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“... to Claire and Anna. There is an almost mythological necessity about the narrative set-up of Michael Ondaatje’s novel. A sexual relationship develops between Coop and Anna; they are discovered by the father, who viciously beats his adopted son and drives away with Anna, leaving Claire to nurse the injured Coop in the middle of an ice storm. The ...”

“... 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 struggle’ and ‘slightly implausible’ regularly crop up in even the most enthusiastic reviews – but are then explained away as necessary sacrifices to his higher purpose ...”

“... 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, chronicles passages of life that would test the most resilient cheerfulness. Coming through Slaughter (1976) is loosely based on the tragic life of the jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, who died in an asylum in New Orleans ...”

“... a sea horse, for sea horses are beady-eyed little creatures, characteristically alert and erect. Michael Ondaatje’s prose is inventively figurative, but his figures do not always quite add up. A man sets off across the desert on foot, seventy miles to the next oasis: ‘water in a skin bag he had filled from the ain hung from his shoulder and sloshed ...”

“... Keneally anatomises historical Australia by plucking from its origins a strange factual nugget. Michael Ondaatje does something similar for Canada with a wispy succession of word paintings eerily evocative of a past he cannot have known but can magically conjure. His prose is consciously poetic and at first sight seems more conditioned by the need to ...”

“... arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins of racial tensions in North America. With its description of a multicultural ...”

“... which is to compress ‘the myths, the poetry, the history of a vast and ancient continent’; Michael Ondaatje has likened it to ‘a spirit painting in a 19th century locket – full of wisdoms and magic – the most delicate tracing of a profound and elliptical history, thrilling in its style and adventurousness’; the marketing director of ...”

“... performative utterance indeed, and clearly intended to repel all invaders. (It didn’t. See what Michael Wood does with it in The Magician’s Doubts, a book, astoundingly, worthy of its subject.) Hidden motives and additional adverbs were optional, but the autobiographer’s central assertion used to be: ‘here I uniquely, truthfully stand, and no one can ...”

“... in the form of a script. Warner’s magic realism is not that of Marquez and Rushdie but of Michael Ondaatje, whose magical images do not require any supernatural explanation. Morvern’s knee sparkles with different-coloured specks because she once slid on her knees and grazed her skin across the glitter of a Christmas card. Lanna’s grandmother ...”

“... humour, neither of them from the narrator’s point of view. The image of the acrobats is from Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and isn’t, on its first mention in that book, a dream: ‘The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling from each ...”

“... attitudes to invention that is so striking. Closer to home, and rather more suggestive, is Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, with which Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger shared the Booker Prize in 1992. Did Unsworth empathise with his co-winner’s vision of war-torn Italy, and his account of the ruinous splendour of Poliziano’s Tuscan ...”

“... World Literature should really be called Global Literature. It has its royalty, like Coetzee and Ondaatje, Mohsin Hamid and Kiran Desai; its prizes (the Nobel, the International Man Booker), its festivals (Jaipur, Hay), and its intellectual support system (the universities). The success of World Literature, the editors said, is a by-product of successful ...”