A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

Michael Ondaatje is almost legendary, a prolific writer with so much creative energy and abundant talent that it’s hard to believe he’s reached the age of 83. Over the past fifty-nine years, he’s written twenty-two books: a book about film-making, a family memoir, seven novels and thirteen books of poetry, including the recently published The Last Year.

Although this title sounds elegiac, these poems are not. They draw upon a life that he’s steeped in literature and enriched by living on several different continents. They celebrate the precise beauty of words and use imagery from Ondaatje’s first home, Sri Lanka. They are tender and sensuous, capturing moments with lovers and friends. And yes, there are eulogies that honor the memories of household animals who died old.

Above all, they are fragments of autobiography, told at a slant, never confessional, always alluring.

In his evocation of his Sri Lankan roots, Running in the Family (Asia by the Book, October 2007), Ondaatje mentions the kabaragoya, a monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, which an early explorer described as having “a blew forked tongue, which he puts forth.” A smaller relative of this lizard is prized because eating its tongue gives eloquence.” Both of these creatures are blended into one and become part of Dante in the poem Last Things. In an Italian piazza, a statue of Dante falls and the shape of a lizard “crawls out of shattered plaster, a blue rough tongue slithering…a finished book in his mouth.”

A similar echo is found in the poem Dark Garden, where a woman Ondaatje has not yet met but will someday love steps on a nail at the time he imagines one of his characters having a splinter pulled from her foot, “That faraway echo and coincidence” mirrors the final chapter of The English Patient when Kirpal and Hannah, separated by time and space, each see a falling household object at the same moment.

A man enthralled by language, Ondaatje, in his poem Definition, says “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred pages of a Sanskrit dictionary,” where he finds the word ansa, and gives it to the woman he loves, for “the warmth of that word for your shoulder blade.” The English patient springs into life in that poem, searching for the word that will name “that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck.”

In a mixture of poems and small essays, lives unfold. “The dyers who steal color out of the bark of trees to paint temples,” unnamed lovers who exist in a realm that’s “still all coal and smoke,” the dog whose death is “courteous and beautiful,” They all evoke memories of other stories, while breathing on their own and lingering in a new corner of the mind. “Nothing remains still in a story,” Ondaatje says to those readers who recognize shadows from his previous work. 

A Year of Last Things begins and ends with rivers, “the wet dark rectangle,” “all those echoing rivers.” And suddenly there is Lalla, the glamorous, eccentric grandmother who often stopped her car to swim in a river, who stepped off her front porch one night and was swept into a flood that “was her last perfect journey.”

This is the gift that Michael Ondaatje always offers: each of his books brings new portions of beauty while taking us back into other wonders that he’s placed in our minds and hearts, sweeping us into an unending “perfect journey.”~Janet Brown

On the Front Line : The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin (Harper)

I really respect and admire people who are totally dedicated to their work. Especially those people who often make sacrifices of their own to help the more unfortunate. I believe that being a war correspondent is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Journalists put their lives at risk to bring news of atrocities committed around the world. I am referring to the journalists who make an effort to go into the heart of a conflict, not sit back in their comfortable hotels and report their stories secondhand from refugees, soldiers, and international aid workers. Marie Colvin was one of those people. 

Marie Colvin was an American who has been a war correspondent for the Sunday Times since 1986 when she covered the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in Libya. Since then, she has reported on conflicts around the world. She has covered the Iran-Iraq War, she stayed in Baghdad throughout the bombing during the first Persian Gulf War, she was also the first journalist to enter Kosovo from Albania with the Kosovo Liberation Army after the bombing by NATO planes.

She lost the sight of her left eye covering the conflict in Sri Lanka but that didn’t stop her from going back to other conflict zones after her recovery. She went back to the Middle East to report on the continuing problems facing Israeli-Arab relations, the departure of U.S. forces from Iraq and the resurgence of Al-Qaeda, on Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban fighting against Hamid Karzai’s government. She also sent dispatches from Iran, Egypt, and Libya, until she was killed in February of 2012 while covering the uprising in Syria. 

On the Front Line is a collection of her reports in the various conflicts she has covered. Several of the articles focus on the Middle East - the Iran-Iraq War, The Gulf War, Soviet Jews escaping persecution and finding refuge in Israel’s Occupied West Bank. She has interviewed Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and was one of the three remaining journalists in Dili, in East Timor where the United Nations were planning to pull out leaving hundreds of East Timorese to fend for themselves against the Indonesian army and militias. However, thanks to her reporting the U.N. reversed their decision to pull out. Colvin says, “I embarrassed the decision-makers and that felt good because it saved lives.”

