Word: ceylon
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Holmes haunts The Hamilton Case (Little, Brown; 307 pages) as well, a miniature masterpiece of a mystery by Michelle de Kretser, who lives in Australia but was born on the island of Sri Lanka. The Hamilton Case is set there, back when it was the English colony of Ceylon--"a useful bauble," De Kretser writes, "fingered and pocketed by the Portuguese, Dutch and British in turn." Our hero is Sam Obeysekere, a Ceylonese lawyer educated at Oxford who, with his genteel Western airs, is seemingly bent on out-Englishing the English. His story takes some time to reveal itself...
...novel begins in pre-World War II Ceylon, when the 14-year-old Lakshmi leaves her family and moves to rural Kuantan with her new husband, Ayah. Lakshmi bears six children, and the narrative voice soon jumps from Lakshmi to her children, who paint a divergent and complex portrait of their mother. Daughter Anna recounts how Lakshmi stood up to the Japanese invaders, started a business and hid her earnings, coated with bird droppings, at the top of a palm tree. "The Japanese made us all very resourceful," she relates, "but Mother was an undefeatable force." Sevenese, Lakshmi...
...Arguably, the first traveler to willingly visit?and leave?the island was Russian writer Anton Chekhov, who came in 1890 to study life in the penal colony. After finishing his book The Island?a Journey to Sakhalin, Chekhov remarked, "I have seen Ceylon, and it is heaven, and now I have seen Sakhalin, and it is hell." Despite his stinging account, the people of Sakhalin have a lasting affection for the playwright and his introduction of the island to the world. His likeness vies with Lenin's on monuments throughout Sakhalin's capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk...
Remembrance of Things Past Movie stars and royalty, tycoons and world leaders?they can't all be wrong, can they? Not about sunset on the veranda of Colombo's Galle Face Hotel. A pot of Ceylon tea is on the table. Uniformed waiters anticipate every need. Attention wanders from a book to monitoring the progress of the sun's blood orange descent into the Indian Ocean. All, in short, is as it should be, the life you've always felt you deserved...
While he was researching and writing his third novel, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje was pretty much free of all expectations for the book except his own. Born in 1943 in Ceylon (which changed its name to Sri Lanka in 1972) and a longtime Canadian resident and citizen, Ondaatje enjoyed a modest following as a poet, filmmaker and educator. But when his novel appeared in 1992, all that comfortable obscurity came to an abrupt halt. The English Patient went on to win Britain's prestigious and commercially influential Booker Prize and was then turned into a 1996 Academy Award-winning...