Ben Libman at Poetry Magazine:
Years ago in the Sri Lankan highlands, Michael Ondaatje’s Aunt Christie, only 25 years old, volunteered to have “a total stranger in the circus profession” shoot an apple off her head. “That night,” Ondaatje writes in his sometimes fictionalized memoir Running in the Family (1982), a man named “T. W. Roberts was bitten in the leg by a dog while he danced with her. Later the dog was discovered to be rabid, but as T.W. had left for England nobody bothered to tell him. Most assume he survived.”
This complex little anecdote is a perfect Ondaatjeism, a distillation of a narrative style and variety of drama that permeates his writing: a memory made into lore, an eccentric relative made into a character, an incident with a wild animal, a stranger who flits in and out of contact as if he only ever existed for that moment, a vital message never sent, and two non sequitur scenes that are nevertheless jammed together. His works have often reveled in one or another of these modes or interests, but rarely are they brought together so pithily as here. Only when his six-decade career is collapsed into a single volume can the totality to which they point emerge clearly.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.