A book full of sights and more, signifying much, including, and in a big way, one of my favorite themes -- that of the 'little' people, the ones 'behind the scenes' of history, the ones we'll never know.

After reading this book, I feel like I've been to Ontario and in particular Toronto during the early-20th century. Toronto is a teeming, vibrant multicultural community, so much so that the main character from backwoods Ontario feels like the outsider. Though to be completely accurate, he probabl More...

Astounding. One of the best novels I've ever read. Ondaatje does things with language that should be almost illegal, giving us scenes that can be at the same time lush and heartbreakingly stark, weaving in and out of different timeframes and contexts with the fluidity and free association of memory. His depictions of the hard work these characters undertake in early 20th Century Canada (bridge building, logging, tunnel drilling under Lake Ontario in order to build a water purification plant) hav More...

In the middle of this novel, Ondaatje writes:

"The first sentence of every novel should be: "Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.'"

And this seems to be Ondaatje's philosophy about his novels.

I read this book because we are headed to Toronto at the end of August, and this was described to me as the "quintessential Toronto novel." However, I found myself scanning pages and anxiously hoping that I would get to the end. Not signs of a good novel for me!

Some More...

There is a scene, in the very beginning of this book, during which Patrick Lewis, primary voice among the the half-dozen or so protagonists, watches Scandinavian men skate home over a frozen river on a dark winter's night in Northern Ontario, carrying handfuls of burning cattails over their heads. Ondaatje, who is the rare poet capable of writing great fiction, describes the scene thusly:

"It was not just the pleasure of skating. They could have done that during the day. This was against the nig More...

A full five star endorsement for a novel that has a mesmeric, hallucinatory quality. Images as powerful and poignant as a dream, narrative that slips and weaves and ducks between people, places and time, and an impressive sweep of invention that catches the breath. Ondaatje uncovers the story of those whose labour created Toronto landmarks in the early twentieth century, deftly knitting up truth and myth, revealing the lives of those who were forgotten in the official version of history.

Actuall More...

I finished reading this book several weeks ago just before an interview at the National Arts Centre with Michael Ondaatje. In face, I believe I finished it mere hours before seeing him speak.

I had never read an Ondaatje book, and felt that I should, given the fact that I was about to see an hour long interview with the man. I chose In the Skin of A Lion based on this thread on Ask Metafilter. Lion came up several times as the Quintessential Canadian Novel (something I find interesting, given the More...

The best book I've read in 5 years.

But everyone I recommend it to hates it.

The prose is poetry, and the genetic connection to Ondaatje's earlier prose-poem works like "Coming through Slaughter" is obvious. But the power of this book resides in his characterization - you come to be absolutely devoted to the individuals - and I choose that word deliberately - that populate this novel. Though sparingly described, they seem more familiar than the characters so exhaustively cataloged in much pomo f More...

This is my favourite of Ondaatje's novels, and I am quite the Ondaatje fan, so. This is pomo in ways that are by now familiar: interested in collage-style historical documentation, nonlinear, imagistic, in opposition to grand narratives, obsessed with artistic creation, etc. And I love that stuff, because it is awesome. But what really makes this work is Ondaatje's prose, which is lush and visceral and delicious - he invests all of his characters with a specific kind of depth resultant from the More...

This was a very haunting story, about all kinds of people from different places in the world, their life paths crossing in mysterious ways. The language was sometimes very poetic, other times quite crude. Patrick was introduced first only as 'the boy' and he was the only Canadian in the story, all the other characters were immigrants. Patrick himself felt like an immigrant when he moved to Toronto, he was lost, with no real goal.

The end was very open, with no real resolution for any of them. More...

"He walks back into the bright kitchen and moves from window to window to search out the moths pinioned against the screens, clinging to brightness. From across the fields they have seen this one lighted room and travelled towards it. A summer night’s inquiry." (p.9)

"In the drive-shed Hazen Lewis outlined the boy’s body onto the plank walls with green chalk. Then he tacked wires back and forth across the outline as if realigning the veins in his son’s frame. Muscles of cordite and the spine a tr More...

I read In the Skin of a Lion again for my class, and can’t seem to fit it in anywhere in the 10-10-12 list, so I’m putting it in “Short” both because that’s the category I’m meant to be reading right now, and because - perhaps more importantly - the book might be thought about in short thematic, chronological and character sequences. It’s a beautiful novel. There are descriptions that catch your breath, beautiful scenes between people who connect by allowing one another the space to be different More...

Read first, I believe, in 1996 when I was working on an author project in an English Dept. Graduate Methods class. I may have read it earlier, as I did The English Patient & perhaps others of Ondaatje's prose books. If read earlier, I imagine I read it again in '96. I came away with the opinion that it is my favorite among his novels. Now, rereading, I realize that I remembered almost nothing about it, except that it takes place in Toronto at the time of the building of a signature bridge & More...

IN THE SKIN OF A LION. (1987). Michael Ondaatje. ****.
Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and now lives and works in Canada. His later novel, “The English Patient,” won the Booker Prize and was later made into an Academy Award winning film. This novel, written five years before “The English Patient,” was its prequel. Several of the characters in this novel show up in the subsequent book. This one tells the story of several different immigrants to Totonto, along with country Canadians who mo More...

There is a romance to the turn of the nineteen hundreds that deals with the fact that it is a time, not so unthinkably distant, but one we were not a part of. It is a time we hear about, read about, of things that no longer exists both spiritually and physically. Patrick is an example of his time, beginning in 1910, Toronto, into the heart of brutal and difficult industrial work; the building of bridges, the digging of tunnels, enormous infrastructures dwarfing the body, that begin to piece toge More...

