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http://www.thenation.com/issue/000619/0619leclair.shtml
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±ýɦÅýÈ¡ø, ¨¾ ±Ø¾¢ÂÅ Michael Ondaatje ÓýÉ÷ «¾¢¸Á¡¸ô §ÀºôÀðÎ, §†÷Á¢íì§Åò¾Éòмý
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«øÄ. «¾É¡ø, í§¸ ±ÉÐ ¸¼¨Á Óʸ¢ýÈÐ; ÌÃø §¾öóÐ ãÊ즸¡û¸¢ýÈÐ. ¸£§Æ The Nation
ŨÄò¾Çò¾¢§Ä ¦ÅÇ¢Â¡É ¾¢ÈÉ¡öÅ¢¨Éò ¾ó¾¢Õ츢ý§Èý.
ANIL'S GHOST.
By Michael Ondaatje.
Knopf. 311 pp. $25.
Purchase this book online
from Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0375410538/thenationA/103-1586014-3087838
------------------ ¯ûǢΨ¸
¦¾¡¼ì¸õ-----------------
The Sri Lankan Patients
by TOM LeCLAIR
This time none of that lollygagging
elusiveness that began The English
Patient. Not that novel's
gauzy "she" but Anil Tissera, 33-year-old forensic
anthropologist returning
to her native Sri Lanka to investigate possible
human rights violations.
We know almost immediately that she left the country
at 18 to be educated in
England and America, and that her Western training
has given her both an attitude
and an appetite for unearthing truth. Anil
meets her co-investigator,
Sarath Diyasena, a 49-year-old male archeologist
who, like Anil, comes from
a well-to-do Colombo family. In the first fifty
pages, Anil and Sarath uncover
a skeleton that has been reburied in a
government archeological
preserve.
The detection begins. Who
was the skeleton they call Sailor? Who tried to
burn his bones? The skeleton
is a mystery but not the romantic enigma slowly
dying in The English Patient.
And the violence has not receded, as it had in
World War II Italy. The
time is almost now, and all around the detectives are
reports of terror--by the
southern insurgents, the northern guerrillas,
perhaps by government hit
squads.
Anil and Sarath drive into
the countryside to ask for help from Sarath's
former professor, a now-blind
epigraphist living in the "Grove of Ascetics,"
a Buddhist forest monastery.
We get a few pages of the esoteric history and
exotic sensibility Ondaatje
loves, but on the way back to Colombo the present
asserts itself when the
investigators find a man nailed to the highway. They
take him to a hospital where
Sarath's brother, Gamini, works as an emergency
services doctor. He describes
in gruesome detail the victims of terror
bombings. The prose is concrete,
direct, wearied. You wouldn't know Ondaatje
has published eleven volumes
of poetry.
Who is responsible for the
terror? Who killed Sailor? Anil and Sarath drive
to the south and hire a
miner named Ananda to reconstruct the skeleton's head
so the victim can be identified.
Here we get some of the researched expertise
Ondaatje also loves; Ananda's
reconstruction is like Kip's deconstruction of
bombs in The English Patient.
But the face Ananda rebuilds doesn't aid the
investigators, for it's
a ghost's, not Sailor's. The expression is serene,
the look Ananda hopes is
on the face of his disappeared wife.
Halfway through the book,
Ondaatje's purposeful pace slows. Perhaps now we'll
begin to understand why
thousands of Sri Lankans are killed or disappeared
every year--but no, we get
instead a hundred pages of flashbacks about the
characters' tragic loves,
"The Sri Lankan Patients." Anil was unhappily
married in England, stabbed
her married lover in California and found that
her lesbian lover, Leaf,
has Alzheimer's. Perhaps past personal failure, not
future public truth, has
brought Anil back to Sri Lanka.
Gamini was in love with Sarath's
wife, married someone else, became obsessed
with his medical practice,
started taking amphetamines and lost his wife. Now
he often sleeps in the wards.
After Sarath's wife committed suicide, he
immured himself in his archeological
studies. Only Ananda has lost a spouse
to terror, perhaps the reason
he tries to commit suicide after bringing "her"
back. Gamini and Sarath
are killing themselves more slowly, indirectly.
This middle section of Anil's
Ghost resembles the beginning of The English
Patient: rapid switching
among characters, times, locales. The novel becomes
self-conscious and defensive
about abandoning its detective plot. In a
flashback, Anil and her
lover Leaf watch movies on a VCR: "the films
staggered backwards and
forwards...until the actions became clear to them."
Leaf says, "I'm just a detail
from the subplot, right." Sarath seems to speak
for this long section when
he disagrees with Anil's definition of truth as
verifiable and public. For
Sarath and Ondaatje, truth is "in character and
nuance and mood." While
Ananda continues the reconstruction of the skull,
Anil engages in moody meditations,
attends to the nuances of plant life and
the decaying house where
he works.
In the last thirty pages
Ondaatje rushes Anil's Ghost to its conclusion. We
do get a public truth--that
the government killed Sailor, who was suspected
of sympathizing with the
insurgents. Or perhaps with the guerrillas. It
doesn't make much difference
because Ondaatje never provides any information
about the two groups or
why they're killing people. Anil takes her forensic
findings to government authorities;
Sarath saves her from detention or worse
by pretending to undermine
her truth; Gamini discovers Sarath's body several
days later; and, finally,
Ananda finds new employment reconstructing a tall
statue of the Buddha that
had been toppled not by terrorists but by
impoverished people seeking
a treasure within. So, five pages from the end
Ondaatje offers this one
small gesture of understanding a cause of political
terror.
