I listened to this book during my commute to work.

I found myself frustrated by this book and I wonder if I would have been if I had read it. There were crucial moments that weren't developed. The ones that leap to mind are Anil's decision to tell her father's old friend where she was (she had been skeptical of him! Everything happened just as she feared!) and then to go back to the city with the body. So many other decisions in the narrative are presented fully--why is this one, which fundamentally shapes the novel's outcome, so faintly sketched out?

Anil's love subplot also aggravated me. I can't put my finger on why I didn't care about it and even felt annoyed by it. Maybe because it seemed so unconnected to the situation at hand, but I wouldn't think untidiness would bother me. I guess it just wasn't very interesting and it could have been. Maybe I'm missing something, though, and Anil is a victim just as the main male characters are. Maybe she is cut off from connections. Everyone was so alone in this book. People would make terrifying sacrifices for one another but still be utterly separate when standing side by side.

It is a quietly terrifying book. Perhaps it reads as a bit numb. Perhaps there is no other way to approach the subject matter of one's country slaughtering itself.

I liked the structural weaving--a character would appear in a fragment (flash forward? flash back) and do something, say something never quiet resolved in the book, but when the book returned to the main narrative line the character would be newly integral. This was, of course, quiet, but a strange pleasure running through a mournful book.

The ( )

Interesting in many respects: the prose is easy yet lovely, the topic (forensic medicine with a human rights angle), and the treatment of shifting in dimensions. But somehow I didn't really like Anil's character. She didn't seem quite real, a trite stereotype of the many do-gooders. Somehow her motivations seemed forced. While using the same successful and engaging writing style, Ondaatje's Anil doesn't seem quite to make it. ( )

I was happy to have an excuse to read more Ondaatje. Like The English Patient, the book is very fragmented, perhaps too fragmented for its own good, and some of the characters' decisions just aren't explained. Or explainable. But also like The English Patient, it's lyrical and beautiful and harrowing and full of fantastic character moments, big and small. Ondaatje's beautiful prose and keen insight can carry the reader through anything.

I loved Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, which has a Sri Lankan woman as protagonist.

Anil's Ghost is a beautiful, albeit difficult, novel, but one well worth the effort. It's a quiet book, with some of its most important themes left unsaid, but one of the great things about this book is how information is revealed...or not. Ondaatje's prose is magnificent, and some of the best that I've read. It has a sensuality to it that sometimes seems at odd with his grizzly subject matter, but it really works. The character themselves feel very real, despite the reader's brief time spent with them. You know you've read good characterization when you're aching for more of these people after the novel ends. Ultimately, I found the most important theme of the novel to be about identity. Sri Lanka's national identity engulfed in violence, Anil and Sarath's quest to uncover the identities of others, Gamini's life defined by his identity as a doctor, and so many more brilliant facets of this same idea. I picked Anil's Ghost up as a whim and found a treasure sandwiched between its covers. ( )