Anil's Ghost

Ondaatje, Michael

3.58

17,927 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 037541567X ISBN 13: 9780375415678

Publisher: Random House, 2000

The universally acclaimed novelist and poet--winner of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Canada Governor General's Award--presents his first new novel since The English Patient. Simultaneous.

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Review:

Anil's Ghost is Michael Ondaatje's eagerly awaited follow-up to his classic Booker prize-winning novel The English Patient. Drawing on Ondaatje's own Sri Lankan heritage, wonderfully explored in his travel narrative Running in the Family, Anil's Ghost is located in contemporary Sri Lanka, in the midst of interminable internecine civil war between government forces, separatist Tamils and antigovernment insurgents.

The novel's action revolves around Anil Tissera, a young forensic anthropologist, born in Sri Lanka but educated in Europe and America, who "had courted foreignness", and "was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or on the highways around Santa Fe". Anil returns to the country of her birth after 15 years on a United Nations sponsored investigation into the escalating number of politically motivated murders engulfing the island. As Anil begins to realise the scale of the murder and horror which her investigations reveal, it becomes clear that "the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here". She reluctantly teams up with Sarath Diyasena, "the archaeologist selected by the government" to investigate a particularly sensitive murder; skeletons discovered buried in the Bandarawela caves, one of the most archaeologically sensitive sites in the entire country. One skeleton in particular fascinates both Anil and Sarath. Simply known as "Sailor", the quest for the skeleton's identity sucks both Anil and Sarath into the terrifying heart of darkness which makes up contemporary Sri Lankan politics. Ondaatje reflects upon the ancient history of Sri Lanka through the fragments of history and identity that Anil and Sarath uphold in the face of the murder and chaos which surrounds them.

Although Anil's Ghost is a poetic and beautifully written book, it is also a tough, uncompromising and brave novel about a terrifying conflict that the world has chosen to ignore. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"There is much to astonish, to disturb and to admire in this dense book... a rare triumph" (Guardian)

"This is why I read, this is why literature matters, this, in short, is IT!... By the closing pages Anil's Ghost has come as close to a holy book as a novel ever should" (Independent)

"A deeply felt and highly accomplished survey of devastated paradise... which both plunges you into the carnage of Sri Lanka's civil war and keeps you aware of the island's past splendours of civilisation. Barbarity and art hauntingly mingle in this fine book" (Sunday Times)

"It is Ondaatje's extraordinary achievement to use magic in order to make the blood of his own country real... Nowhere has he written more beautifully" (New York Times Book Review)

"A truly wondrous book... I was as enthralled as I have not been since The English Patient" (Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden)

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