In the other two Michael Ondaatje novels I’ve read (Anil’s Ghost--Dec. 11 comments--and Divisadero--Nov. 7 comments), this superlative writer soars through time and space unconstrained. In the Skin of a Lion stays in his home territory of Ontario, with Toronto as the hub of the action. Moreover, the novel sticks to a defined couple of decades and is a work of social protest as much as it is anything else.
I once again give credit and thanks to Randy, my Canadian son-in-law, for the gift of thi More...

Not impressed.

Change the pronoun and this sounds remarkable like someone I know intimately well:
"When he spoke of his own past he was not calm like her. He flashed over previous relationships, often in bad humour. He would disclose the truth of his past only if interrogated with a specific question. He defended himself for most of the time with a habit of vagueness."

This next part is so beautiful, albeit long for me to add here:
"He had wanted to know her when she was old. At lunches she would ar More...

Michael Ondaatje writes with a rare, original and genuinely vivid clarity. That is, the images that he paints jump off the page, grab you by the lapels and shake you. While other writers have this talent, this writer has the soul of a poet and the net effect is that you are moved by what you read. It's impossible for his creative penchants for metaphor, simile, characterization and imagery not to get inside your head and fire your imagination. Some of the scenes are hauntingly beautiful, especia More...

It was quite a while since I had read something by Ondaatje. I read "The English Patient" twice, a few years ago. The first time I was enthralled. But my second reading disappointed me. With "In the Skin of a Lion" I retraced this emotional trajectory in the space of reading a single book.

I know Ondaatje doesn't want us to look for a polished, coherent story in his books. In "Skin" he warns the reader in a variety of ways for the inevitable disorder and multiplicity of his narrative universe. Th More...

In the Skin of a Lion is Michael Ondaatje’s second novel and the predecessor to The English Patient which won the Booker Prize and was made into a stunning film starring Ralph Fiennes. It’s an intriguing exposé of the immigrant dispossessed who built the city’s infrastructure in the 1920s. As the city is transformed by their labour so too must Ondaatje’s characters transform themselves and adapt to their new lives but they do this in unxpected ways. The book features disconnected narratives whic More...

There were moments of beauty and visual acuity, but more often there were moments of muddlesome bemusement. Story arcs left hanging, dangling tantalizingly (a nun falling off a bridge to be caught in mid-air, but then what...?)--abandoned, but returned to eventually. Satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. There is a quote in the book that seems to sum up my feelings of this book:

"Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the

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Ondaatje's writing is beyond reproach, I think anyone who reads this novel will see that. My review isn't so much based on the writing, which is precise and profound in places. It's the characters. And the timeline. And the structure. The male characters all felt very similar to me. There were only vague differences between the three of them, and honestly none of them were exactly fascinating. I got lost in the plot a few times because I couldn't recall who'd done what, even though I read it ove More...

This is probably the most beautiful book I've ever read, and I reread it at least once every couple of years. If my house was burning I would take this one book from my bookshelf.The language is like poetry and the narrative threads are complex and involved - you just have to read this book and let it wash over you, and in the end the author draws the threads of the many stories together with incredible skill. Passages from this book resonate through my art and work constantly.

I gave this a "5" — "It was amazing" — something I don't often do because I feel a book has to live up to that evaluation and while many, many books are really, really good, few are amazing. This one was amazing. In the Skin of a Lion was a pick for a book club and having not read Ondaatje before I was looking forward to it. I am now looking forward to rereading it (and reading other works by him) in the near future. Ondaatje is a poet as well as a novelist, it shows. His language is wonderful. More...

Overall, my thoughts are mixed... while this is a superbly written book and I enjoyed it, I didn't love. And I found the large breaks in time in the story confusing and a bit frustrating. The story is beautifully written. And I really enjoyed the historical aspects of the building of Toronto. However, I was frustrated by the lack of character development; just as you would get into a character's story, the character would be dropped.

This is Ondaatje’s prequel to The English Patient, and it is where we meet the characters of Hana and Caravaggio prior to appearing in the more renowned book. This novel is a mesmerizing tale of harsh survival and the eternal struggle between workers and the powerful forces that employ them. Written by a man who is a true poet with passages that linger and convey hidden meanings, it weaves the stories of several characters into one effortless conclusion. It takes place in the 1920’s where immigr More...

I read this book for school, and I really hoped I would like it since the school work would be really boring otherwise. In the beginning, I really didn't like it, and was annoyed by the use of language. I had to struggle to understand what was going on sometimes. Although this could have a lot to do with the fact that English is not my first language, I am fairly confident in my English skills being enough to read this book. After spending a couple of ours on a plane, reading the book non-stop, More...

I have read and greatly enjoyed Ondaatje's works in the past, but I must say this is not my favorite. I am familiar and comfortable with Ondaatje's tendency to skip around in time and place, and have never found it distracting or detrimental before. In this case, however, it made the book seem like a series of completely disjunct narratives. Sure, the characters meet each other now and then. But the motivations behind what they do, the reasons for their meetings and the consequences thereof rema More...

LIKES: Some of the scenes the author creates are dream- like in their beauty (the opening scene isa perfect example-- it's what drew me into the book). His view-from-the-dirt of Ontario in the early 1900s is captivating, and I particularly love how Patrick (an Ontario-born citizen) is a stranger among the immigrant population, feeling as much out of place and unfamiliar with the language(s) as the immigrants themselves feel in this young country. It is an ingenious way of conveying to threader t More...