Anil's Ghost

Apr 12, 2012 ·Karen· rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: canada, mttbr-2012

Against the obscenity of large numbers

When a writer, dauntless and unflinching, turns his piercing gaze on mass murder, how does he drag it back into the realm of the human? In 2666 Bolano gave to each and every one of the women murdered in Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juarez), a name, or the clothes they were wearing, or where they were murdered, or, at the very least, how they were found and what happened to the corpse afterwards. He turns each one into an individual, even in the relentless catalogui...more Against the obscenity of large numbers

When a writer, dauntless and unflinching, turns his piercing gaze on mass murder, how does he drag it back into the realm of the human? In 2666 Bolano gave to each and every one of the women murdered in Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juarez), a name, or the clothes they were wearing, or where they were murdered, or, at the very least, how they were found and what happened to the corpse afterwards. He turns each one into an individual, even in the relentless cataloguing of their deaths we never lose sight of the individual human being, loved and missed and mourned. Some 300 pages that retain a steadfast sobriety, as any descent into bathos would become unbearable, self-defeating. Now, that is perhaps just possible when dealing with numbers that creep into the hundreds, but what do you do with this particular breathtaking footnote of history? The civil war that flared up in Sri Lanka in 1983: by early 2000, 18 years of war had claimed the lives of more than 64,000, mostly civilians. Sixty four thousand. Sixty four thousand.

One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims. In a sixth century Buddhist monks' burial midden, located in a government archaeological preserve, four modern skeletons are found. Anil Tissera is a forensic pathologist, sent by a Geneva Human Rights organization, teamed with a Colombo archaeologist in a seven week project as a gesture to placate trading partners in the West. Anil and her partner name these four skeletons Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Sailor is the only skeleton with a skull. They work to uncover the truth of his particular fate. Proof of one type of crime, that will speak for many crimes. One victim that will speak for many victims. But at a time of war the truth is a flame against a lake of petrol. Anil's status as a delegate of a Western organization might protect her - but what of her colleague?

Ondaatje uses a narrative style that skirts around the story. Obtuse, dislocated, off-centre, like Anil herself, born in Sri Lanka, now ex-pat, she has created a new centre of self around her intellect and her scientific, rational approach to life, an approach which holds her at a distance, protects her from pain. The narrative too holds us at a distance which makes the swift and sudden incursion of horror all the more intense. Gradually, like the reader, Anil is made to look straight at the face of death, rather than busying herself with the details of forensic evidence. In a process that reflects precisely what this novel does, Ananda, the artist, recreates an individual face out of the skull. But Ananda has lost his wife in the terror, so the face is peaceful: "It's what he wants of the dead."

Anil rose and walked back into the dark rooms. She could no longer look at the face, saw only Ananda's wife in every aspect of it. She sat down in one of the large cane chairs in the dining room and began weeping. ... Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could see the rectangular shape of a painting and beside it Ananda standing still, looking through the blackness at her.

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Jul 01, 2008 Marguerite rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Expats, lovers, crusaders

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

I tried to read this once before, but I couldn't get much past page 80. This time, I couldn't put it down, which just reinforces my belief that there's a right time and a wrong time to read each book. This time, I'd been prepared by The Ministry of Special Cases and "The Caretaker," a story in Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector. I wonder, now, about my recent attraction to refugee fiction or desaparecido fiction. What, exactly, am I looking for? What have I lost, or left behind?

Ondaatje's chara...more I tried to read this once before, but I couldn't get much past page 80. This time, I couldn't put it down, which just reinforces my belief that there's a right time and a wrong time to read each book. This time, I'd been prepared by The Ministry of Special Cases and "The Caretaker," a story in Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector. I wonder, now, about my recent attraction to refugee fiction or desaparecido fiction. What, exactly, am I looking for? What have I lost, or left behind?

Ondaatje's characters are as complex and interesting as Sri Lanka. I think the shifting perspectives in the different sections might have put me off the first go-round. When I stopped reading for the night at the end of a character's section, the book made more sense. The events and constant suspicion/paranoia that are inevitable in an environment where people keep disappearing while the "enemy" is an unknown held the different sections together nicely. The lack of perfect resolution at the end fit, too.

Ondaatje's writing is frequently lyrical:
"Patterns of death always surrounded him. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea. So the removal of a wise sixth-century head, the dropping off of arms and hands of rock as a result of the fatigue of centuries, existed alongside human fate. He would hold statues two thousand years old in his arms. Or place his hand against old, warm rock that had been cut into a human shape. He found comfort in seeing his dark flesh against it. This was his pleasure. Not conversation or the education of others or power, but simply to place his hand against a gal vihara, a living stone whose temperature was dependent on the hour, whose look of porousness would change depending on rain or a quick twilight.
"This rock hand could have been his wife's hand. It had a similar darkness and age to it, a familiar softness."