Colvin’s long experience has taught her that most governments lie or distort the truth to cover up what they are really doing and the only way for the world to know is to go in and report what she sees. The Sri Lankan government was a case in point. The northeast part of the island was controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), a militant organization that fought to create an independent Tamil state because of the discrimination and violent persecution of them by the majority Sinhalese who dominated the Sri Lankan government. 

The ban against journalists going to the Tamil-held areas meant they could not speak with any of the leaders of the L.T.T.E. “even though the government was involved in negotiations with them through a Norwegian envoy to begin peace talks. The only news of the problems with those negotiations came from the government”. 

The ban also meant that reporters had no first hand accounts of the nearly half-million civilians living there, more than half of them being refugees. The people “were suffering under an economic embargo that the government denied existed.”. Colvin was the first foreign journalist to enter the Tamil-controlled area of Sri Lanka. After she filed her story and tried to make her way back to the government-held area, she was shot in the eye, thus the eyepatch that became her famous trademark. 

I am fascinated and repulsed by crimes against humanity. After Colvin’s narrow escape from Sri Lanka, she’s often asked if the risk was worth it. Some people call her brave while others say she must be stupid. Colvin responds to her critics and supporters alike. She says, “there’s no way to cover war properly without risk”. She doesn’t care about what kinds of planes were flown, what types of tanks were used or the size of the artillery being rained down. What she is most concerned about is “the experience of those most directly affected by the war, those asked to fight and those who are just trying to survive.” 

It amazes me as to how barbaric people can become. Colvin’s articles do not whitewash any of the facts - random killings, looting, rape, violence, torture, friendly neighbors turning on each other because they are of the wrong party or race. It appears it will take the world another millennia or more before all people realize that in war, it is the average citizen, young and old alike, who suffer the most. What the world truly needs are more people like Marie Colvin to continue writing the truth about the atrocities of war. ~Ernie Hoyt

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (Knopf)

On the day after Christmas, 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala is chatting with her friend at a Sri Lanka beach resort. Her husband is in the bathroom and her two sons are absorbed by their Christmas presents. Suddenly her friend looks out at the sea and says. “Oh my god. The sea’s coming in.” The two women watch as waves grow larger and come closer. They call to their families and then they all run.

A jeep moves by, stops, and picks them up but the water finds them, filling the interior of the vehicle until it reaches their chests. The jeep turns over. 

Sonali is alone, spinning, within the wave, feeling crushing pain, her chest hurting as if it’s “being pummeled by a great stone.” Time moves slowly enough that she pinches herself on the leg to wake herself up, hoping that she’s dreaming. Her head finally moves above the water and she begins to float, a screaming boy beside her. She looks to see if he’s her child. He’s a stranger and she puts him out of her mind. When she sees a tree branch above her, she grabs it and her feet touch solid ground in “an immense bogland,..a knocked-down world.”

She wonders if it was the “end of time,” which it is, for her. From the beginning she knows her husband and children are dead. She berates herself for not warning her parents before she and her husband ran away to save their sons. She feels disconnected from everyone she sees, from other survivors at a hospital to her brother andf his family when she returns to Columbo. She wants to die and knows that as soon as she has the strength, she will kill herself.

Her relatives stick by her side. Friends come from her home in England. She lives in agony, wondering why she and her husband had insisted that their children have two homes in the world, England and Sri Lanka. This now gives her two countries where she encounters all that they longer share. 

When her brother empties the home of their parents and rents it to a Dutch family a year after the wave, Sonali begins to haunt it. She pounds on its gates every night,, telephones the tenants at two in the morning, rings their doorbell, leaves and then comes back to do it again. Without peace herself, she refuses to give the right of living in peace to these strangers who have invaded her past.

When she returns to England, the life she used to have with the dead people she loves still fills the house they lived in. Ordinary objects pierce her wherever she looks and when her academic career as an economist offers her the chance to live in New York, she grabs it with the same savage desperation she had used to clutch the tree branch while engulfed in the wave.

It’s not until she returns to the Sri Lankan beach where she and her family were last together that she can look at the past without being stabbed in the heart. The eagles that her oldest son loved to watch are still there. When she ventures out onto the sea on a whale-watching expedition, the blue whales that fascinated her son come to the boat and Sonali sees “burst after burst of glowing blue,” the immensity of a tail breaking through the water. One of the whales comes close enough that she can hear it breathe; she believes it releases “a doleful sigh.” 

