Michael Ondaatje
He was born to a Burgher family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese origin. He moved to England with his mother in 1954. After relocating to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje studied for a time at Bishops College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto and received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and began teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1970 he settled in Toronto. From 1971 to 1988 he taught English Literature at York University and Glendon College in Toronto.
He and his wife, novelist and academic Linda Spalding, co-edit Brick, A Literary Journal, with Michael Redhill, Michael Helm, and Esta Spalding.
Although he is best known as a novelist, Ondaatje's work also encompasses memoir, poetry, and film.
Ondaatje has, since the 1960s, also been involved with Toronto's influential Coach House Books, supporting the independent small press by working as a poetry editor.
In 1988 Michael Ondaatje was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) and two years later became a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He has two children and is the brother of philanthropist, businessman, and author Christopher Ondaatje.
In 1992 he received the Man Booker Prize for his winning novel adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film, The English Patient.
“You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her...”
“He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”
“If I were a cinnamon peelerI would ride your bedand leave the yellow bark duston your pillow.Your breasts and shoulders would reekyou could never walk through marketswithout the profession of my fingersfloating over you. The blind wouldstumble certain of whom they approachedthough you might batheunder rain gutters, monsoon.Here on the upper thighat this smooth pastureneighbor to your hairor the creasethat cuts your back. This ankle.You will be known among strangersas the cinnamon peeler's wife.I could hardly glance at youbefore marriagenever touch you-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.I buried my handsin saffron, disguised themover smoking tar,helped the honey gatherers...When we swam onceI touched you in waterand our bodies remained free,you could hold me and be blind of smell.You climbed the bank and saidthis is how you touch other women the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.And you searched your armsfor the missing perfume.and knew what good is it to be the lime burner's daughterleft with no traceas if not spoken to in an act of loveas if wounded without the pleasure of scar.You touchedyour belly to my handsin the dry air and saidI am the cinnamonpeeler's wife. Smell me.”
“I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love”
“For the first forty days a childis given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.”
“There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character - the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover...Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy? After the cups of tea, coffee, public conversations ... I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover. ”
“There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.”
“...the heart is an organ of fire.”
“I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.”
“all this Beethoven and rain”
“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”
“She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome--the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.”
“He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.”
“Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.”