This gave me a lot to think about: a fifth-century Chinese society that put music at the heart of its civilization, the qualities of any writer, temple stones being the recipients of confessions, understanding gained by studying weaknesses, not strengths.

I'd like to read more by the author, who's published more poetry than anything else.(less)

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Mar 01, 2012 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: canadian, 2000s, contemporary, war, cultural-sri-lanka, bookmineset-2011-2012

This was my first experience reading Michael Ondaatje and I have to say that I was impressed. His prose has an almost poetic quality that made me want to keep reading, and kept me enjoying the novel even when the subject matter was extremely disturbing.

Anil's Ghost is the story of a native Sri Lankan woman who has spent the past 15 years in America. Now she goes back to Sri Lanka as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group. She struggles with making her two worlds co...more

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Jul 22, 2008 Ellen rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people interested in Sri Lanka's dark underbelly

Meh. Listened to this on tape. This contributed to the fragmented feeling of the book, but only a little. I didn't know why certain characters were being fleshed out when they were, or how they were related to the story at all sometimes. Maybe if I'd known more about Sri Lankan politics it would have been more clear. There was some suspense, but it never climaxed. Some of the writing was beautiful and vivid, but not enough to keep my attention if I'd been reading this myself.

Read The English Pat...more

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Oct 29, 2008 Cameron rated it 4 of 5 stars

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...more

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Apr 19, 2013 Susan rated it 5 of 5 stars

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!

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Apr 21, 2013 Emmy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Reading this one was hard-going almost to the end where finally things start to happen. Most of the book is disjointed episodes that I was hoping will connect in the end. They didn't!!

Anil of the title returns to her native Sri Lanka as a forensic expert working for the UN. She is paired upon arrival with Sarath, an archeologist assigned by the Government. Together they find a recent skeleton buried with ancient skeletons in a government site. They set about to establish the identity of this ske...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Susan Oleksiw rated it 5 of 5 stars

Anil is a Sri Lankan woman who has lived abroad for most of her life, working in criminal forensics for various international groups at sites of massacres in South American, etc. She is sent to Sri Lanka on a brief mission and soon uncovers a skeleton among others at an ancient archaeological site. She insists on working on this skeleton despite the resistance of her local partner, an archaeologist. The story is set during the very dangerous times of the Tamil insurgency/rebellion, when the gove...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Tillie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008

Okay, I'll admit, my first thought was Bones: Sri Lanka, lol. Not quite what I got, though.

The idea of the story is interesting - a woman leaves her native country for a Western education, only to return years later in the middle of a civil war, essentially as an outsider. She no longer speaks the language, most of her family is dead, and nearly all of the people she interacts with during her research are suspicious of her. It's an effective tool, because while Anil is Sri Lankan, her world vie...more Okay, I'll admit, my first thought was Bones: Sri Lanka, lol. Not quite what I got, though.

The idea of the story is interesting - a woman leaves her native country for a Western education, only to return years later in the middle of a civil war, essentially as an outsider. She no longer speaks the language, most of her family is dead, and nearly all of the people she interacts with during her research are suspicious of her. It's an effective tool, because while Anil is Sri Lankan, her world view is now more Western, so the reader is able to see Sri Lanka from both sides. However, I don't ever feel like Anil as a character is very well-established. We get glimpses of her childhood, as well as her life after she left Sri Lanka, but I never really felt attached to her. I didn't dislike her; there just wasn't anything particularly endearing about her, nothing that made you really want her to succeed.

Much like he did in The English Patient, Ondaatje skips around time and location at will. While I can't say I'm particularly fond of the style, it actually works fairly well here as he is able to tell the stories of different characters without being constrained by a more traditional linear timeline. In fact, some of the best parts of the book are when he strays away from Anil, and instead tells stories of several people whose lives were dramatically impacted by the civil war. I think it might have actually been more compelling and powerful for him to just write a compilation of short stories about life in Sri Lanka rather than trying to fit them all into Anil's storyline.

