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Feb 06, 2015booksphinx rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
Like the reader, Pisinga, I also struggled with the structure of this book. I wanted so much to like this three times award-winning novel. When I first struggled with the disjointed, stream of consciousness type writing, I thought I should just bite my lip and struggle on - maybe it would get better later. Anil was the main character in the story and try as I might to feel some affection or empathy for her, I just couldn't. She seemed self-absorbed, a little manipulative/cruel, occasionally sexual (not a minus, but seemed out-of-place somehow), callous and cold. Maybe I am misunderstanding her. She seemed like a black sheep. I get that a certain amount of distance and dark humor helps in a profession like hers, but she was particularly "cool". Almost like a - well, almost like a "ghost". Maybe that's where the author was going with this... In any case, getting through the book was a chore. Lots of complicated third person narrative like this: "Archaeology lives under the same rules as the Napoleonic Code. The point was not that he would ever be proved wrong in his theories, but that he could not prove he was right. Still, the patterns that emerged for Palipana had begun to coalesce. They linked hands. They allowed walking across water, they allowed a leap from treetop to treetop. The water filled a cut alphabet and linked this shore and that. And so the unprovable truth emerged." Beautiful, in the way some poetry is beautiful, but 307 pages of this and it gets a little hard-going. Perhaps on a second read-through, I would understand more of what was going on in this story, but I don't think I'm going to revisit this book in a hurry. I'd be interested to read other books by Ondaatje to see if they read any better - or if they have more relatable characters. All in all, this book had a few moments of exquisite beauty/compelling tragedy which seemed to snuff themselves out quickly. Finding relatable moments or characters in this book was like trying to find only strawberry centres in a packet of Bridge Mixture: hardly an 'unpleasant' experience and I could appreciate the other pieces, but ultimately I was left feeling unsatisfied, as this book contained too little of the things I would usually like in a story.