Anil is a forensic anthropologist who has returned to her native Sri Lanka as a representative of an international human rights organization. She works with archeologist Sarath as they attempt to identify a skeleton that they believe is a victim of atrocities committed by the government during the civil war. The storyline follows the pair’s journey toward identifying the victim, while flashing back to provide their personal histories. Sarath knows there is danger in pursuing identification, but Anil sees it as an opportunity to expose the truth to the world. They enlist help from Sarath’s brother, Gamini, a doctor who has treated civilians caught in the crossfire.

The writing is top rate. There are scenes of beauty as well as brutality. A number of storylines occur simultaneously, and they are seamlessly interwoven. We learn about archeology, forensic pathology, and medical practices used to treat victims of the civil war. We come to understand the different factions involved. Conflict is introduced in the interactions between Anil and Sarath. Anil does not entirely trust Sarath since he is a related to a government official. The tension builds in the second half, and the climactic scene is both unexpected and intense.

4.5 ( )

Her's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Memorable story that highlighted civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980's. Terrible; deception and murder all around." ( )

Anil is a forensic pathologist, who returns to Sri Lanka, the country where she grew up, to take part in a UN investigation of human rights abuses during the recent (and still ongoing) civil wars. Together with archaeologist Sarath, his surgeon brother Gamini, and the artist Ananda, she pieces together the history of a recent skeleton that has anomalously turned up in an archaeological site from a much older period.

This is a book full of fascinating and often horrifying details about the consequences of communal violence, with some really beautiful writing that sticks in the mind, but it's also a very discursive kind of a book, constantly shying away from anything that looks like a neatly-resolved plot, something Ondaatje clearly felt would be inappropriate in this kind of context. As a result, there are all kinds of side-tracks that tell us fascinating things about the lives of forensic pathologists or plumbago miners, but don't necessarily deepen our understanding of the characters and their story. In a less-distinguished writer you'd call this "research dumping".

I think the focus on the technical aspects of what extreme violence does to human bodies works against the book as well: we end up with a striking, but very generic, picture of communal violence that doesn't have much to tie it to the specific Sri Lankan setting. Also, it gives a lot of weight to scientific details that Ondaatje isn't necessarily very competent to work with on his own: There were a couple of unimportant but conspicuous errors in technical terms that made it apparent that he hadn't run the final text past his expert advisors (e.g. "microtone" for "microtome", and "millimetres" for "millilitres" — those could have been dictation mistakes). ( )

When I went to read this book I found not only that I had read it several years before, but that many of the ideas I had about Sri Lanka came from that reading, though I barely remembered the story. Anyway, I finished it again. I enjoyed the book, though I found the ending somewhat less satisfying than Divisadero. ( )

Complex, powerful. Follows Anil Tissera as she returns to Sri Lanka as a representative of a human rights group to investigate political murders known to have occurred in the civil war.

The story focuses on a single skeleton -- I'm not sure how much this is for the literary flexibility, but I found it an irritant.

The story is multilayered, following a range of characters -- and they are characters, because the sparse writing keeps them at a distance from this reader.

worth reading, not sure I'll reread. ( )