I also was not thrilled with the end. While I don't expect (or even want) stories that are about civil war and government corruption to end neatly and cleanly, I would have liked a little more closure. Instead it just kind of ended - I'm not even sure if Anil's research ultimately had an impact at all. I think that Ondaatje, who was born in Sri Lanka but moved to England as a boy, was trying to demonstrate what was taking place in his homeland, and how helpless he felt about it. I will admit that the more I think about Anil's Ghost, the more I appreciate what I think Ondaatje was trying to get across, but I still feel like it fell a bit short.(less)

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Nov 26, 2012 Thenewdirectionoftime rated it 3 of 5 stars

Anil’s Ghost has the quality of the haunting beauty of a black and white landscape in a Bergman film, it provides Dantesque glimpses into the horrors of 20th century dirty wars, and it manages to build characters that are uniquely postmodern: a forensic scientist, an anchorite epigraphist, an archaeologist, a drug addicted emergency room doctor, and a shamanistic painter of eyes.

If the reader is immersed a little in the nomenclature of South-East Asia, he will know that “Anil” is a man’s name. T...more Anil’s Ghost has the quality of the haunting beauty of a black and white landscape in a Bergman film, it provides Dantesque glimpses into the horrors of 20th century dirty wars, and it manages to build characters that are uniquely postmodern: a forensic scientist, an anchorite epigraphist, an archaeologist, a drug addicted emergency room doctor, and a shamanistic painter of eyes.

If the reader is immersed a little in the nomenclature of South-East Asia, he will know that “Anil” is a man’s name. Therefore he was likely to expect this book to a bildungsroman that follows the development of its protagonist, the “putative” Anil, from innocence to experience – possibly from his home in Asia to his settlement in Canada. Maybe this would be Ondaatje’s opportunity to tell his own story after getting a green light to go ahead with just about anything at all after the success of The English Patient, which this novel followed. But that expectation was defeated. Surprisingly Anil turns out to be a young woman. The reader comes to realize this after a few confused pages into the book.

A man’s name is a good aesthetic choice for this exceedingly complex character, Anil Tissera. Her name means wind or breath. Like the wind, she can be characterized by her ambiguity – an ambiguity rendered in constantly precise prose. We are never given full disclosure to her thoughts by an omniscient narrator. What the story does include is a rich variety of her memories. Perhaps most memorable of all is the way she got her name, which wasn’t the one she was born with – This episode would stand alone as a good short story. Then there are other recollections: of a love affair with Cullis, also a scientific researcher, whom she ultimately stabs, of another affair with a woman named Leaf who introduces her to smoking pot and film. To add to the mix, she began her life as champion swimmer and there is evening a passing reference to how she had translated the archaic poet Archilochus in university.

It is the loving care that went into creating this Pygmalion of a character, who would surely be the ego ideal of any intellectual, that stands in contrast to what actually happens in the novel. What happens in the novel is that more characters are introduced. There is the archaeologist Sarath and his brother Gamini. Then there is also the epigraphist Palipana, a brilliant scholar who has fallen into disgrace. And at last there is Ananda, (meaning “bliss”), the only working class character of the book. All of these Ondaatje attempts to render with the same character as the eponymous Anil. But at about 300 pages long, there is simply not enough space to contain these ambitious characters as well as the arc of a compelling series of incidents.

The dramatic events of the novel concern Anil’s return to Serendip to find that it has descended into a seething chaos of confused internecine warfare. Someone somewhere gets thrown off a train. Relatives are kidnapped and never heard from again. Bodies turn up. And Anil and Sarath even come across a man crucified on the tarmac of a highway as though it were an everyday occurrence. Things have gone terribly wrong in her homeland. Her job as a forensic researcher is to complete a mandate given to her by the U.N. And this is the weakness of the book. What exactly she is doing isn’t clear. Even though tension is added to the plot by making it unclear whether Sarath, a local archaeologist assigned to help her, is working for or against uncovering the truth, it isn’t clear exactly what she is looking for. They seem to set out into the country side on random hunches and haphazard discoveries. Woven into these discoveries are forensic factoids and knowledge that Ondaatje has to be given credit for learning about and then writing on in an aesthetically pleasing way. But then, he seems to get lost in the immense interest of all the science, anthropology, epigraphy and analysis. There still needs to be a story to tell. That is unless his aim is to write wholly the kind of novel Martin Amis calls a type two novel, a Finnegans Wake of a novel that makes language itself the hero.

So the story doesn’t emerge and live on its own merit by being compelling. Instead, it seems like a rationale for introducing the characters. Anil and Sarath find some skeletons that they suspect (one circumstantial evidence of being in a place that only government employees have access to) might have been victims of state terror. Sarath then decides they need the help of Palipana. Again, he is an interesting figure but it defies understanding what this historian can offer an investigation into murder. He points the characters in the direction of Ananda, an artist able to recreate the face on the skull of one of the putative victims, “Sailor.” Again, Ananda is a very worthwhile character who draws us in with his story of loss, the variations of his talents and even with his attempted throat cutting. But there is still this lingering feeling that he is a square peg pounded by Ondaatje into a round hole of an Anil’s U.N. mission.

