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Anil's Ghost Paperback – 1 September 2011

by Michael Ondaatje (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars 1,051 ratings
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Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of the civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka sent by an international human rights group as a forensic anthropologist to investigate the campaigns of organised slaughter engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past - a story driven by a riveting mystery.
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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
  4. Publication date
    1 September 2011
  5. Dimensions
    12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    9780099554455
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0099554455
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  1. All that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power.
    Highlighted by 92 Kindle readers
  2. ‘The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.’
    Highlighted by 80 Kindle readers
  3. Anil had read documents and news reports, full of tragedy, and she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze.
    Highlighted by 75 Kindle readers
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Review

A truly wondrous book... I was as enthralled as I have not been since The English Patient -- Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden It is Ondaatje's extraordinary achievement to use magic in order to make the blood of his own country real... Nowhere has he written more beautifully * New York Times Book Review * A deeply felt and highly accomplished survey of devastated paradise... which both plunges you into the carnage of Sri Lanka's civil war and keeps you aware of the island's past splendours of civilisation. Barbarity and art hauntingly mingle in this fine book * Sunday Times * This is why I read, this is why literature matters, this, in short, is IT!... By the closing pages Anil's Ghost has come as close to a holy book as a novel ever should * Independent * There is much to astonish, to disturb and to admire in this dense book... a rare triumph * Guardian *

Book Description

From the author of The English Patient and Running in the Family, a breathtaking novel about love and the horrors of civil war.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0099554453
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 1 September 2011
  • Edition ‏ : ‎ 1st
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780099554455
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099554455
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 224 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 out of 5 stars 1,051 ratings

About the author

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Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje is the author of several novels, as well as a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. Among his many Canadian and international recognitions, his novel The English Patient won the 1992 Man Booker Prize, was adapted into a multi-award winning Oscar movie, and was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018; Anil’s Ghost won the Giller Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the Prix Médicis; and Warlight was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.

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Top reviews from Australia

  • MEREDITH READ
    5.0 out of 5 stars Sri Lanka, read before you visit.
    Reviewed in Australia on 19 February 2019
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    As always Michael Ondaatje’s exquisite writing exposes both the beauty and horror of life in Sri Lanka allowing us to feel deeply for those involved and understand some of the complex political and religious conflict. A wonderful book to read before seeing Sri Lanka, I loved it.
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  • Gloria sharp
    5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing read. Thank you Ondaatje
    Reviewed in Australia on 18 April 2016
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Stunning writing. An amazing read. Thank you Ondaatje .
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  • MisterHobgoblin
    2.0 out of 5 stars Dem bones...
    Reviewed in Australia on 18 October 2015
    Format: Kindle
    Anil is a forensic archaeologist, Sri Lankan by birth and returning to the nation of her birth as part of an international scheme of cooperation to investigate murders. She is assigned to work in partnership with Sarath, a local forensic archaeologist (I have waited all my life to meet one and then two come along at once!), presumably employed by the Sri Lankan Government.

    Sarath has been assigned a number of skeletons to look at, found at an ancient burial site. Anil quickly determines that some of the skeletons are not ancient at all, and given the Government controls access to the burial site, is presumably responsible for putting the bodies there. Anil is determined to uncover the identity of one of the bodies…

    Thus far, there have been a couple of imponderables. Firstly, why would Sarath have had the bodies in the first place. If the site was well known and preserved, there would be no reason to dig up bodies. And secondly, if Sarath had thought the bodies were ancient, why was he showing them to Anil whose sole remit is to investigate murders.

    What follows starts to look like a real slice of Sri Lankan life. I had the good fortune to be in Sri Lanka whilst reading this, and some of the atmosphere – the rain, the arrack, the roads, the forest – all rang true. But after a while, it looks like a framing device for a series of anecdotes about instances of brutality and learning about ancient Sri Lankan culture. The plot, thin, though it was, just evaporates. Meanwhile, we get a breakneck tour of Sri Lankan place names (was there a single sizeable town that wasn’t mentioned?) but little sense of actual place. Anil and Sarath travel and set up operations in a variety of locations without any obvious difficulty, rope in assistants and leave muddy footprints everywhere. There is little logic to their actions; and their successes seem to be based on improbable flukes of circumstance.

    There is little exploration if the nature of the conflict. There are, we are told, three groups – the Government, the opposition, and the Tamil separatists. However, we are not told about their respective positions, their territory, their identity. The war has no background, it is just a state of being. It seems to sweep up anybody and everybody. I can understand that Michael Ondaatje did not want to take sides and wanted to avoid a lengthy history lesson, but this just feels to far removed from any physical reality.

