Review by Booklist Review
Once upon a time, when one thought of Sri Lanka, one imagined an island paradise. The very name is lovely. How many of us know that since 1983 a ferocious ethnic war between Buddhists and Hindus has torn the island apart and wrought nearly 70,000 casualties? The poet-writer Ondaatje, who lives in Toronto, was born in Sri Lanka. Anil's Ghost, his first novel since the widely acclaimed English Patient (1992), is about the horrible war in his native land. Ondaatje's peripatetic storytelling--the constant shifts from one character or bit of business to another and his poetic sensibilities that tease out just the right words to memorialize his characters--proves perfect for this story. Anil Tissera is a forensic pathologist, born in Sri Lanka and educated in the U.S., who returns as a representative of a human rights organization. In her Sri Lankan youth, "Anil had been an exceptional swimmer . . . and the family never got over it; the talent was locked to her for life." Anil has come to work with Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist, who on their first meeting greets her with, "So--you are the swimmer!" Their search for the group behind the organized murders on the island is the main plot and the conduit for revealing the nature of the war. Through Anil and Sarath, readers meet the physician Gamini (also Sarath's brother) and spend much time with him on M*A*S*H-like forays into the bloody pit of war; members of the persistent Hindu Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam; and the lost artist Ananda Udugama, who helps Anil and Sarath create a face and identity for the skeleton "Sailor." Ondaatje's plea in this work, circuitous and beautifully told, is simple--a prerequisite of life is proof of existence. --Bonnie Smothers
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
While he is generally considered a Canadian writer, Booker Prize-winner Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and he has chosen to set his powerful and resonant new novel in that country during its gruesome civil war in the mid-1980s. Written in his usual cryptic, elliptical style, much of the story is told in flashbacks, with Ondaatje hinting at secrets even as he divulges facts, revealing his characters' motivations through their desperate or passionate behavior and, most of all, conveying the essence of a people, a country and its history via individual stories etched against a background of natural beauty and human brutality. 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 partner; at 49, he is emotionally withdrawn from the chaotic contemporary world, reserving his passion for the prehistoric shards of his profession. Together, Anil and Sarath discover that a skeleton interred among ancient bones in a government-protected sanctuary is that of a recently killed young man. Anil defiantly sets out to document this murder by identifying the victim and then making an official report. Throughout their combined forensic and archeological investigation, detailed by Ondaatje with the meticulous accuracy readers will remember from descriptions of the bomb sapper's procedures in The English Patient, Sarath remains a mysterious figure to Anil. Her confusion about his motives is reinforced when she meets his brother, Gamini, an emergency room doctor who is as intimately involved in his country's turmoil as Sarath refuses to be. The lives of these characters, and of others in their orbits, emerge circuitously, layer by layer. In the end, Anil's moral indignation--and her innocence--place her in exquisite danger, and Sarath is moved to a life-defining sacrifice. Here the narrative, whose revelations have been building with a quiet ferocity, assumes the tension of a thriller, its chilling insights augmented by the visceral emotional effects that masterful literature can provide. More effective than a documentary, Ondaatje's novel satisfies one of the most exalted purposes of fiction: to illuminate the human condition through pity and terror. It may well be the capstone of his career. 200,000 first printing; Random House audio. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
After 15 year abroad, forensic pathologist Anil returns to Sri Lanka to help identify victims of the civil war there. This follow-up to The English Patient is the first novel Ondaatje has set in his native country. A 200,000-copy first printing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
YA-Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist, returns to her homeland of Sri Lanka as a member of an international human-rights group investigating abuses that occurred during the country's decade-long civil war. She teams up with Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist who works for the Sri Lankan government. Together they unearth a skeleton and, using their skills and training, patiently piece together parts of the man's life and violent death. Along the way, they each deal with ghosts of their own. Ondaatje weaves the present time of the story, sometime in the 1990s, with plenty of flashbacks to the characters' pasts. Several of the murders are mentioned in enough detail to relate how the victim was tortured, but none of the specifics are described. Intensely written, the book skillfully conveys the tension, fear, and stress Anil and Sarath feel as they discover the past life, another ghost, of the skeleton they have found. The author shows the hopelessness and inability of the general population to find any way of stopping the unrelenting massacres, all in the name of politics and beliefs. He deftly describes the effects of war on individuals, a nation, and a people as an entity. Young, attractive Anil and her story should appeal to teens who are interested in human rights, and have seen the movie or read Ondaatje's The English Patient.-Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The aftershocks of the recent bloody civil war in Sri Lanka, and of doomed efforts to name and remember that afflicted country's ``disappeared,'' are explored with commanding poetic intensity in this striking latest from the Canadian (and Sri Lankan'born) author of (this novel's immediate predecessor) The English Patient (1992). As he did in that earlier tale, Ondaatje analyzes the effects of political catastrophe on several deeply involved characters brought randomly'and explosively'together. Anil Tissera, a ``forensic anthropologist'' who had emigrated to America and now works for an international Human Rights organization, returns to her homeland to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders. She is assigned to work with Sarath Diyasena'a phlegmatic archaeologist whose own political affiliations remain cloudy'and is soon involved in the process of ``restoring'' skeletons officially declared ``prehistoric remains'' (though it's obvious they're the remains of recently deceased victims of torture). Ondaatje's plot is mined with ingenious surprises, but the story's structure is relentlessly meditative and ruminative'as becomes apparent when it expands to include other principal characters: Sarath's younger brother Gamini, a doctor abducted by rebel insurgents, who shares with Sarath a history of fraternal intrigue and sexual rivalry; Sarath's mentor Palipana, a venerable ``epigraphist'' (i.e., an interpreter of ancient ruins) who has become a blind recluse; and Ananda Udagama, an ``eye-painter turned drunk gem-pit worker turned head-restorer,'' whose unusual artistry is commandeered in the violent climactic pages. The actions and thoughts of these and several other dramatically conceived characters often exude a hallucinatory power; and as often, unfortunately, drain away the story's immediacy, in capriciously positioned flashbacks burdened with explaining their past lives and present interrelationships. The reader becomes lost in thickets of speculation and reverie. Impressive and often fascinating, but not a success. There's ample evidence that Ondaatje worked diligently, and perhaps for several years, on Anil's Ghost. But he doesn't seem to have finished it. (First printing of 200,000)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
