts.

Anil's Ghost was released the same year as C.S.I. premiered on TV (2000), and the solving of its central mystery -- discovering the identity of the skeleton they nickname Sailor -- may have been a more fascinating read at the time: who among us now doesn't assume that a lab full of specialists can crack any crime from the minutest of evidence? As Anil and Sarath analyse soil, insect pupae, and pollen, the reader is confident that the dead man's hometown will be discovered, and even Anil's deduction of his occupation from bone stress and an artist's reconstruction of his face from a skull seems just a day at the office anymore. If only one could go back in time before this storyline became cliché. But while this mystery might be the central framework for this book, it's not really what it's about.

Ondaatje writes in disjointed scenes, where characters reveal more about themselves through the stories that they tell than by their present actions. Some stories in Anil's Ghost are tacked on at the beginning of chapters, unrelated to the action -- like the young teacher who passed the same group of teenaged boys every morning on her way to school until one day all she saw of them were their heads stuck on poles -- and other stories are used to illuminate the main point, as in this recounting of an artist who paints the eyes on Buddha statues:

n  

He climbs a ladder in front of the statue. The man with him climbs too. This has taken place for centuries, you realize, there are records of this since the ninth century. The painter dips a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about to be enfolded in its great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him -- so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha's during the process of creation.

n
So, too, does it seem that no one, not Ondaatje and not the characters that he creates, is willing to be direct with the truth of the Sri Lankan Civil War (and the government's culpability) : a mirror is held up to events and an atmosphere, rather than facts, are revealed. There is much space between the various stories and much isolation felt by the characters: Sarath and his brother Gamini are not only estranged from each other, but both have been left by their wives; Anil is unmarried, has recently left her lover, and risks losing her best friend; Sarath's mentor, Palipani, has become a hermit after a public disgrace; the artist, Ananda, has become a drunk after the disappearance of his wife. There is distrust and fear and language barriers between characters, yet meanwhile, truck drivers are hauled from their vehicles and crucified to the pavement, a young miner is branded an insurgent at the say-so of a hooded accuser, bodies turn up at the morgue with their faces destroyed by acid, and something must be done.

n  

There were dangers in handing truth to an unsafe city around you. As an archaeologist, Sarath believed in truth as a principle. That is, he would have given his life for the truth if the truth were of any use.

n
In Anil's Ghost, Ondaatje hands out the truth, paints in the Buddha's eyes, and while he may do so indirectly, using a mirror and painting over his shoulder, those eyes will last for generations; bearing silent witness.

I enjoyed this book very much, but recognise that it would not be for everyone. Remember when Elaine seemed to be the only one who hated the movie made of Ondaatje's The English Patient?



It's okay to be an Elaine.

Exquisitely written, as Ondaatje (always?) is - that overused word 'lyrical' applies in spades here - and more, the lyricism is connected to a set of intriguing, complex, deeply hurt and deeply feeling characters. Others comment on the fragmented nature of the narrative; for me, I was (due to life circumstances) only able to read/listen to this in snatches, and I think that actually minimized any disruption I might have felt had I been consuming this prose in longer stretches.

But wait - that is not quite right; one of the things I loved so much about this was the circular nature of the storyline. Ondaatje loops back and forward in time and place; we learn characters' fates while they are still vigorously present in earlier (or later) timelines; we learn how they are connected to each other in ways that seem happenstance, even accidental. Minor details we might have missed early on reappear later as crucially important. A black-jacketed sleeper in a hospital emergency room. A teacher walking to school in the early morning.

Later we learn who these people are; what they mean to each other. The details of their lives - like the skeleton whose identity is the central concern of forensic pathologist Anil and archaologist Sarath for much of the story - matter, although they need to be carefully observed and put together, like a puzzle. It's a brilliant device/conceit on Ondaatje's part.

I loved Anil, of course. Her sadness and conflict and passion are the focal point of much of the novel. But really, it is the side characters who left even more of an impression on me - Gamini; Palipana; Ananda - and the tragedy and pathos of their lives as described and as recollected.

The imagery at the end is heartbreaking, but also full of grace and beauty. After so much war, torture, death and disintegration, the ending is strangely peaceful and loving. Bucolic. The resolution and symbolism of the reconstruction of the Buddha seems perfect.

Bilo je ovo kao da sam se hranila prašinom pa ostala da grebe u grlu. Na prvi pogled nepovezani događaji, ali dobijaju cjelinu tek pred kraj romana, koji nikako nije običan. Likovi su snažni, i ponekad kao da mogu da se vide vene istih. Jako upečatljivo djelo

Anil's Ghost

For several years, I have had the opportunity to study Theravada Buddhism at a Sri Lankan Buddhist Temple in Washington, D.C. Although it was not the focus of my interest, I had from the outset of my study of Buddhism been aware of the unfortunate civil war that raged in Sri Lanka for many years. I welcomed the opportunity to learn more about the conflict by reading Michael Ondaatje's novel "Anil's Ghost" (2000).

