Selected Product:
| In the Skin of a Lion
Paperback
Edition: 1st Vintage Inte
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1997-01-14
ISBN-10: 0679772669
ISBN-13: 9780679772668
List Price: $13.00
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.
Beautiful
| Customer Rating: | | A beautiful book. A 200 page poem that will keep you up at night, hungry for more. Mr. Ondaatje is one of the greatest poets currently working and his ability to craft poetry weaved around narrative is nothing short of stunning. The rebellious nature of the predecessor to "The English Patient" sets it in stark contrast to the defeatist, post-war drama of its more critically acclaimed sibling. The characters are deep, the drama rich, and the events molded from history; if not necessarily fact. If you have enjoyed any of Ondaatje's writing, you will love "In the Skin of a Lion" - and if you are one of the fortunate ones able to enjoy Ondaatje for the first time, I envy you... |
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| Customer Rating: | I cannot say that I fell in love with this book upon first reading--in fact, had I not been stuck waiting for several hours with nothing else to do, I probably would never have made it through. It is constructed very tediously, the structure being as intricate (and perhaps, as initially inaccessible) as the stylistic language itself.
That being said, there are reasons why this has taken and retained the role as one of my favorite books. The characters have been dismissed by many others as flighty, 2-dimensional, ephemeral, unconvincing--to me, their elusive quality is an incredible and attractive one (as reflected in the style of the writing itself). In a way each character is a poem grounded in the idea of a person; the language used to weave them into spidersilk existence is inexpressibly eloquent and beautiful.
For readers of prose poems & wistful, wandering works of art, this is the book for you. Read it once. Read it twice, savoring each world. Read it a third time and look at the embryonic world around you, and you might notice that you have started to break free. |
Not Ondaatje at his best
| Customer Rating: | I was completely floored by Ondaatje's 'Coming through the slaughter'. It is a superb novel of interconnected stories. 'In the skin of a lion' uses the same form and surpasses Slaughter in evoking atmosphere and imagery, but failed me as a whole. It is not a tour de force like Slaughter.
But: I compare Ondaatje with Ondaatje. I certainly think he is one of the best novelists of our time. And In the Skin of a Lion is a book worth reading. |
In the Skin of A Lion
| Customer Rating: | | Stay with this book for the first 150 pages of mostly gritty stories about building the infra-structure of Toronto in the 1920's. Then, the poetic, magic realism, dreamy writing begins and it is beautiful and kind of crazy but fun to read. Enjoyable, thought provoking and interesting, that is all I can say. |
Next time I'm going to read his poems
| Customer Rating: | It was quite a while since I had read something by Ondaatje. I read "The English Patient" twice, a few years ago. The first time I was enthralled. But my second reading disappointed me. With "In the Skin of a Lion" I retraced this emotional trajectory in the space of reading a single book.
I know Ondaatje doesn't want us to look for a polished, coherent story in his books. In "Skin" he warns the reader in a variety of ways for the inevitable disorder and multiplicity of his narrative universe. There's a motto (by John Berger) that prefaces the book: "Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one." Then Ondaatje frames the whole novel as a story that is being told by a man to a girl, during a four hour nightly drive in a car: "She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms. And he is tired, sometimes as elliptical as his concentration on the road, at time overexcited ..." And then halfway through the book, the author admonishes us again: "Trust me, this will take time, but there is order here, very faint, very human". And despite these warnings and caveats, after a while a feeling of dissatisfaction sets in. The problem is not really the fact that an Ondaatje novel is more a collection of vignettes than a clockwork literary edifice. The problem is that this fragmentation erodes his characters' psychology. In "The English Patient" all of the protagonists are shadowy, ephemeral and solipsistic figures, unable to reach beyond their own world. In this book they fare only slightly better. With Patrick Lewis, Ondaatje has arguably drawn an interesting character. Although Lewis is only marginally less solitary and enigmatic than the "Patient's" protagonist, something of the animal-like but appealing naiveté of this personality really shines through. On the other hand, Lewis is not a man of ideas nor really of purposeful action and his development into a wavering anarchist is sketchy and rather implausible. Also the female characters in "Skin" - Clara, Alice, Hana - remain two dimensional, more carriers of an idea or an ethos than real human beings.
Ondaatje's mastery of prose is ultimately what one keeps involved. His language is suggestive and brilliantly refined (although sometimes it spills over into the ridiculous: how on earth is the "flight of a post-coital bat" supposed to look like?). Apparently he started out writing poems and I think this, rather than novels, is his real trade. He spins his narrative out of hypnotic images, some of which come back in various guises across different novels. For example, the image of a person hanging from a rope in a deep void is iconic image in the "English Patient" and it plays an important role in "Skin" too. Likewise, I thought of Ondaatje's description of a deserted Naples in the former book when reading the final scenes that play out in the monumental, cavernous Toronto waterworks in "Skin of a Lion".
So it's mixed feelings again after finishing this book. I'd give it 3,5 stars. The next book by Ondaatje I pick up will be one of his early collections of poems. |
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