Palipana and Ananda are both renowned for their abilities to recreate what has been lost. Palipana could lay out the design of the ancient city from the traces of its ruins. They represent a constant in our humanity – and as such they are powerful motifs pointing back to the main theme of the story. Nevertheless, they just seem to be hanging out in the story as supernumeraries. To some degree the Gamini character has this quality too. And it is for this reason that the novel loses a lot of steam somewhere in the middle. Between the beginning and Anil’s mission and the end when she confronts the government officials with her findings, there is a kind of swirl of memories, dreamlike recollections and phantasmagoric images of loss and sadness. The reader is left with the feeling that there needs to be much more of this novel or else much less.

For whatever aesthetic flaws it suffers, for its humorlessness bordering sometimes on melodrama, and for its occasional purple passages (Anil pouring water over herself is transubstantiated into “A mantra of gestures”) this novel serves to very important extra-literary purposes.

The most vital is to call the attention to brutal meliorism of the West’s view of the world as having become a safer, more peaceful place since the forces of darkness were defeated in Germany in the first half of the century, and then again in a kind of coda in the second half after the crumbling of the Soviet empire. The reality is that our contemporary dispensation, our social and economic arrangement, produces the violent conflict that has being wracking Sir Lanka for the past thirty odd years. Wars are profitable, so wars continue to happen. That is what Anil’s Ghost reminds us.

The second point, and it is unclear whether the contrast was intended by Ondaatje, is the contrast between the intellectual in the West and her counterpart in the East. While Anil lives the life of a white collared professional, her life is vacuous. Her marriage fails, she has an affair with a married man, she takes drugs and contemplates the details of mediocre culture. In short, she is a gifted titan with languishing in the amusement park of western society. A poignant comparison is Gamini. He is utterly engaged. Though exhausted and nearly worked to death by his own single-mindedness, his life is clearly the more existentially fulfilled of the two characters. Of course, the point of the novel is to show Anil attempting to redeem herself by offering her services to the U.N. as an investigator, the question is left open as to whether she will find the authenticity she is seeking outside her subjectivism.

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Sep 27, 2012 Sorayya Khan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 (Sara...more 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."(less)

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Jun 05, 2012 Carla Perry rated it 4 of 5 stars

“Anil’s Ghost” by Michael Ondaatje is a subtle book – the journey of a woman originally from Sri Lanka (Ceylon), educated in England and America, is a forensic anthropologist sent by Amnesty International back to Sri Lanka to work with local people to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder. I say “subtle” because it’s a low-key book from Anil’s perspective. She is partnered with “Sarath” who has his own dark secrets and they go to a ancient burial site where they find a body of...more

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May 08, 2012 Carl Brush rated it 5 of 5 stars

