escapades—often drunken—comprise the most
touching and most humorous episodes. In fiction,
Ondaatje (as in Billy the Kid) investigates specific
historical characters with Coming Through Slaugh-
ter (1976), a similarly eclectic work devoted to jazz
great Buddy Bolden’s descent into madness. In the
Skin of a Lion (1987) depicts the experience of im-
migrant workers in Canada who helped build some
of the country’s most prominent landmarks.
Ondaatje is best known for The ENGLISH PATIENT
(1992), a novel that employs two of the characters
from In the Skin of a Lion. The English Patient ex-
plores the complicated relationships between his-
tory and fiction, geography and identity, love and
morality. The eponymous character, ironically, is
not English at all; he remains enshrouded in mys-
tery from the plane-crash injuries that leave him
unidentifiable and from the emotional injuries of
his relationship with Katherine. The questions he
raises concern many of Ondaatje’s other pieces:
What does a name truly signify? Is ownership a
right? How can borders be crossed, or erased en-
tirely? To what extent is history a limiting, or lib-
erating, force? Undoubtedly, this text has defined
Ondaatje’s stature, having tied for the prestigious
Booker Prize in 1992. In 1996 director Anthony
Minghella’s cinematic adaptation of this work won
multiple Academy Awards.
Ondaatje’s recent novel ANIL’S GHOST (2000)
returns his focus to his native Sri Lanka. The pro-
tagonist, a forensic anthropologist, hopes that in
“reading” the corpses of violence she can spark an
international intervention in the nation’s ongoing
cycles of bloodshed. Again, Ondaatje creates a mys-
tery surrounding individual identity; Anil strug-
gles to ascertain the background of a single victim
christened “Sailor.” While she manages to “read” a
number of facts from the corpse, she is not able
to mount a successful charge against government-
sponsored mass-murder by the novel’s conclusion.
The writer’s career has been marked by dra-
matic and often violent imagery, such as the
burned man of The English Patient or the starved
dogs of Billy the Kid. He has been considered one
of the so-called cosmopolitan writers, in part be-
cause of his international background and in part
because of his repeated insistence that borders
and identities should be porous and flexible. The
heteroglossia that marks his novels is a distinctive
Ondaatje trait; he once remarked that “If you’re
handcuffed to a narrator for 300 pages, it seems
possibly boring.” Despite the generous inclusion of
so many voices in single artistic works, Ondaatje
has been consistently reticent about his personal
life, frustrating interviewers and biographers with
silence and distortion, as if he seeks a mysterious
identity of his own.Bibliography
Barbour, Douglas. Michael Ondaatje. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1993.
Jewinski, Ed. Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beau-
tifully. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994.
Michael Ondaatje in conversation with Caryl Phillips.
Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Lannan Foundation, 1997. Vid-
eorecording.
Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. New York:
Vintage, 1982.
Solecki, Sam. Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael
Ondaatje. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2003.
J. Edward MallotOne Hundred Million Hearts
Kerri Sakamoto (2003)
This second novel of KERRI SAKAMOTO is an inno-
vative take on the events of World War II as they
are experienced by her Japanese and Japanese-Ca-
nadian characters. Beyond merely reiterating the
stories about the experience of Japanese Cana-
dians during the war, Sakamoto raises the taboo
issue of loyalty.
The protagonist of the novel is a third-genera-
tion Japanese Canadian, Miyo, who discovers only
after her father’s death that her Canadian nisei fa-
ther left Canada to serve the emperor of Japan as
a kamikaze pilot during World War II. Miyo goes
to Japan on a quest to find a sister that she never
knew she had. While in Japan, Miyo meets Buddy,
a nisei from Vancouver who knew her father. Also
a kamikaze pilot during the war, Buddy, unlike
Miyo’s father, did not go “home” but remained inOne Hundred Million Hearts 229