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Literary Review
FACE TO FACE
In the skin of a lion
TISHANI DOSHI
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Michael Ondaatje on his new book Divisadero, the art of editing and what’s currently blowing the top of his head off.
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Michael Ondaatje is nothing like what you expect him to be in real life. There’s the lionish mane of hair, yes, and the intensity, but there’s also the easy laughter and the accent that could be from anywhere or nowhere at all. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and spent his early years there before moving to England with his mother in 1954. In 1962 he relocated to Canada. He is the author of the Booker-winning
The English Patient
, three other novels and several books of poetry. Excerpts from an interview…
How did your early years in Sri Lanka shape you as a writer?
Completely. I mean I see myself as a Sri Lankan-Canadian writer. I was utterly influenced by it. I was there till I was 11. I could speak Sinhala and a little bit of Tamil and while I’ve lost it now, I always imagine that it has gone subliminally into the English language somewhere you know? I think one of the things that influenced me a lot was the oral tradition. When I was there, there was no sense of Sri Lankan writers that I was aware of and so the stories that I heard were at the dinner table where everyone would lie and lie some more, anecdotes and so forth, and so when I wrote Running in the Family it was like trapping that kind of form.
When you did Anil’s Ghost and you had to go back for a different story, how did that come about?
Well, I wanted to write about what had happened in Sri Lanka. Running in the Family was like a lyrical midsummer’s night dream thing — it wasn’t the real world, and I wanted to write about it but didn’t know how to. Everyone has a different opinion about what’s going on in Sri Lanka — politically, anecdotally etc. I went back many times, and gradually, I made friends who were outside the family, which is very important, otherwise I’d have been stuck in the 1940s or something. I wrote a book of poems, Handwriting, which was the book that began the entrance to Anil’s Ghost.
Do you get tired of people calling you a poetic novelist?
Only because I think it’s being misinterpreted. People’s complaints about poetic novels are that the writing is lush, ornamental. But you know poetry is laconic, it’s tight. In poetry, the language is focusing on tightness, not saying everything like in a novel. It’s exactly the opposite of what they think. I don’t mind though. Whenever they want to criticise it they’ll say, “Oh he’s a poet,” with a wink in their eye.
One of the most important things as a poet is the act of naming. With this new book, was the title with you from the beginning, or did it arrive later as an afterthought?
It came in the middle, not quite an afterthought. I never begin the book with an idea. I think for me, if I have an idea for the book, I lose it 10 days into it. An idea doesn’t last long. I think there are much more interesting things going on subliminally or sub-consciously that you can discover when you’re writing a book. The idea of divisadero or division — I wasn’t conscious of that and obviously it was recurring again and again. I loved the name, and I needed a working title for my notebook, so I used it. But later it began to mean more, so I explored its other meanings — looking into the distance and glimpsing at things, and I thought, yes, this will work.
Letting the subliminal speak: Michael Ondaatje.
Tell me about the character of Coop. How did he come about and how did you go about all the research, his card-playing for instance?
I’m not sure how he grew. I began the book with the three young people and I didn’t know what was going to occur… I always thought that Coop was not of the world, everything about him wants to escape — the whole idea of chance and danger and stuff, so it just seemed to me that he would become a card player. I can play poker but I’m not that good at poker so I had to go Lake Tahoe and met poker players and I stayed there with them for a long time — rather like the doctors in Sri Lanka, actually. It was not to ask how do you win a game, how do you play a hand, how do you perform this operation? But it’s more, how do you live, what’s your daily life like? With the doctors in Sri Lanka, I’d go with them to the peripheral hospitals and spend a few days with them — they would listen to cricket the whole time, or talk about a good place for a meal, so that was more important than asking point blank questions. You pick up the manner. And with gamblers as well, I think that what I was doing was picking up the manner.
Do the characters take over then? Are they not your galley slaves like Nabokov said, or do you have some control over them?
You have a little hook on them (laughs). But you know you also have to leave an open door all the time. It’s like describing a landscape. If you don’t know the landscape, you allow the landscape to reveal itself. It’s the same with your characters — they reveal themselves. I didn’t know Anna fully when I began the book, I didn’t know Coop fully, so you’re gradually discovering them as you’re living them with them for five years or something like that.
If you work four to five years on a project, is it a monogamous venture? Do you work on just the one thing or are you thinking of what you can do next?
Monogamy is a good word here (laughs). I mean, I’m quite appalled — no, not appalled, but amazed at writers who have finished a book and then the next day they’re doing something else, because you know, it takes me a while to get over this marriage (laughs). It’s a very intense time for me. I used to be able to write poetry and fiction simultaneously but it’s become very difficult to do now.
You’ve had some experience with documentaries and film — working with Anthony Minghella and Walter Murch in “The English Patient”. Do you think film is the most powerful medium of our time?
Susan Sontag said something great actually, she said the century began with film becoming obviously the most important medium, and then it quickly became decadent. You know, I think that’s true. It’s certainly true of western film. Film in the west has become so restricted to what’s financially successful that it’s quite horrific really. And the trouble is that it’s influenced everything around us, so people who read books want them to sound like films or to be structured as simply as films, which is a real danger. It may well be the most important form of our time, but it’s not the most open, or the most complex.
So, this is a kind of stock question that I ask: As a writer, which do you think is more important – memory or the imagination?
(Long pause) Hmm. Well, I think it’s difficult to say because I think the imagination grows out of memory. In a lot of ways I think this book is about that — Anna’s memory is what’s creating the structure of the book and oddly the Segura story, which she may be inventing — is growing out of her past. But I wouldn’t say one should have memory without imagination or vice versa. Imagination by itself is kind of deadly — like surrealism or something — you know, gone wonky? And that’s why for me, if I’m writing a fictional thing, I really need a real situation and physical landscape — so in this book, the landscape of California, the landscape of the Gers — those two things were essential, otherwise I feel like I’ll drift away in a balloon.
How does the private act of writing contrast with the expectation and the publicity of a book tour? Do you enjoy it, is it a pain, or do you just want to get back to your hermit hole?
I’d like to get back (laughs). No, it is difficult, but unfortunately, it’s a reality now. You don’t want to think about what you’re going to have to do in the future when you’re writing a book though. I mean you want to write a public book but you don’t want to think about how Jack or someone else will read it, so you forget the audience when you first write. But when you’re editing, you do think about it, and you realise that to make sense of it you may have to turn things around a bit and bring it out of the water so people will understand it. It’s like lighting a stage properly.
What’s the last thing you read that blew the top of your head off?
I read Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg… the one about Dostoevsky. Really amazing. I think he’s wonderful … such a personal grief book. Everyone thinks he (Coetzee) is a cold fish, but the emotion in that book is devastating.
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