Her memories no longer cut through her with jagged edges. “I can only recover myself when I keep them near,” Sonali realizes. With deep generosity and great love, she has turned her vanished life into art and her pain into a terrible and blinding knowledge that all of us are afraid of, that all of us, she says, would be able to survive.~Janet Brown

Bringing Tony Home by Tissa Abeysekara (Scala House Press)

Kristianne Huntsberger, a soon-to-be Bangkok resident, looks at memory and identity through the eyes of a Sri Lankan writer.

The epigraph to Bringing Tony Home is taken from a dialogue with the Buddha, in which a man asks, "If I die and am born again as you say I will be, is that, which is reborn, the same me?" The Buddha replies that it is "neither you, nor yet any other." Tissa Abeysekara writes that, likewise, his book, "being truth recreated through memory, is neither true nor untrue." It is a collection of stories grafted with autobiography. Memory and fiction come in and out of focus the way that a sweeping camera pans over an expansive landscape where a small figure traces a road along the railroad tracks.

Locating identity within memory and the recorded history of his mid-twentieth century home in post-colonial Ceylon is a daunting task for the narrator, a boy from a privileged native family whose fortunes failed after World War II. He recalls a British fighter plane crash in 1942, and his memory of watching the wounded pilot being carted away in a hackney. His mother considers this a constructed memory because he had been only three years old "and according to her it is not possible to remember that far back and over the years I came to doubt it myself, but now I remembered the scene once more and it seemed quite real and if it was otherwise like Mother suspected, it didn't seem to matter anymore.". The family is forced to leave behind the "Big House" and the red Jaguar and Tony, the faithful family dog. The boy's mother would have him learn to adapt and his father would have him hold on to the former world. These stories explain the consequences of this division, evidenced in the narrator's internal and social struggle. When revisiting the native home of his grandmother he encounters a monk on the mountain who asks, "'from where are you?' This question in my language implies much more than your place of residence. It wants to know your origin." This is the question the narrator pursues and the one that provokes the deep introspection of Abeysekara’s stories.

When the narrator rescues his dog, marching him the distance between the abandoned Big House in Depanama and the poor one in Egodawatta, or when he rejects his father’s gift, rediscovers his adolescent lover or travels to the central hills where his grandmother was born, we understand that we are being shown more than just these incidents. We are following the narrator as he learns, finally, the meaning behind the episodes in his life. There is clarity in the distance he has gained and in remembering things past, much like glimpsing the sea from the mountaintop. As the monk he encountered near his grandmother's home explained, after years of looking, it will happen suddenly: "through that little break in the long line of hills, like through the eye of a needle, I saw the water, blue and glistening like a crest gem. Ever since then I see it. I need glasses to read, but I see faraway things." Abeysekara paused in the middle of his life to reflect on a world he no longer recognized and which had ceased to recognize him, and to glimpse the world he was unable to see before that moment.

After receiving word that Abeysekara had passed away in April of this year I re-read Bringing Tony Home. Returning to the book as tribute to the man's nostalgia, I found my own. Between the pages I had left a bus transfer and a strand of hair--a gray one--that I lost while reading a passage in which the narrator unpacks the story of his own birth, faced with entries from the diary his father kept that year. How does one react to the unraveling of one’s own myth? By recognizing the contradictions of our fathers as our own, Abeysekara answers. The relationship then between fiction and fact in these stories is the same as in the lives we live. We re-member and re-read and re-live our memories to make meaning.

Mosquito by Roma Tearne (HarperCollinsAustralia)

In the most terrible times of history, fairy tales are born. Princes marry fair damsels despite all obstacles in stories that are told and retold during times of plague, starvation, and never-ending war. When daily living is hopelessly, helplessly, and routinely endangered, stories emerge that keep the human spirit alive, and survive to become enduring literature, as the works of both the Brothers Grimm and Pramoedya Ananta Toer have done. In this same tradition comes a breathtaking and beautiful first novel from Sri Lankan artist and writer, Roma Tearne.

Theo, a middle-aged writer and widower, returns to his native Sri Lanka after decades of British life, during a time when civil war is driving others away from this country. He explains his return as a search for sunlight, but in truth Theo leaves safety for danger because he believes that he has nothing left to lose. He is a man without emotion, frozen by grief, searching for words.

