As a Buddhist, I'm fascinated by Sri Lanka who preserved the Pali Canon and allows us to keep the memorized stories and teaching from the Buddha through the mist of time. When the Buddha died, they got together and tried to remember the teachings. Hundreds of years later, writing became more of a thing and they wrote down what the oral tradition had memorized. Slowly slowly the teachings made it to Sri Lanka around 3 ace. And the English translations I read today are from those preserved writings.
It turns out there was a terrible war dated between 1983 to 2009 with an estimated 70,000 had been killed by 2007. United Nations estimated a total of 80,000–100,000 deaths.
Ondaatje's novel came out in 2000. He was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Canada. He spent his first 11 years there, then went to England. He went to Canada in 62 when he was 19.
There is a delicate sensibility, he's a empath, a highly sensitive person perhaps. Anil is a forensic anthropologist.
I had a question. On page 68 of my hardback edition, Anil has to broker a name change. She is 13 and her brother is 17. She doesn't like the names she got and wants a name from her brother. Anil is actually a male name, and she's a woman, but she wants the name Anil. Her brother is a bit of a jerk and exacts a high price for the name transfer. There is also a last minute "sexual favor". What? I wonder on the continuum of sexual favors what she did. I looked up all the possibilities on Wikipedia.
There's a million questions about the complex references in the book. I listened to Steve Earle when he referred to him and the song Fearless Heart. Reading his Wikipedia page, he's been married 7 times. The country music doesn't feel like Sri Lanka, but perhaps it expresses something that's hard to express in Sri Lanka. How in every country you can reach out into other countries to find expression for experience. His son put out 8 albums and died of an overdose. He also has a son on the spectrum of autism.
The Prime Minister of Sri Lanka was assassinated in 1989 (Wikipedia). That's pretty horrible. There is a fictional account of the events in the novel.
I thought the book was interesting in many ways, but I was hoping for more of a sense of place. I felt I got more a sense of the writer's poetic writing style which is interesting.
The glimpses into the Sri Lankan Civil War from 1983 to 2009 was horrible, it killed over 100,000 people. I don't know how much Ondaatje really knew about the war. Glimpses of horror are perhaps all we can take in a modern novel. If you want realism read Red Badge of Courage, or All Quiet On the Western Front, or see Black Hawk Down, or the beginning of Saving Private Ryan.
Chamath Palihapitiya has made the news recently. He says nobody is going to do anything about the Uyghurs in China. I wonder if he's saying that because he witnessed nobody doing anything about the slaughter in Sri Lanka. Palihapitiya is from Sri Lanka.
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