Michael Ondaatje - "Warlight"

Wonderful story of two children who, left by their parents, find their way through teenage and young adult life with various colourful characters such as the Moth and the Darter. There could have been a bit more about the father, his death was explained away in two sentences when not given any attention. Also, why the infatuation with the mother, and less so the father? Because the mother stayed behind a bit longer? We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I havw achieved, but by how I got there. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe about the Moth? Who made me move from just an interest in "characters" to what they would do to others? But above all, most of all, how much damage did I do?

Michael Ondaatje - "Warlight"

Colson Whitehead - "The Nickel Boys"

Amazing book about a fictional "reform school" for boys, told by a black "student", or rather inmate, Elwood Curtis. And his friend, Jack Turner. Writing that gets you from the get-go. Somehow near the end I got a strong Michael Ondaatje feeling; perhaps because this is based on a real story, a real terrible place in Florida where boys were whipped and abused and killed.




She was rarely sick, and when she was, she refused to stay off her feet. She was a survivor but the world took her in bites. Her husband had died young, her daughter had vanished out West, and now her only grandson had been sentenced to this place. She had swallowed the portion of misery the world had given to her, and now there she was, alone on Brevard Street, her family tugged away one by one. She might not be there.



No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren't running the course but running deep into their character - down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.

Michael Ondaatje - "Anil's Ghost"

"Coomaraswamy points out that before eyes are painted there is just a lump of metal or stone. But after this act, "it is thenceforward A God." ... There is a ceremony to prepare the arficer during the night before he paints. You realize, he is brought in only to paint the eyes on the Buddha image. The eyes must be painted in the morning, at five. The hour the Budha attained enlightment. The ceremonies therefore begin the night before, with recitations and decorations in the temples.
"Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence. Later he will be honoured with gifts. Lands or oxen. He enters the temple doors. He is dressed like a prince, with jewellery, a sword at his waist, lace over his head. He moves forward accompanied by a second man, who carries brushes, black paint and a metal mirror.
"He climbs a ladder in front of the statue. The man with him climbs too. This has taken place for centrueis, you realize, there are records of this since the ninth century. The painter dips a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about to be enfolded in the great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him - so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha's during the process of creation. Around him the mantras continue. May thou become possessed of the fruits of deed... May there be an increase on earth and length of days... Hail, eyes!"
"His work can take an hour or less than a minute, depending on the essential state of the artist. He never looks at the eyes directly. He can only see the gaze in the mirror."

Wonderful book. Dream like, at times, though its subject is at times horrifying. High up the general reading list, and definitely high up the reading-for-writing list. The momentum that was lost, was due to my own fault of reading too many things simultaneously.

Michael Ondaatje - "Coming Through Slaughter"

(author of "The English Patient")

A jarred, struggling style, sentences that burst open with colour, sound and smell with every word that hits your eyes. I had to think of Leonard Cohen's style, Nick Cave's... madness in words, madness in story, madness in man.

Loved it from the very first page. Loved it for its craziness, its originality, its story of a man, a time and a place of which I knew nothing.

The confusion of the sentences jumbling down the page are not done as an artistic effect, the rereading of the dialogues in which you figure out yourself who says what are not an intellectual game, but the everyday uncertainty of the story itself. You get it or you don't. You go with the flow or you sink under the weight of paperless thoughts.

blurb at the back: At the turn of the century, the Storyville distrcit of New Orleans had some 2,000 prostitutes, 70 professional gamblers, and 30 piano players. it had only one man who played the cornet like Buddy Bolden. By day he cut hair and purveyed gossip at N. Joseph's Shaving Parlor. At night he played jazz as though unleashing wild animals in a crowded room. At the age of thirty-one, Buddy Bolden went mad.

But here there is little recorded history, though tales of 'The Swamp' and 'Smoky Row', both notorious communities where about 100 black prostitutes from pre-puberty to their seventies would line the banquette to hustle, come down to us in fragments. Here the famous whore Bricktop Jackson carried a 15 inch knife and her lover John Miller had no left arm and wore a chain with an iron ball on the end to replace it - killed by Bricktop herself on December 7, 1861, because of his 'bestial habits and ferocious manners'. And here 'One-legged Duffy' (born Mary Rich) was stabbed by her boyfriend and had her head beaten in with her own wooden leg. 'And gamblers carrying cocaine to a game'.

The final stages of an evening's drunkenness would see her reaching into her suitcase to bring out her copies of Audubon drawings. Hardly able to talk around a slur now she'd interpret the damned birds, damned, as she saw them, for she was sure John James Audubon was attracted to psychologically neurotic creates. She showed him the drawing of the Purple Gallinule which seemed to lean over the water, its eyes closed, with thoughts of self-destruction. You don't know that! Shut up, Buddy! She showed him the Prophet Ibis, obviously paranoid, that built its nest high up before floods came, and the Cerulean Wood Warbler drunk on Spanish Mulberry, and her favourite - the Anhinga, the Water Turkey, which she said would sit in the tree tops till disturbed and then plummet down into the river leaving hardly a ripple and swim off with just its eyes and beak cresting water - or if disturbed further would hide by submerging completely and walk along the river bottom, forgetting to breathe, and so drown. That's how they catch water turkeys, she said, scare them under water and then net their bodies when they float up a few minutes later, did you know that? Bolden shook his head. You tell a good story Mrs Bass but I don't believe you, you crazy woman, you're drunk you know that - you crazy woman. A week later Mrs Bass went for a drive and never came back. After lunch Buddy and Nora set out walking. They found the Envictor two miles down the road. Mrs Bass was sitting at the wheel and had been strangled.

Webb had spoken to Bellocq and discovered nothing. Had spoken to Nora, Crawley, to Cornish, had met the children - Bernadine, Charlie. Their stories were like spokes on a rimless wheel ending in air. Buddy had lived a different life with every one of them.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning. The heat incredible, we go out and buy a bag of ice, crack it small in our mouths and spit it onto each other's bodies, her tongue slipping it under the skin of my cock me pushing it into her hot red fold. But we are already travelling on the morning bus tragic. Like the ice melting in the heat of us. Dripping wet on our chest and breasts we approach each other private and selfish and cold in the September heatwave. We give each other a performance, the wound of ice. We imagine audiences and the audiences are each other again and again in the future. 'We'll go crazy without each other you know.' The one lonely sentence, her voice against my hand as if to stop her saying it. We follow each other into the future, as if now, at the last moment we try to memorize the face a movement we will never want to forget. As if everything in the world is the history of ice.