I thought Richard Price might qualify as my new author discovery of ’08, but he fell out of favor after my reading of Clockers recently ( Cf. comments from Dec.4). Paul Auster was a contender (Cf. on The Book of Illusions from Dec. 4.) However, my encounter with Anil’s Ghost sealed the deal for Michael Ondaatje. The man is one of those authors, like J.M. Coetze, whose work is on another plane even from those most of us consider excellent.
Like Ian McEwen, Ondaatje likes to inhabit a variety of...more I thought Richard Price might qualify as my new author discovery of ’08, but he fell out of favor after my reading of Clockers recently ( Cf. comments from Dec.4). Paul Auster was a contender (Cf. on The Book of Illusions from Dec. 4.) However, my encounter with Anil’s Ghost sealed the deal for Michael Ondaatje. The man is one of those authors, like J.M. Coetze, whose work is on another plane even from those most of us consider excellent.
Like Ian McEwen, Ondaatje likes to inhabit a variety of minds, times, and professions. In the two books I have read, he has presented convincing gypsies, historians, carpenters, equestrians, physicians, among others. His time span ranges from medieval to the present. You’re liable to find yourself in California on one page, France on the next, and Sri Lanka on the next. And Sri Lanka is, indeed, the primary (but not sole) setting for Anil’s Ghost.
Anil is a forensic graphologist. One who is able to discern from bones--old or new--not only the age and sex of an individual who once fleshed out an exhumed skeleton, but the probable occupation, marital status, cause and place of death, and any number of other particulars. She is sent by a human rights organization to Sri Lanka to investigate charges about the activities of the various groups engaged in armed civil conflict with one another. She welcomes the assignment because she spent a good part of her childhood in the country, her father having been a respected physician there. She teams up with a forensic anthropologist who is nominally her host, but who has conflicting family and political alliances--most of them unknown to Anil--which complicate the situation. The setup is perfect for Ondaatje’s skills since, aside from being born in Sri Lanka himself, the vague and shifting ambiguities of religion, politics, loyalties, and fears inherent in the situation are part and parcel of the reality one finds in his books.
I won’t go farther into the plot. You should discover that for yourself. I will dip a hesitant toe into the waters of MFA terminology to say that if there are indeed (And I dispute the notion.) plot-driven, voice-driven, or character-driven novels, Ondaatje’s novels might be called spirit-driven, borne on the breath of language and soul as expressed in terms of character and action. Witness this one short section of Anil’s return to a childhood domicile:
The day after she arrived. . . Anil had sent a letter [we don’t know to whom or about what at this point] but there had been no reply. So she didn’t know if this would be a wasted trip, whether the silence meant acceptance or the address she had was extinct. She knocked, then looked through the bars of the window, turning around quickly as she heard someone come out onto the porch. Anil could hardly recognize the tiny aged woman. They stood facing each other. Anil stepped forward to embrace her. Just then a young woman walked out and watched them without a smile. Anil was aware of the stern eyes that were taking in this sentimental moment.
No backstory about who these women are or why Anil has come to see them. We learn all we need from the gestures and the reactions and the remark about the unanswered letter. We also get foreshadowing of trouble in the “stern eyes” of the onlooker. What would have taken most writers several pages, Ondaatje accomplishes in a short paragraph packed with action and emotion. And at the center of the event is the beating heart of past and present wrapped in what the “young woman” sees as merely a “sentimental moment.” That’s mastery.
Anil’s Ghost is a relatively short book, but it has Tolstoyan impact. It’s religious, political in scope, yet entirely individual in its subject and its action. Ondaatje is not prolific. That’s too bad. The world badly needs more of him. But I’m thankful for this. (less)

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Aug 28, 2011 Karlo Mikhail Mongaya rated it 4 of 5 stars

Literary texts are ideological forms of social consciousness that arise out of the material foundations of society. Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost can therefore be said to have a particular relationship with the social order from which it was written: a Sri Lanka wracked by civil war, chronic crisis, and diaspora.

Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan forensics expert returning to her homeland after fifteen years studying and working abroad, is sent by the United Nations back to the island-nation to invest...more

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Jun 15, 2011 Sharon rated it 3 of 5 stars

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...more

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Jul 31, 2010 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

A beautifully written book, with a muted thriller taking place in Sri Lanka to keep the pace going. I definitely want to read more Ondaatje after this. Some favorite lines...

"She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic... 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 anot...more

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Aug 13, 2009 Andrea rated it 4 of 5 stars

I believe I have met my match in terms of audio books - Ondaatje just didn’t work for me in this medium, but I am fully willing to imagine that it is simply because of the complexity of his language and imagery and the failure of a magnetic strip to convey that information to my mind well.

Anil’s Ghost tells the story of a young woman, Anil, who returns to her native Sri Lanka after an absence of several years. She returns to assist the government with work studying ancient bones and using her sk...more I believe I have met my match in terms of audio books - Ondaatje just didn’t work for me in this medium, but I am fully willing to imagine that it is simply because of the complexity of his language and imagery and the failure of a magnetic strip to convey that information to my mind well.

Anil’s Ghost tells the story of a young woman, Anil, who returns to her native Sri Lanka after an absence of several years. She returns to assist the government with work studying ancient bones and using her skills as a forensic anthropologist. In the midst of this inquiry, she discovers a much more recent body of a man killed in the midst of the civil war raging there between the government at the Tamil Tigers. In the midst of identifying this man and trying to make this crime known, she meets several people and her life and theirs become interwoven.

As always, Ondaatje’s language is beautiful. It always reminds me of ribbons of satin that glide lightly across my lips - beautiful and rich. His portrayals of both sensuality and psychological are deep and complex, and the characters in this book are various and flawed and profound in the way that all humans are when we take the time to see each other. And Ondaatje’s use of the setting here is both interesting and fitting for the complicated and secretive plot of the story.