Nalini is a girl who has learned to live a silent life. After watching her father burn to death on the street, leaving only black dust for his daughter to touch, Nalini has found that lines drawn on paper are more comforting than words. She draws and paints unceasingly and when Theo, as a local celebrity, comes to speak at her school, Nalini discovers that he is someone whose image she wants to put on paper.

Caught first by her tenacity, then her talent, and then her beauty, Theo begins to look for Nalini's presence in his life. Commissioning her to paint his portrait, he is amazed by the new life and youthful eagerness that Nalini gives to his painted image. Slowly an affinity develops between the seventeen-year-old artist and the forty-five-year-old writer, one that is carefully observed and understood by Theo's manservant, Sugi.

As he watches the silent girl, whose "unhappiness had blotted out her light," and the grief-stricken middle-aged man, both take on renewed life when they are together, Sugi is frightened by what he sees and they refuse to acknowledge. "They are both such children," Sugi realizes, "The girl is too young, and he is too innocent." In a country where the sounds of the night can presage death,Sugi knows that Theo and Nalini hear only what will enhance the new world that lies between them, and that it is up to him to protect them--if he can.

Surrounding the enchantment that envelops this unlikely couple are people slaughtered in road ambushes, child soldiers who kill without pity, and corpses who have died from torture and are found hanging from trees. Falling in love in a landscape of unspeakable beauty, in a country where peace is an illusive luxury, "a place spiralling into madness," Theo and Nalini are brutally and terribly separated when,inevitably, what Sugi fears comes to pass.

Fairy tales endure, not because of their happy endings, or because of their triumphs of good over evil, or their messages that true love will conquer all. The strength of a fairy tale is found in the exaltation of the strength of the human spirit and the agony that it can withstand. What a fairy tale provides is the realization that it is possible to be damaged and then healed, homeless and then secure, and that the power of story can keep hope alive. Perhaps more than ever, people need the message found in a fairy tale. In Mosquito Roma Tearne brings that message to a world that seems to be going back to a dreadful future.

Running In the Family by Michael Ondaatje (Vintage Books)

"It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia." With a dozen crisp words, Michael Ondaatje goes to the core of what it is to live in a cold country while yearning to return to a world of color and light. Born in Sri Lanka and irrevocably shaped by it, Ondaatje gives voice to what many people feel and are unable to articulate. With memories, vivid descriptions and poetry, he catches the shimmer and fragrance of a place that he loves and then gives it to those who struggle to do the same, and fail.

Ondaatje's family is so rooted in Sri Lanka that "everyone was related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations." "God alone knows, your Excellency," was the reply given to a British governor who asked one of them his nationality.

These are people whose stories fill an island, whose names are chiseled in the stone of a church built in 1650, whose exploits still linger in houses first inhabited in 1700, and who continue to tell about the remarkable end of an ancestor who was "savaged to pieces by his own horse."

"There are so many ghosts here," Ondaatje says and then brilliantly brings them back to life: his grandmother "who died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree," his parents who whirled through the 1920s in a dazzling chaos of cocktails, dancing, and gambling, a forebear who kept biological notebooks cataloging "at least fifty-five species of poison" that could be found in this island paradise, including "ground blue peacock stones."

Sri Lanka was the breeding ground for these beautiful, reckless and mythic people; it claimed them and held them in the same way that it claims and holds this book. A country with "eighteen ways of describing the smell of a durian," where a monitor lizard's tongue, when it is cut in half and swallowed whole, will give the child who ingests it the gift of brilliant speech, if it doesn't kill him first, Sri Lanka is, Ondaatje says, "a place so rich that I had to select senses" while observing it.

Through his eyes and voice comes the scent of cinnamon, rich on the skin of the wife of the man who peels it for a living, the darkness of a jungle "suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks," the shadowed figures of men standing by the side of a road, "urinating into darkness and mysterious foliage," the warmth and the smell and the feel of "slow air pinned down by rain."

"We own the country we grow up in," he tells us, while offering the one he owns to us, so generously that we can feel it in our skin and so vividly that whatever part of Asia inhabiting our memories is suddenly alive in every one of our skin cells. Throughout the coldest winter, this book will bring the gift of heat, of flowers that "flourish and die within a month" and are instantly replaced by more, of "the lovely swallowing of thick night air" and the dreams that it carries. It's a gift wholeheartedly given by a man who can evoke a world and make it breathe forever with his wondrous and lovely words.