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    Anil's Ghost
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    Anil's Ghost
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    Anil's Ghost
    Audiobook7 hours

    Anil's Ghost

    Written by Michael Ondaatje

    Narrated by Alan Cumming

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.

    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 civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder 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 propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a literary spellbinder-Michael Ondaatje's most powerful novel yet.


    From the Trade Paperback edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 5, 2000
    ISBN9780375417306
    Unavailable
    Anil's Ghost
    Author

    Michael Ondaatje

    Booker Prize-winning novelist Michael Ondaatje is the author of many collections of poetry and several books of fiction, including In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. He and his wife live in Toronto.

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    Reviews for Anil's Ghost

    3.5/5

    858 ratings56 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A lyrical, time-jumping book, quiet somehow in its precision, its private emotions. The larger strokes -- the way isolated people manage to work together and the way violence intrudes on solitude -- are all the more effective for being struck across a fabric of such beautiful and hushed detail.Alan Cumming's reading is excellent.
    • 3/5
      "Anil's Ghost" is an aggrieved elegy to Sri Lanka and its suffering people. Anil is a young Sri Lankan scientist who returns to her land after studying and working in the U.K., and the U.S. She returns to investigate forensic evidence which could point to official policy which has a deadly effect on the local populace. Sarath tries at first to suppress the evidence, and when Anil finally gets to work unimpeded and present her findings (after Sarath saves her life, helps her escape, and causes the stolen evidence to be returned to her), her onetime adversary, Sarath, pays for it all with his life.We have Sri Lankan polemics here: expositions on history, religion, archeology, civil war, and official murder. This book didn't make a grand impression on me, and I'm not sure why. Polemics should come through action and consequence, told directly, and not from flat, characterless narrative.
    • 3/5
      Interesting story about Sri Lanka and their civil war and innocent victims.
    • 3/5
      Lovely writing, and I enjoyed the story, but the characters weren't as fleshed out as they might have been. Very lively and interesting discussion at Babelia.
    • 5/5
      Ondaatje's haunting prose is ideally suited to such a story as this, where civil war and fear have torn at a country and created a world that can be as surreal and beautiful as it is cruel. At the center is Anil, a forensic anthropologist who was born in Sri Lanka, and who has come back unrooted and free under the direction of a human rights organization, though identity and connection are at the center of what she does. Through her, through a doctor, and through others--all of whom are affected and affecting--Ondaatje stages a world to be sunken into and explored, through visceral and careful writing that is, simply, worth reading and re-reading.Simply, I don't know of any other writer like Ondaatje, and I don't know that this book could be forgotten, once read. And it should be read.
    • 4/5
      Overall I'd say I enjoyed this. The way he writes kept me interested; I read it very fast (essentially three periods of sitting reading 100 pgs each), and was anxious to se where things wound up. However, I wasn't fond of how it jumped around. Flashbacks/memories randomly creeping in without idea of when they were taking place, where they fit in... the first time it completely confused me and I had no idea how she'd gone from one scenario to a completely different one. There's too much jumping around in time and from character to character's perspective. I don't care for that style at all, not in short little hops back and forth like this, and I don't think it worked well here. But I did enjoy the story told, and thought he did a good job with the emotional impact - making it clear just how much all these murders touched everyone. Definitely not a cheerful read, but worthwhile nonetheless.
    • 5/5
      “The purpose of war had become war” – Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost

      And that is the problem with this book. The plot is much clearer and easier to understand than his other famous book, The English Patient. The writing, while less convoluted and involved, is still poetic and mesmerizing. The motivations of the characters the book follows are about as clear as real people’s motivations generally get. This time, figuring out what has happened is not so much of a problem. The hard part is figuring out why.

      The story takes place mostly in Sri Lanka, evidently in the early 1990’s. There is a three-sided civil war going on. There is the government. There are anti-government rebels. And there is a separatist group of insurgents; these people want to secede from Sri Lanka and form their own country, I think. Anyway, what all these groups have in common is that they sneak around and kill people and then try to hide the evidence of it.

      Anil Tissera is a young woman, a forensic pathologist, a native of Sri Lanka, and a representative of an international human rights agency. She left the country fifteen years earlier to be educated and work in the West. She has recently been investigating government murders in Central or South America. But now she has accepted an assignment to do the same thing in Sri Lanka.

