Concetti Chiave
- Michael Ondaatje, born in Colombo, Ceylon in 1943, is of Dutch descent and has lived in England and Canada.
- He gained initial fame as a poet before becoming a renowned novelist, winning the Booker Prize in 1992 for The English Patient.
- Anil's Ghost, set during Sri Lanka's Civil War, combines forensic thriller elements with personal and political narratives.
- The novel employs techniques such as flashbacks and collage, using italics for emphasis and cohesion between storylines.
- Despite some digressions in its final part, Anil's Ghost is praised for its rich imagery and suspenseful storytelling.
Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in 1943 in a family of Dutch origins. He first moved to England at the age of five, then to Canada in 1962. He studied and graduated from Queen's University, Ontario, in 1967. He made a reputation first as a poet and, more recently, as a novelist. In 1992 he was awarded the Booker Prize for his work, The English Patient. He lives in Toronto and teaches at York University, Toronto.
Besides The English Patient (1992), he wrote Anil's Ghost (2000), set in a modern Sri Lanka, during the Civil War between the Tamil separatists and central Government forces.
It develops on two levels: on one side, Anil's investigation, which evolves as a sort of forensic thriller, and, on the other, the interweaving of personal events (divorces, suicides, love affairs) with political ones (mass murders, assassination attempts, suicide-bombers), as if in a kind of tragic patchwork.To maintain cohesion between the two levels, the author makes frequent use of flashbacks and, graphically, of whole pages in italics, using a collage techniques.
There are sometimes too many digressions, especially in the last third of the book but, on the whole, the novel is a masterly work, rich in imagery and suspense.
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