I can't think of many novelists who, when I finish one of their works, leave me wondering what it is I just read. Sometimes it happens that the book is no good; other times it feels that the experience of reading the work, of being part of that work, living and breathing it for the week or two, is the point, and like a conversation with a stranger, a story overheard, I am satisfied, freed, and only a grain of what was said is left in my memory. This is the feeling I get when I read the work of Michael Ondaatje, an author often misinterpreted as someone concerned solely with poetics and not story. Yet, it's the story and the way that it is rendered, that leaves me with the impression of having lived in some place, in some time, that I can never experience in this world.
Having read The English Patient, Divisadero, and In The Skin of a Lion, I am struck by what seems to be such a simple, yet uniquely original conceit for a novel: the process of something being built as the arc of the story. Whether what is being built is a relationship, a tunnel, or the past, the story is concerned with the process more than anything else. Along with the process comes the stories and back-stories of the people involved and the history of place. In the final scene, whatever has been built is then utilized, whether it is torn down, imploded, or burned. But it seems as though because we have followed the process so carefully, because the language and characters have engaged us in place and story, we know what will happen here, that they will collide with the finished product, and all of what has been built will, and should, come undone.
Having read The English Patient, Divisadero, and In The Skin of a Lion, I am struck by what seems to be such a simple, yet uniquely original conceit for a novel: the process of something being built as the arc of the story. Whether what is being built is a relationship, a tunnel, or the past, the story is concerned with the process more than anything else. Along with the process comes the stories and back-stories of the people involved and the history of place. In the final scene, whatever has been built is then utilized, whether it is torn down, imploded, or burned. But it seems as though because we have followed the process so carefully, because the language and characters have engaged us in place and story, we know what will happen here, that they will collide with the finished product, and all of what has been built will, and should, come undone.The greatest stories do not begin or end, because they can never be told this way. We become part of the character's lives, as we do in this life, and learn what is necessary to learn in order for that particular story in their lives to be told. "The past is always carried into the present by small things", writes Ondaatje in his novel Divisadero. To look closely at that thing--a storefront, a woman turning a corner, a shard of glass in the street--can spark the entire history of the self, of all those encounters with other people in other places, the countless stories and conversations and experiences. Finally, the writer must determine what of those recollections, those parts, are essential in building the frame of the one story he or she wishes to tell.