      An older anthropologist, Sarath Diyasena, is assigned to be her contact. They discover a skeleton at the government guarded site of an archaeological dig that seems to belong to someone who was murdered in the past five years, and they set out to discover who the person was and how and by whom they were murdered. This is a long, slow process, and during it, Anil is not sure Sarath is completely trustworthy. Eventually, when they have discovered as much as they are likely to, Sarath returns to the capital, promising to return in a couple of days. When he is not back in a week, Anil takes the skeleton and returns herself.

      In the end, Sarath turns out to be more supportive than Anil could have known. Although the government body she is supposed to report to has contrived to make away with the skeleton containing the evidence, apparently to discredit her report as having no evidence to back it up, Sarath has managed to get it back for her; he urges her to write up her report and leave the country. But his cooperation is costly to him.

      The war rolls on. And what we don’t ever find out (because, I presume, nobody knows) is why the people doing these things, committing these murders, are doing it, and keep doing it. What do they think they are going to accomplish by killing all these people? In the end, it doesn’t really matter so much who is killing who; they all wind up dead just the same.
    • 4/5
      Very moving. Beautifully drawn characters.
    • 3/5
      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.

    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Overall I'd say I enjoyed this. The way he writes kept me interested; I read it very fast (essentially three periods of sitting reading 100 pgs each), and was anxious to se where things wound up. However, I wasn't fond of how it jumped around. Flashbacks/memories randomly creeping in without idea of when they were taking place, where they fit in... the first time it completely confused me and I had no idea how she'd gone from one scenario to a completely different one. There's too much jumping around in time and from character to character's perspective. I don't care for that style at all, not in short little hops back and forth like this, and I don't think it worked well here. But I did enjoy the story told, and thought he did a good job with the emotional impact - making it clear just how much all these murders touched everyone. Definitely not a cheerful read, but worthwhile nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      Anil Tissera has returned to her native Sri Lanka as a pathologist for an international human rights organization to investigate deaths of Sri Lankans in the civil war of the 1990s. She is assisted by Saratha, a local archaeologist and his brother, an emergency physician. It's a subtle story that is not so much about the war, but quietly entangled with the passions and loyalties of the people. There are myriad tragedies to be faced beyond the allegations. As anyone from a country that has experienced civil war can attest, understanding the allegiance of those around you is paramount. Anil's colleagues are complex, shadowy, careful, only to be expected in the circumstances, but Ondaatje gives them a remarkable verisimilitude. Because so much of what has happened in the war reflects national identity, Anil's forensic investigation is as much a probe into Sri Lanka's culture, people and history as of the civil war victims. This is a quiet telling, an elegy set against the sad backdrop of Sri Lanka's civil war and veiled in the surreal, dreamlike quality of Ontaatje's prose that captures the beauty and atmosphere of the country.
    • 4/5
      The book really took me with it on a journey. I'm glad I read it slowly and without the distraction of any other books. The subject is war and very painful but painted through the detail of characters that go straight to the heart which is how it is bearable to read, yet unbearable at the same time - how do people survive in a war torn country? - well some do and some don't but the struggle to end any war must continue with all of us.
    • 2/5
      For some reason I have only a very vague memory of this book as I add it to my collection some years later. Tells the story of a Sri Lankan forensic expert dealing with the terrors of 1990s in Sri Lanka. I see that it is critically acclaimed, and can't account for its lack of impression on me.Read in Samoa July 2002.
    • 4/5
      Somewhat disjointed, not a quick read. But in this age of terrorism and fear of what you say or don't say, what you do or don't do could mark you for death, the story, like the ghosts of Sarath, Gamini nd Anil will stay with me. One reviewer distilled the story to this: a doctor, a forensic anthropologist and an archaeologist - a study of the living, the dead and the immortality.
    • 3/5
      I needed some time before I commented on this novel.When I saw discussion questions posted it helped me hone my feelings.I would recommend it if you feel like exploring the following:The atrocities of Sri Lanka civil warKey characters who have extensively damaged personal lives but still have threads uniting them.The pursuit of justice and recognition for the nameless victims of the war.The aftermath of scars to the land and the psyche...etcI did develop an increased respect for Buddhism.I got a taste of the authors poetic style.I learned of Sri Lanka geographically. culturally and a bit of the 3 prong civil war.ButThe read was overwhelming for me...dark and intense.I was looking for trust that couldn't be extended by the characters.I came to understand that the read would be in transition from one setting and group of characters to another.They did however blend and contribute to the story.Enough said.If you read Anil's Ghost, I'll llook for your review to add some dimension to mine.
    • 2/5
      I had a really hard time getting in to Anil's Ghost. In fact, I really didn't ever get into it - I finished it in a marathon of reading more just to get through it than because I really cared about the characters or story.