So my problem was not, I believe, with Ondaatje’s story but with my own inability to process it well when just hearing it. I often found myself losing track of characters because, I think, I wasn’t seeing their names and having a visual association with them. (It probably didn’t help that Sri Lankan names are totally new to me.) I also didn’t track well with the way the subplots layered onto the central story; I saw how everything came together, but I just wasn’t able to pick up the subtleties and depth that I know Ondaatje was very consciously working into the book.

Yet, still, I found listening to this book to be almost soothing despite the violence and upheaval of the story. I felt the same way reading The English Patient; there’s just something about Ondaatje’s writing that feels like liquid gold to me, like I’m bathing in sunlight.

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Jan 07, 2012 Monica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and this book is set in that country during its civil war in the mid-1980s.

Anil Tessira, a 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. There are three groups committing atrocities: the government, anti-government insurgents, and separatist guerrillas. These warring forces are terrorizing a population paralyzed by fear.

Sarat...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Matthew Madrone rated it 4 of 5 stars

First, let me state that this books has nothing to do with ghosts. The main character is Anil, and just to be clear, she is not a ghost.

Anyway, this is a beautiful, dark and mostly satisfying book (minus some boring back story about the main character's failed affair with some nonentity of a character) with some particularly compelling secondary characters (the bit about the blind archaeologist is awesome) and side stories that revolve around human rights investigations in 1980s Sri Lanka by a...more

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Jul 06, 2012 Ashwini rated it 3 of 5 stars

Anil's Ghost is a story set against the turbulent civil war in Sri Lanka, although it does not delve too much into the political/historical background of these events. Rather, it's experienced in a series of aftershocks through the actions of its characters. The main one, is Anil a forensic anthropologist who is sent by a UN-like human rights group to investigate human remains on the island. With her is archaeologist Sarath.

The main plot revolves around the discovery of a skeleton (nicknamed 'S...more Anil's Ghost is a story set against the turbulent civil war in Sri Lanka, although it does not delve too much into the political/historical background of these events. Rather, it's experienced in a series of aftershocks through the actions of its characters. The main one, is Anil a forensic anthropologist who is sent by a UN-like human rights group to investigate human remains on the island. With her is archaeologist Sarath.

The main plot revolves around the discovery of a skeleton (nicknamed 'Sailor') who is identified as a rebel sympathizer and summarily killed and buried at a historical site by govt forces. Sarath and Anil roam the country trying to piece together the story of Sailor, possibly to highlight govt crimes.

Interspersed with the Anil/Sarath story was that of Gamini, Sarath's brother. I found him to be one of the most interesting characters in the book. He is a doctor and a surgeon, obsessed with his work, a drug addict but deeply compassionate. His work draws him into the circle of mindless violence and torture that is inflicted upon the people. His methods, although bizarre and not altogether logical make literary sense in his particular situation. In my opinion, Gamini was the centre of the book rather than Anil, who seemed a rather hysterical character, ill-equipped to deal with the complicated situation in her country (yes, Anil is female). Also, it was rather unbelievable that a forensic anthropologist would not acquaint herself with the sensitive political situation before coming there. (did she read only the bones/soil stuff?) Hence she relies on the machinations of Sarath, who is a bit more pragmatic and eventually gets himself into serious trouble (on her account).

I confess that I have watched a lot of 'Bones' and expected a more interesting forensic anthropologist. But more seriously, the book was not about forensic studies at all, but about civil war and the scars it leaves on people. Seen through the eyes of the doctor Gamini, it really highlights the senselessness of war. To me that was the most interesting dimension of the novel.
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Jun 23, 2012 Donna rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, sad-books

I am still undecided about this book, as to how I truly feel about it. I nearly stopped reading it twice. I actually paused about a third of the way through, then at the halfway mark, and simply stared at the cover, as if the woman on the front could tell what I needed to know. Which would be--what is the author doing? What is the point of him arranging this book in some jumbled manner that detracts from the power of the subject at hand? I understand that he needed to provide some background on...more

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Apr 23, 2013 Michelle rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, mysterious, re-read, books-for-class, 2013

This was my second time reading Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje. The first time, I was assigned it for Senior IB English, this time, I was helping my younger brother with his Senior IB English class. I didn't mind, though, because both times I loved this novel.

Anil is a Sri Lankan ex-pat, now working as a forensic pathologist. She gets an assignment in Sri Lanka to investigate murders committed by the government and separatist groups. Upon finding a modern bone along with skeletons from a gover...more

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Aug 31, 2011 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

I listened to the CD in the car during a long drive, and I must say something about the reader, Alan Cumming. He was wonderful. I must admit that generally I don't enjoy books on tape/CD, and would prefer reading print, but in this case I was transported by Cumming's versatile acting. My enjoyment was not based solely on his acting, but that his portrayal made me forget about the actor and focus on the character. That is a rare occurance for me; I am rarely "taken" by a reading, I'm too busy cri...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Patrick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As always Ondaatje's writing is superb but my lack of sympathy for the characters involved is striking; therefore I can only give this book 3 stars.

