It was a tumultuous time for Michael, too. In one poem Ondaatje wrote of the "terrifying comedy" of his father's life: "My mother divorced him again and again./He would rush into tunnels magnetised/by the white eye of trains".Ĭeylon gained independence in 1948. His father, Mervyn Ondaatje, was in the Ceylon light infantry and supervised a tea plantation before losing jobs through alcoholism ("My father was in tea and alcohol he dealt in tea and he drank the alcohol").
His mother, Doris Gratiaen, was given to dancing in the style of Isadora Duncan. Ondaatje says, "It was probably an easier childhood for me than for my brother and sisters, being the youngest." His brother Christopher, a businessman and explorer, thought his memoir romanticised. Though his memoir depicts the halcyon days of a westernised elite, where "nobody really had to grow up they remained wild and spoiled", he describes his family as "on the edge of hard times". His earliest years were spent on the Kutapitiya tea estate ("the most beautiful place in the world") in the last era of colonial Ceylon, before the estates were nationalised. "My background is a real salad, so it's difficult to know who I am," Ondaatje laughs. When his wife died, he married a Sinhalese woman. According to family lore, a Tamil forebear came from south India in 1600 as a doctor, healed the Dutch governor's daughter and was rewarded with a Dutch wife and spelling of his name. Of Tamil, Sinhalese and Dutch descent - an inheritance seen in his blue-eyed gaze - he is often taken to be a member of the closed Dutch-descended Burgher community, although his ancestry is perhaps more mixed than that. Ondaatje was born in 1943 in Colombo, the capital of the British colony of Ceylon, the youngest of four. He prefers to write from anonymity, from a watchful invisibility, maintaining the unmediated bond between writer and reader. Voluble on writing and his other arts - theatre, film, photography - Ondaatje shrinks from personal inquiries. And Ondaatje's rapid but softly elided speech recalls another character in the book, Patrick Lewis, whose "conversations lost some of their syllables out of shyness, vagueness, uncertainty".
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The neon-lit artery was memorably fixed in the novel, In The Skin Of A Lion (1987), which mapped and mythologised the author's adopted city: the dashing neighbourhood thief Caravaggio has "a parting in his dark hair like Yonge Street at midnight". His first two novels are set in North America, and it is that part of his life and work that came to mind when we met in a downtown skyscraper on a Toronto street leading to Lake Ontario. Handwriting, together with Anil's Ghost ("the two books go hand in hand"), complete a journey back to his source. Though his initial trips spawned the quasi-memoir Running In The Family (1982), his 10 other poetry volumes and his fiction gave few clues about the island of his birth. This was set entirely in Sri Lanka, which he began to revisit only in his 30s. His first impulse was to return to poetry, with Handwriting (1998). On the other hand, "Even if people expect you to write romance, it gave me the freedom to write anything I wanted." He is ambivalent about the fame The English Patient brought him. Though it too charts intimate lives in wartime, it is set in the near-present amid the bloodshed of Sri Lanka, the birthplace Ondaatje left as an 11-year-old child. It has a familiar luminous intensity that blurs the boundary between prose and poetry, but it offers little of the epic passion viewers of the film might seek. The English Patient was his third novel in 25 years Anil's Ghost, his latest, took seven years to write. Ondaatje is a man who works at his own pace. Since then, worldwide English-language sales of the book have topped 2 million.
The film was a huge box office success, won nine Oscars, and dragged the intensely private author into clamorous celebrity.
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It was his third novel: it co-won the Booker prize in 1992 and four years later was adapted into the Hollywood movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott-Thomas. Then came The English Patient, his tale of romance in the Sahara and wartime intrigue in a Tuscan villa. He was feted at home in Canada as a poet and novelist, and revered in the wider literary world. E ight years ago, Michael Ondaatje was doing pretty well.
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