Sarath and Gamini, educated
Sinhalese residents of Sri Lanka, must know the
causes, the fist of recent
history: the economic effects of postcolonialism,
the religious conflict between
Hindus and Buddhists, the ethnic hatred
between several groups of
Tamils and the dominant Sinhalese. Anil, who is
Sinhalese, also knows. So
does Ondaatje. But the reader never learns about
this history. What happened
in the courts of sixth-century Sri Lanka or
fifth-century-BC China,
yes. But not in the past thirty years in what used to
be Ceylon.
"A good archaeologist can
read a bucket of soil as if it were a complex
historical novel," thinks
Anil. The formula should be reversible, but
Ondaatje shows no interest
in the soil and roots of ethnic oppression.
Instead he repeats the blind
epigrapher's near-tautology: "The main purpose
of war had become war."
* * *
Ondaatje does indict the
Sinhalese government in the deaths of Sailor and
Sarath, but the human rights
activist Anil gets Sarath killed in the process
of exposing her truth; she
and her finding disappear from the novel. But just
after Gamini discovers his
brother's body, Ondaatje describes in horrific
detail a terrorist blowing
up himself, the president of the country and a
bunch of other people. The
novelist tips the quantitative scale as well as
his hand, identifying the
terrorist only as D----. No ethnic identity, no
political affiliation, no
history. It's D----'s tragedy that I want to know.
For what public love or
political hate did he kill himself?
But Ondaatje doesn't look
there. He takes the long view. The reconstructed
Buddha of the Sinhalese
gazes across killing fields, sees what Ondaatje
implies is the human condition
anytime, anywhere: senseless violence, pockets
of love. Ondaatje and the
Buddha could be right, but the author's apolitical
gaze seems irresponsible
when there's so much politics to see in Sri Lanka.
Sarath and Gamini criticize
Western journalists for swooping into Sri Lanka,
tossing off some reductive
political analysis and leaving. I don't see the
difference between that
and Ondaatje revisiting his native land, observing
victims, avoiding political
analysis and then retreating to Canada.
While standing on a platform,
preparing to paint in the Buddha's eyes, Ananda
feels that as an artificer
"he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith.
But he knew if he did not
remain an artificer he would become a demon. The
war around him was to do
with demons, spectres of retaliation." This is
high-minded consciousness
for a man whose former work had him on hands and
knees in muck hundreds of
feet below the earth's surface. Ananda sounds like
the author's apologist.
I'm not asking the artificer who invented Ananda to
be a demon, but Ondaatje
must know that his highly selective contrivance will
retaliate somewhere, that
its silence on class and religion and ethnic
prejudice can comfort those
with historic or recent privilege.
* * *
Despite its evasions, Anil's
Ghost could still be a courageous book. I doubt
that Ondaatje will suffer
Salman Rushdie's fate, but given the ongoing
disappearances in Sri Lanka,
Ondaatje may well not wish to return there soon.
He went back in 1978 and
1980, then wrote a poetic and nostalgic memoir,
Running in the Family, about
his once-wealthy family of eccentrics. In that
book, too, he turns away
from politics to personal lives. At the age of 11,
Michael was ripped from
wealth and homeland by his parents' divorce. One
understands why The English
Patient and Anil's Ghost foreground tempestuous,
failed loves. Still, to
use terror as a background for class nostalgia and
romance seems overkill.
In a recent interview on
Anil's Ghost, Ondaatje said, "Certain words, certain
phrases are said so often
that they come to have no reverberation. 'Human
rights,' the phrase is indivisible,
but the words mean nothing to me. When I
hear the word 'politics'
I roll my eyes, or if I hear a political speech I
can't listen to it. And
so in a way I burrow underneath these words, and I
try not to refer to them.
The words are like old coins. They just don't feel
real."
For Ondaatje, "real" words
are those the poet can sneak into the minds and
mouths of highly educated
and exquisitely sensitive characters. Anil
distrusts Sarath for his
retreat into the "aesthetic." Ondaatje should
distrust himself. Now I
don't trust his collage method. It's a way to avoid
banal, "old coin" cause
and effect, the logic by which human rights are
denied or defended.
In Don DeLillo's Mao II,
a wordsmith novelist like Ondaatje complains that
terrorists have usurped
the role of novelists in contemporary culture. One
way for the novelist to
regain power is to occupy the mind of the terrorist,
as DeLillo does in that
novel. Another way is to explore the terrible
conditions from which terror
arises, as A. Sivanandan does in his 1998 novel
about Tamils in Sri Lanka,
When Memory Dies.
In Anil's Ghost Ondaatje
chooses to write his "real" words and beautiful
sentences for the walking
ghosts of Sri Lanka, the traumatized apolitical
survivors. But what about
the dead? The tens of thousands of dead--the women
and men, Tamils and Sinhalese,
poor and rich, the loved and unloved, who died
or murdered for political
causes, however misguided, necessary or
crazy--deserve more understanding
and respect than Ondaatje gives them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom LeClair's novel about
Kurdish asylum-seekers, Well-Founded Fear, will be
published in July by Olin
Frederick.
------------- ¯ûǣΠÓüÚõ
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