      I think it was the style that made it difficult for me. The chapters jumped around from character to character as well as in time. I found it disorienting and fragmented. There was a dreamy, detached sense to the narrative that didn't work for me - I imagine that it was certainly intentional, to convey particular emotions, but for me it just had the effect of keeping me from getting truly engaged.

      The storyline of Anil's Ghost is pretty depressing. I don't mind reading books about heavy topics if they engage me and I feel that they carry some truth I can relate to. Since I could not connect to this book, it seemed even more heavy than I expected.

      After two not-so-great books in a row, I need to do some careful searching at the library this weekend!
    • 1/5
      I couldn't get into this book at all. Fragmented, internal inconsistencies, hard to get a grip on....Perhaps I'll try it again when I'm in a different life.
    • 4/5
      Anil Tissera was born in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, to a prosperous family, where she achieved a small degree of fame by winning a notable swimming race as a school girl. She left at 18 to attend medical school in England, and she later trained to become a forensic pathologist there and in the United States. After a brief failed marriage and the early deaths of her parents she is rootless and restless, despite her successful career. She applies and, to her surprise, is accepted as a forensic specialist for an international human rights organization that plans to send a team to Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, during the height of the country's civil war. The government is engaged in fierce and bloody battles with the Tamil Tigers to the north and with separatist insurgent forces to the south simultaneously, and the bodies of thousands of soldiers on all sides and innocent civilians caught in the middle have been turning up with alarming frequency throughout the country. Intense international pressure is put upon the Sri Lankan president to investigate the claims of atrocities by the government and the rebels, and he reluctantly agrees to an investigation, while he and other officials vehemently deny that the Sri Lankan Army is involved in the torture and slaughter of insurgents and civilians.It has been 15 years since Anil left her homeland, and Sri Lanka is both familiar and distant to her. She is paired with Sarath, a local archeologist who acts as both an older guide and as a temporizing influence on her inpatient tendencies. Later she meets Sarath's younger brother Gamini, an emergency medicine physician who is haunted by his experiences caring for hundreds of patients with traumatic injuries and seeing nearly as many corpses in the hospital's morgue.Anil and Sarath come upon an ancient burial ground, and they discover a body that doesn't seem to fit with the others. Anil suspects that it has been placed there recently, and since soldiers guard the site she and Sarath conclude that the man, a local resident who has been brutally tortured before his death, was killed by government forces. Sarath senses the extreme danger of this discovery, and urges Anil to act cautiously, but she is outraged and insists that the government, the Sri Lankan people, and the international community must know what is happening there. Anil's Ghost begins slowly, as Ondaatje carefully creates a rich tapestry of the lives of the main characters and teaches the reader about the essential techniques of archeology and forensic pathology, which was occasionally of little interest to me. However, the tension and drama progressively build throughout the second half of the book up to its momentous ending. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, but I was left with several unanswered questions, particularly about the motivations and fates of the three main characters that cannot be discussed in this review.
    • 4/5
      ETA: Warning - you learn very few specifics about the civil war. I was up last night thinking about this and considering if I should remove a star. No, I am not removing one. Ondaatje has a special way of writing, and I like it very much. In the beginning of the book there is a statement that says the war continues but in another way! So I think, what way? Tell me! (He never does.) That irritated me then, just as so much else did in the beginning. I didn't get what I expected but what I got was very good. Still, a four star read.*************************What to say? I am thinking. I know I really liked it by the end.....not in the beginning. In the beginning and even in the middle I was often confused. In the beginning all that lured me was learning about the horrors of the civil war raging in Sri Lanka at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s and facts about the country - physical and cultural. By the end I knew who was who. People are not simple, and this writer does not make it easy for you. You jump all over the place, from one place, time and person to another. By the end I was enchanted by the lines. By the end I cared for several of the characters. By the end I understood the message and agreed. Is it best to drive for truth and clarity, if this will just bring more suffering? And yet some people are who they are and have to behave as they do.The narration by Alan Cumming also annoyed me in the beginning, but by the end it was just fine. In the beginning there was questioning tone, a tempo, an inflection that bugged me, but that just disappeared by the end!
    • 4/5