    I had high hopes of the novel and there was some intrigue built into the opening chapters (including why the female protagonist had a male name). But by the end, I felt that I didn’t know much more about Sri Lanka and didn’t particularly believe in Anil or Sarath.
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Aura of sadness
    Reviewed in India on 22 September 2018
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    The book took me to another depth of understanding what happened in Sri Lanka during that period - much more disturbing than just reading the news during those times. There is so much underlying sadness in all his books and it really touches your heart
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  • Roger Brunyate
    5.0 out of 5 stars Buried Truths
    Reviewed in the United States on 19 December 2009
    Verified Purchase
    In most other hands, the subject of ANIL'S GHOST would be a mere political thriller. Forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera accepts a UN mission to investigate atrocities in Sri Lanka, the country she left fifteen years before to study in England and the US. Among daily reminders of terrorist activities on all sides, she stumbles on evidence that the government also may be implicated in spreading fear by murder. Will she be able to confirm her suspicions? Will she be allowed to leave the country alive?

    But Michael Ondaatje (who was also born in Sri Lanka) is a poet, and he uses this narrative mainly as the armature for a meditation on the many ways the past can haunt the present. Several time-frames are at work simultaneously. Anil herself is in the immediate aftermath of a breakup from a lover in America only weeks before; there is a mystery concerning a close female friend of several years back; and of course her return to Sri Lanka brings back memories of her own childhood. Teamed in her investigation with a Sri Lankan archaeologist, she discovers a number of skeletons buried in the same site; the one which arouses her suspicions is obviously a recent death, but the others are over 100 years old, part of the buried record of a cultural history going back for centuries. Together, they visit the archaeologist's former teacher, an old man living ascetically in the depths of the forest, whose vision of history compasses millennia, intuitively subjective rather than scientific. Months, years, centuries, millennia: the time-frames intertwine, creating a tissue of memories that enfold the novel, the characters, and the country as in a web.

    Yet the memories are set against an all-too-immediate present. The contrast is seen most clearly in the two principal male characters, Sarath Diyasena, the detached archaeologist, and his brother Gamini, who is an emergency room physician dealing with the casualties from gunfire, bombing, and torture. Hooked on speed, Gamini lives in the hospital, snatching catnaps in waiting-rooms, living only for what he can do from one minute to the next. He is not so different from a colleague who, when captured by a terrorist group, went on practising his healing skills among the rebels, apparently with no desire to return so long as he was of use. The hospital sections of this book are unusually stark and focused, even as compared to THE ENGLISH PATIENT, which also set Ondaatje's apparent fascination with medicine and nursing against a background of present war and the archaeological past.

    Above all, Ondaatje is a poet, and I cannot think of any of his novels (I have also read IN THE SKIN OF A LION and DIVISADERO) that show this so richly. Early on, describing the National Atlas of Sri Lanka, he revels in sheer poetry like the following: "The geological map reveals peat in the Muthurajawela swamp south of Negombo, coral along the coast from Ambalagoda to Dondra Head, pearl banks offshore in the Gulf of Mannar. Under the skin of the earth are even older settlements of mica, zircon, thorianite, pegmatite, arkose, topaz, terra rossa limestone, dolomite marble. Graphite near Paragoda, green marble at Katupita and Ginigalpelessa." And for his final chapter, Ondaatje leaves the original plot far behind, describing instead the restoration of a colossal statue of the Buddha by one of the last surviving practitioners of the Netra Mangala, the art of painting the eyes on a statue and thus bringing the dead stone to life. Pulling back from the carnage, yet not forgetting it, the author ascends with the painter to the head of the towering figure. "And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him...". The drawing together of these fibres is nothing less than the author's song of love for his native land.
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  • Mike Dearing
    5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and moving story
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 April 2017
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Anil arrives alone on a Human Rights mission to uncover evidence of atrocity; she is a fragile yet strong character, very similar to the Hana of earlier novels by Ondaatje and as interpreted by Juliette Binoche in the film The English Patient, but her family background lies in Sri Lanka rather than Canada. In the end, redemption from her fraught visit eludes her although she is instrumental in bringing it for others. If you are not familiar already with the dark past of civil war in that beautiful island then you will be both shocked and amazed in equal measure. We also learn much about her own complicated backstory. Nobody wants the truth, she finds. Hard to put down once started.
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  • Ms. C. J. Mcelwee
    4.0 out of 5 stars The Ghost's the thing
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 May 2000
    Verified Purchase
    Although this novel is set in Sri Lanka there is little to describe it. The main landscape is of a society undergoing the pressures of long term war and terror. The submissions and rebellions of everyday life, the not knowing who is with you and who against, and the devisiveness of that situation. It is a novel of ghosts both alive and dead.
    This is not "The English Patient", but why should anyone wish to read the same novel in different guise. What one should ask of any writer is that they give us something fresh each time. Ondaatje does this. What is Ondaatjean is the texture of the prose, his facination with the details of processes - in 'The English Patient' it is bomb disposal, here it is in the artists processes for painting the eyes of the buddha (perhaps a metaphor for the situation in Sri Lanka at the present and how people have to deal with it, for if the statue of the buddha has no eyes painted or carved in, then he has not taken up residence and cannot see). It is in the forensic archeology, in the bones.
    This is a quiet novel about unquiet times and worth your attention.
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  • DHANESH.M
    4.0 out of 5 stars pleasure to read.
    Reviewed in India on 13 June 2015
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Enjoyed reading.
    thought sometime a bit like beating about the bough
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