Michael Ondaatje’s books include Anil’s Ghost and The English Patient.
The dangers of the subjunctive moodwhen love affairs are still all coal and smoke
and gestures focus on almost stationary details,a thistle, the moon, an unexpected thrush
In the basic architecture of cricket (apartfrom its medieval tone) is the almost sultryskill of the leg glance, that involves‘a very short parlay with the head’as Ranjitsinhji said, misquoting Jane Austen
and not...
There is no mirror in Mirissa
the sea is in the leaves the waves are in the palms
old languages in the arms of the casuarina pineparampara
parampara, from generation to generation
The flamboyant a grandfather planted having lived through fire lifts itself over the roof
unframed
the house an open net
where the night concentrates on a breath...
If you took only the subject matter of Michael Ondaatje’s novels into account, you would expect him to be an austere and even punishing writer. He chooses the darkest material,...
On the Petaluma Road, in the former Gold Rush territory of Northern California, a man inherits a farm, marries a miner’s daughter called Lydia Mendez and adopts a four-year-old boy from a...
Even Michael Ondaatje’s most ardent admirers admit that there’s an act of faith involved in reading his work. Words like ‘precious’, ‘portentous’, ‘a...
Can a penis sleep like a sea horse? The question arrests us on the first page of The English Patient: Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet ... ...
After the autobiographical candour of Empire of the Sun, J.G. Ballard returns to his familiar austere impersonality with The Day of Creation. Superficially, this latest terminal vision recalls...
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