      Das ist ein schönes, aber auch sehr trauriges Buch über den Bürgerkrieg in Sri Lanka, über den ich bisher gar nichts wusste.Die junge Forensikerin Anil kehrt nach Sri Lanka zurück, um für eine Menschenrechtsorganisation Mordopfer zu untersuchen. Es besteht der verdacht, dass die Regierung Menschen verschwinden lässt. Und tatsächlich kommt Anil mit Hilfe des Archäologen Sarath, des Künstlers Ananda und des Arztes Gamini Verbrechen auf die Spur. Damit bringen sich die vier, die aus unterschiedlichen Motiven zusammenarbeiten, selbst in große Gefahr.Das Buch ist toll geschrieben, aber auch etwas schwierig zu lesen. Wenn man nicht gut aufpasst, läuft man Gefahr, wichtige Details zu überlesen. Vor allem am Ende ist eigentlich alles wichtig. Mir gefiel es sehr gut.
    • 3/5
      “Secrets turn powerless in the open air.” This novel is set on the island of Sri Lanka during the brutal civil war turmoil of the 1980s and 90s. This was a civil war fought by three opposing groups: the government, anti-government insurgents in the south and Tamil separatists in the north.The main character is Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan born forensic scientist who returns to her homeland as a United Nations human rights investigator to explore various human rights abuses and "disappearances" that have been perpetrated by the three different combatents.Bach on the island she finds that she has been paired with a Sri Lankan government-appointed partner, Sarath Diyasera, a forty-nine year old government archaeologist who is related to a Government minister meaning that Anil never fully trusts him and leads to distrust his real motives for taking part.While excavating a site in a Sri Lankan Government controlled part of the country Anil and Sarath uncover three skeletons, two are from the nineteenth century bones but one is much more recent and appears to have been buried twice at two separate locations. This unidentified body is given the name, "Sailor," and becomes the centre of their investigation in not only into his cause of death but also his identity.Although born in Sri Lanka Anil is western educated and as such does not share the same values and ideals as those with whom she must work. As Sarath's brother Gamini remarks she is like a foreign journalist who flies in, films their piece and then fly out again without having to deal with the realities of life on the island, the sometimes compromising alliances that must be made just to avoid suspicion yourself and as such stay alive. Sarath in contrast is a permanent resident of the island and therefore must make these compromises. This becomes one of the major themes of this novel and for me at least one of its major failings. I feel that if the author had instead concentrated only on those who actually lived on the island, it would have proved far more compelling.Throughout the novel Ondaatje threads his way between past and present, giving us an insight into some of the mystic background to the island however,not all of these background tales seem to have much to do with the main plot. Now I have no complaints with his prose which at times is poetic but is always beautiful I felt that at times he went off at a tangent some of the message gets lost and as such the novel is not as thought provoking as it could and perhaps should have been which to my way of thinking was a real missed opportunity.
    • 3/5
      Anil Tessera returns to her home country, Sri Lanka, as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to help track down sources of murders taking place in the country. It’s the 1980’s, and Sri Lanka is embroiled in Civil War; it’s the government that has sent out death squads to hunt down factions of insurgents and separatists. It’s a delicate, balanced story, but I suppose the reason for my lower review score was that it was just a little too delicate and slow for my taste. I loved the very last page, which is the source of the first quote below. I was kinda glad when I got there though.Quotes:On life, death, and carrying on afterwards:“And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him. He could witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wing, or a hundred-mile storm coming down off the mountains near Gonagola and skirting to the plains. He could feel each current of wind, every lattice-like green shadow created by cloud. There was a girl moving in the forest. The rain miles away rolling like blue dust towards him. Grasses being burned, bamboo, the smell of petrol and grenade. The crack of noise as a layer of rock on his arm exfoliated in heat. The face open-eyed in the great rainstorms of May and June. The weather formed in the temperate forests and sea, in the thorn scrub behind him in the southeast, in the deciduous hills, and moving towards the burning savanna near Badulla, and then the coast of mangroves, lagoons, and river deltas. The great churning of weather above the earth. Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world. There was a seduction for him here. The eyes he had cut and focused with his father's chisel showed him this. The bird dove towards gaps within the trees! They flew through the shelves of heat currents. The tiniest of hearts in them beating exhausted and fast, the way Sirissa had died in the story he invented for her in the vacuum of her disappearance. A small brave heart. In the heights she loved and in the dark she feared.He felt the boy's concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world.”On solitude:“He was a well-liked man; he was polite with everyone because it was the easiest way not to have trouble, to be invisible to those who did not matter to him. This small courtesy created a bubble he rode within.”On war:“Fifty yards away in Emergency he had heard grown men scream for their mothers as they were dying. "Wait for me!" "I know you are here!" This was when he stopped believing in man's rule on earth. He turned away from every person who stood up for a war. Or the principle of one's land, or pride of ownership, or even personal rights. All of those motives ended up somehow in the arms of careless power. One was no worse and no better than the enemy. He believed only in mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so the children would be confident and safe during the night.”
