Word: anil
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Seven years after Booker Prize-winning Michael Ondaatje won nearly universal acclaim for The English Patient, he returns to the literary world with Anil's Ghost-a tale that verges on the same dark terrain: war. Waiting years for him to publish again, one could not imagine where on the globe Ondaatje would choose to place his pen next. The Sri Lankan-born author (transplanted to Canada) who has written evocative pieces set in the old West, the early jazz era and World War II, chooses a different time and place for this story: the Sri Lanka of the present...
...story is in many ways similar to The English Patient. The title's Anil, like Hana in the earlier novel, is someone who chooses her path very carefully-even down to naming herself. She is faced with a country that is no longer hers. By the end of the novel, it is again, and the journey of that transformation is a finely crafted piece of storytelling. The atmosphere of his story is not entirely fiction. The teardrop-shaped island country below India has been ravaged by ethnic conflict for several decades; it has been plunged into war or near...
...protagonist, Anil Tissera, is a forensic anthropologist, returning to the war-torn country of her birth to work on behalf of a human rights center to find out who is behind the mysterious killings on the island. Her partner in the project is Sarath Diyasena, a local official whose loyalties are suspect...
...Anil is caught in a web woven by an ensemble cast that includes Sarath, his physician brother Gamini, Sarath's former mentors and government officials. In typical Ondaatje fashion, the story's time is not linear, but instead meshes the narrative of her work in Sri Lanka with flashes of her childhood and her affair with a married author. The first major turning point of the story is the pair's discovery of a skeleton, who they dub Sailor...
...Sailor becomes the focal point of the story as the struggle to name him becomes a struggle for power. Ananda is recruited to reconstruct the man's head as Anil pieces together the man's past through the history of his bones. Everyone suspects that if his identity is revealed, the government will finally be shown responsible for the killings...