The 3 best books by Michael Ondaatje

Current Canadian literature finds in Michael Ondaatje the third angle of a brilliant literary triangle closed next to Margaret Atwood and of course the Nobel Prize Alice Munro.

Arrived at the novel from poetry and finally spreading towards the essay or the cinema, Ondaatje meets his readers again with that unpredictable cadence of the narrator who only puts on the writer's disguise when a good story appears to put black on white.

Recognized to a greater extent by your english patient Made an Oscar-winning film, this great part-time novelist always offers a humanistic glimpse of intrinsic value, charged with a lyricism of the soul towards total mimicry with the lives of his characters.

In the vicissitudes that surround existence, in the historical approaches and in the scenarios proposed by the author. Everything is impregnated by that sensation of transcendence of the human, recoverable, perhaps in sensations that seem perceptible, like an aroma turned into literature.

Top 3 recommended novels by Michael Ondaatje

The English Patient

If there is a more or less recent novel that reconciles readers of bestsellers with exquisite scrutinizers of the most purist value of the literary, surely this story is quite close to the virtuous middle ground.

As it could not be otherwise, the perfect setting for World War II to place characters on the edge, over the abysses that peek into the depths of the soul made of somatized pain. A small town, or rather what remains of it, welcomes characters who arrive at the place with the urgency and unpredictability of despair and death. Hana is a nurse whose life as her last patient focuses on the end of her ultimate existence, her last chance to find some meaning in the catastrophe.

Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is now that his hands are irreparably diminished. Indian minesweeper Kip searches for hidden artifacts in a landscape where no one is safe except him. In the center of this labyrinth lies the completely burned-out English patient, a nameless man who is a riddle and a provocation to his companions, and whose memories of betrayal, pain, and salvation illuminate the novel like flashes of burning light.

The English Patient

divisadero

Ondaatje is a master at narrating the winding path to resilience, between paths where even shreds of skin are lost. Until arriving at a safe place, convinced that the wounds are nothing, beyond the blood that flows and is lost as the scab and the scar that is never erased is formed.

Tras The English Patient, Ondaatje reaffirms in divisadero his extraordinary ability to navigate the difficult terrain of feelings and to deal with passions, losses and the persistence of the past. A tale of unusual intensity and beauty.In the most intimate and beautiful of his stories, Michael Ondaatje recounts the life of Anna, who after a brutal event that occurred in her home, will have to leave behind life on the farm in California and start a new road in the south of France.

Away from his father, his twin Claire and Coop - a mysterious boy taken in by the family - he will find in literature and in the reconstruction of the biography of an important writer the way to reconcile himself with his past.

divisadero

Mina's journey

The trip as an essential allegory. Life as a path, learning, experiences, learning and subsequent forgetfulness, disappointment and, above all, passions, only they capable of moving us, of pushing us to keep going despite everything.

Of course, the way of starting the path from one to another is not the same. Perhaps the imperative urge to live on paths over the abyss. The point is that only some lives seem to be squeezed to the maximum when it is possible to face the risk and leave it freed from fear and guilt. In the early XNUMXs, Michael, an eleven-year-old boy nicknamed Mina by his friends, embarks on an ocean liner heading from Colombo to England.

In the dining room he is seated at the modest "cat table," the furthest from the captain's table, with an eccentric group of passengers and two other young men, Cassius and Ramadhin. At night they attend, fascinated, the deck walks of a chained prisoner whose crime will haunt them forever, while the beautiful and enigmatic Emily becomes the cause of the awakening of sexual desire. The narrative moves to the adult years of the protagonists and highlights the difference between the magic of childhood and the melancholy of acquired knowledge.

Mina's journey
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