Although this particular book focuses on extrajudicial killings committed by the government and hidden from international view, extrajudicial killings happening in all sides signal instability in a country. In order to keep foreign trade and investments in the country, the government tries to hide the instability that it faces via extrajudicial killi...more

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May 25, 2012 Susana rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

El tema es muy interesante, los crímenes de guerra en Shri Lanka, que en el fondo son los crímenes de guerra en cualquier lugar del mundo, sus efectos en la gente que los padece, directa o indirectamente porque viven en el país y su aislamiento del resto del mundo. El silencio cómplice, basado en el temor impuesto en la población por las desapariciones y asesinatos masivos, la posición de encubrimiento del gobierno, el marco histórico en que suceden y la breve ventana que pareciera abrirse al pe...more

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Sep 23, 2012 Bindu Manoj rated it 3 of 5 stars

Anil Tissare, a forensic pathologist of Sri Lankan origin comes back to her homeland after fifteen years, as a delegate of UN Human Rights commission. Sarath Diyasena, an archeaologist is assigned to help in her investigations of mass murders by the Sri Lankan government. They discover four skeletons in a government protected sanctuary and realize that one of them is just about four to five years old. The story is their search to reconstruct the person that he was. In the process, Anil and Sarat...more Anil Tissare, a forensic pathologist of Sri Lankan origin comes back to her homeland after fifteen years, as a delegate of UN Human Rights commission. Sarath Diyasena, an archeaologist is assigned to help in her investigations of mass murders by the Sri Lankan government. They discover four skeletons in a government protected sanctuary and realize that one of them is just about four to five years old. The story is their search to reconstruct the person that he was. In the process, Anil and Sarath wanders in and out through their past, trying to slay the personal ghosts that haunt them.

The details of a civil strife that shatttered a once peaceful country that the author provides is truly incredible. The atrocities of man against man is described as almost an aside and you realize that would have been the reality for those that were involved in it day in and out. It made me think of how little I knew or actually was interested in knowing about things that happened in a place so near, yet so far. There would not be a single soul in that country whose life would be untouched by a war,

"where the main purpose of war had become war"

The angst of generations and the futility and sense of helplessness of it all is reflected in the words of Sarath's brother Gamini, a doctor whose life is within the walls of a hospital, and who can find solace and sleep only on a hospital bed,

"This was a civilzed country. We had "halls for the sick" four centuries before Christ. There was a beautiful one in Mihintale..... There were dispensaries, maternity hospitals........There were villages for the blind. There are recorded details of brain operations in the ancient texts. Ayurvedic hospitals were set up that still exist.....We were always good with illness and death. We could howl with the best. Now we carry the wounded with no anaethestic up the stairs because the elevators don't work."

Then there is Ananda, the 'painter of eyes' whose wife has disappeared ,and the eyes that he paint reflecting the peace and calm that his soul is searching for.Pailpana the eccentric and brilliant archeaologist, Linus Corea the rich doctor who ignores the war and then becomes an integral part of it, each character is so different , yet so similar to the other.

The story is as much about Anil's ghost as it is about the ghosts that haunt a whole country, and those that people carry in their relationships - brothers, husbands and wives, lovers and friends. It also reminds us that sometimes it might be too late by the time we confront our own ghosts. Reading this is an up and down journey between calm, strife, desperation, hope and hopelessness.

Verdict - This one is not for you if you like sunny spaces and happy endings. Do read it if you love characters with all shades of colors and if you are one who can read between the lines and make a story of your own.(less)

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Oct 20, 2011 Vicki Hoare rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library

I really wanted to like this book. At dinner parties I always try to blend with the wallpaper when somebody starts raving about how the English Patient was the greatest film of all time. I always cringe when I have to admit I thought it was complete rubbish. I'm obviously a uncultured philistine.