Ondaatje's novel is set in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s -- early 1990's in the midst of the conflict. As the author briefly describes it, the civil war involved the Tamils, a separatist group in the north of Sri Lanka, a group of insurgents in the south, and the Sri Lankan government. The civil war was fought in a brutal, clandestine manner, and it tended to be underreported in the West.

Ondaatje neither discusses the origins of the conflict nor attempts to ascribe blame. He does want to emphasize the terrible nature of the violence by all parties, including particularly the Sri Lankan government and its inconsistency with Buddhist teachings. Ondaatje's book also explores highly Buddhist themes of suffering, change, and self-understanding.

In Onadaatje's story, a 33-year old Foresnic Anthropologist, a medical doctor named Anil Tisera, arrives in Sri Lanka under the auspices of a human rights organization to explore the violence and its perpetrators. Anil was raised in Sri Lanka but left it at the age of 18 to pursue her studies and has little, if any, ties remaining to her native land. She is assisted in her efforts by 49 year old Sri Lankan archaeologist Sarath Diyasena, an employee of the government whose political affiliations remain murky during most of the book. Anil and Sarath discover a skeleton in an ancient burial ground, accessible only to the government. The skeleton, that the pair call "Sailor" appears to have been the victim of a recent political murder. Much of the book involves Anil's investigation of how Sailor met his fate.

Ondaatje tells his story slowly and suspensfully as Anil comes to see more of the violence which plagues the land -- including some graphic scenes of torture. In the process, Ondaatje tells the reader a substantial amount about Sri Lanka, its history, natural resources and people. A number of secondary characters are introduced, including an elderly scholar, Palipana, and a painter turned miner, Ananda. Sarath's younger brother Gamini who like Anil is a physician also comes to play a large role in the book.

Ondaatje intertwines his story of the civil war in Sri Lanka with flashbacks of the personal lives of his protagonists. Anil has abandoned the values of her native land and become, it appears, a westerner. The book describes her failed marriage and unhappy relationships in her new life. Sarath and Gamini also have had unhappiness in their marriages. The two brothers appear distant, personally and politically. The themes of suffering and loss in part tie in with the story. They seem to show the "ghosts" that everyone tends to carry with them. As a religion, I think Buddhism tries help people understand and free themselves from their ghosts. But the focus on the personal lives of the characters also detracts from the novel. It makes the story diffuse and unfocused and destroys the tension that Ondaatje otherwise tries to build up carefully in the story of "Sailor" and in the gradual unfolding of the violence, torture, and killing in Sri Lanka. The book thus pulls in too many directions and doesn't work entirely well as a consistent whole.

The book does show the anger, lust, and ignorance that Buddhism emphasizes as the source of sorrow in life. Ondaatje's novel also suggests the absence of easy answers on a personal or political level in resolving these conditions. Ondaatje appears to hold in high regard the Buddhism of the land of his own birth, but he doesn't appear to hold it out as the choice for his characters, especially the westernized Anil. The final scene of the book with Ananda working on restoring a damaged statue of the Buddha appears to capture for the author what Sri Lanka has helped give of value to people. In Theravada Buddhist Scriptures, Ananda is the Buddha's attendant who memorized and recited the Buddha's teachings that were later written down and became canonical.

A difficult and sometimes wandering book, "Anil's Ghost" does offer a chilling portrait of the Sri Lankan conflict and of the unhappy spaces in the human heart.

Robin Friedman

As usual, I enjoyed Ondaatje's lyrical style. Using a forensic anthopologust to try and uncover not only the dead "Sailor" but also Sri Lanka's complicated ethnic mess was a master stroke.
The violence and madness came in flashes between the beautiful poetic prose.

I thought the author did a wonderful job in creating the world of Sri Lanka and the tropical forests there. I liked the idea of an archaeologist teaming up with a doctor, and their meeting up with a Buddha face painter who became blind and his eyes were his relative. This book had some horrific scenes of war, and the casualties of war, and people fighting and being shot incongruously. Anil is an archaelogist who finds a human skull and they try to recreate the face of the person. This person was working in a mine, and his body was taken out and put somewhere else, which was mysterious. This book was intriguing because you felt like you were there with the people and it was a different way of life. I enjoyed the authors other book the English Patient. That was a sad book as well. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to delve into a good reading book.