    • 4/5
      Anil, a forensic anthropologist, returns to her native Sri Lanka at the behest of an international human rights group to investigate the mass murders of citizens by government, insurgents, and separatists during the early 90s. She is helped by the local anthropologist, Saratha, a secretive man with helpful local contacts. One of them, his old blind, professor/mentor may prove useful in helping them identify “Sailor” a twice-buried anonymous corpse.The book is stunning with detail about forensic pathology and bears the hallmark of Ondaatje’s restrained but pregnant style. Anil's story inhabits that quiet space between the seen that one perceives from the corner of the eye and that Ondaatje illuminates and gives life to while chaos, upheaval, brutality, looming danger, and death swirl around held at bay by a perverse illusiveness.Ondaatje is the master of the slow lava-boil of submerged emotion, the layered onion of buried personal secrets, the sly revelation of the novelistic big picture – all done with the skill of painless precision surgery such that you don’t realize your reading self has been skillfully flayed alive until it’s all over.
    • 3/5
      Unique, the kind of book that should be studied more than read. Discussion helped me piece together more of what was going on, but I think there is still much more to this book that a second reading would help to reveal.
    • 4/5
      I didn't find myself being drawn into the flow of this one so easily as I did with The English Patient, but was still moved and horribly fascinated by a tale that opened my eyes more fully to the endemic violence and tragedy of life in present-day Sri Lanka.
    • 4/5
      Finished this book yesterday. Really enjoyed it. I found it quite fascinating and a trip into into another time and place (Sri Lanka in it's not clear which era- it seems to drift from the present to the past)It's a poetic style of writing which is typical of this author. It has a natural feel to how it drifts from character to character and era to era. It has a huge realistic element to it though, with the war going on. Overall, thoroughly enjoyed this book. A good read.
    • 2/5
      This was one of those books that I only pushed through because I was reading it for book club. And even then, I didn’t finish it completely, getting the gist of the end from others in the club. There was just so much of the book I didn’t care about. Some parts were interesting, but others just seemed to be there as a writing exercise.I generally read a book like this because I want to learn more about the event in the background, in this case, the Sri Lankan civil war. But I really came out of it no more knowledgeable than I was going in, and even worse, it didn’t even ignite a desire to learn more from other sources. The war and its circumstances really get lost in all of Anil’s… stuff.The one positive thing I can say about the book is that it really is beautifully written. I just wish those beautiful words were woven into a more cohesive and interesting story.
    • 5/5
      Ondaatje is a master of subtlety, of the ambiguity of life, of the grey that washes extreme situations. He is at his best in Anil's Ghost. The story itself is a simple one: a woman (Anil) searches for the identity of a skeleton she finds when on an international human rights mission in war ravaged Sri Lanka. But as with most stories Ondaatje tells, simplicity becomes weighted with the emotional enganglements of both political and personal history. There is a conversation beneath the dialogue, a narrative never told but eloquent in its silence. In some ways, I was reminded of Geoff Ryman's The King's Last Song. There is that same sense of a country unable to celebrate its vibrant history, left only with silent screams of those slaughtered on the altar of political expedience, and their ghosts. There is an eeriness in the environment Ondaatje creates. Deserving of it accolades, Anil's Ghost is a masterpiece.
    • 4/5
      Anil's Ghost is the clever weaving of fact and fiction. In the mid-1980s Sri Lanka was in a state of civil unrest. It went beyond a north versus south conflict and involved illegal government activity. Anil's Ghost is the fictional account set in the middle of a political and historical truth.Anil Tissera is a forensic anthropologist returning to Sri Lanka after a fifteen year absence. As part of a human rights organization she is obligated to investigate and ultimately uncover the truth about ethnic and religious killings occuring during the country's civil war. Her entire attention is focussed on one particular skeleton she nicknames "Sailor." His remains have been found in an ancient burial ground and yet anthropologically he is considered a contemporary. Upon arriving in Sri Lanka she is paired with man she doesn't know if she can trust. Sarath is quiet and keeps many secrets. What is amazing about Anil's Ghost is the lush language and the intricate character development. Each chapter is dedicated to the unfolding of someone's life, past and present. This technique brings a fullness to the storyline. In the end you feel as if every character has purpose to the plot.