This book was going to be my redemption, my step up into the intellectual elite. I wanted to be able to tell all my ever-so-clever friends that while The English Patient didn't rock my world, Anil's Ghos...more

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Aug 14, 2011 Shirley Schwartz rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: prize-winners

Our world is a dangerous place and in various places and various times throughout history it remains so, even in the present day. As a world community we have not learned very much in our centuries of existence. This book is a testament to that ever-present danger. The setting is in Sri-Lanka during the 1980's and 1990's when there was much political upheaval and political unrest. Ondaatje paints a chilling picture of the everyday world that ordinary citizens lived in at this time. People disapp...more

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Aug 22, 2012 Patrick Faller rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think about this book occasionally; what I mean to say is, it lingers, there on the edge of my thinking, nearly always. It has that same fragmented quality that made Divisadero such a compelling, haunting book for me, but this book focuses on a narrative line that is lacking in the other book.

(The lack of narrative line is not meant as a criticism; the story Ondaatje tells in Divisaderoactually benefits, is strengthened by, the form the novel takes; which is to say that the novel feels much m...more I think about this book occasionally; what I mean to say is, it lingers, there on the edge of my thinking, nearly always. It has that same fragmented quality that made Divisadero such a compelling, haunting book for me, but this book focuses on a narrative line that is lacking in the other book.

(The lack of narrative line is not meant as a criticism; the story Ondaatje tells in Divisaderoactually benefits, is strengthened by, the form the novel takes; which is to say that the novel feels much more--perhaps too much more--unified thematically than Anil's Ghost.)

The aforementioned narrative line is a forensic mystery, namely the identification of the corpse of a murdered man that is discovered when two scientists visit the site of an archeological dig in order to recover four skeletons believed to be hundreds of years old. Ondaatje has set this novel in Sri Lanka circa the late 1980s, early 1990s, and plays somewhat loosely with the civil war that erupted there during that period, which pittied a band of separatist guerillas and insurgents against a government whose transgressions against these two groups remains, at least as far as Ondaatje's novel is concerned, somewhat murky. Some have faulted the novel for treating the conflict somewhat too lightly; I had trouble with this myself, especially nearly two-thirds of the way through the book, where Ondaatje abandons the surface narrative to dip deeply, too deeply, perhaps, into the pasts of his principle characters. One of these is the Anil of the novel's title, a young woman who left Sri Lanka at a young age to study in London and later in America, where she worked at the then-new science of forensic anthropology, which has now been popularized by such television series as Fox's Bones (a guilty pleasure of mine). She has since returned, under the aegis of a civil rights organization, to help with the identification of the bodies of the hundreds of victims turning up dead, often burned beyond recognition, in the wake of reprisals against the government.

Part of the difficulty Ondaatje faces when working to give some shape to the civil war is endemic to his subject; because the government was fighting wars on two fronts, and all sides were committing murders and abducting individuals from home, work, and in-transit--there are several scenes that depict these abductions in a harsh, detail-rich prose Ondaatje uses to greater and greater effect in his more recent books--it was difficult even for those involved in the conflict to discern who the enemy was, as becomes the case for Anil and the archeologist she teams up with to identify the body they'd discovered, Sarath, who, like Anil, is nursing private griefs. The other major character, Gamini, is Sarath's brother and a physician who has given over his life and his health in service of the war.

The structure of the novel is loose, almost prose-poetic, the text coming not in chapters but panels, a paragraph or two at a time or more. Ondaatje manages a slightly skewed perspective; difficult to explain what I mean by this, except to suggest that occasionally the narrative reads like a video camera without sound. You always have a clear view of the subject of Ondaatje's attention, but Ondaatje seems to omit either the voice-over or the visual. So what's left is eithera description of the scene that is highly objective, floating above the heads and hearts of the characters involved in the action, or else a wafting-over of events punctuated by what amounts to a highly subjective view of events. A character's life story distilled to its essence, is what I mean. The space Ondaatje allows his readers, to piece together implication, to link one early scene to one occuring much later in the book, is this novel's art. It is Ondaatje's art. It can be difficult sometimes to locate the thread, and when that happens, I think, that's when the narrative elements can seem superfluos or even purposefully vague. But to be engaged in such a way by a writer--to be trusted so fully to participate in a work's creation--is to be deeply affected by a story. The moral implications of the choices characters make become a part of a reader's own experiences, then. It's that rewarding, and frustrating, of a novel to read.

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Nov 16, 2009 Bryn rated it 5 of 5 stars

I first encountered Michael Ondaatje's writing through the English patient (via the film) and was so taken by his style that I sought out other books.

What captivates me is the incredibly pared down, minimal writing that manages to communicate so much. I find it breathtaking to read.

This is a brutal novel. I gather Shri Lanka is Ondaatje's country of origin, so it's hard not to see this book as having a eprsonal element. Anil is an expert at determining what people did in life by examnining their...more

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