Bøker av Michael Ondaatje

"English Patient" is the winner of the 1992 Booker Prize.

Transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war.

By the age of twenty-one, Billy the Kid had killed a man for each year he'd been alive. Then he was shot dead in the night by a man he once called a friend.Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning novelist, a gorgeous and most of all surprising poetry collection about memory, love, and the act of looking back'His thrilling poems often read like exquisite, unwritten Ondaatje novels'Independent on SundayFollowing several of his internationally acclaimed, beloved novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje's long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes wittily funny, moving and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and abandoned landscapes we hold onto to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Moliere's chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to a California coast, and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges his past and present, in the way memory and the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence all that surrounds him.These poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world who has never conformed to western traditions - always describing himself as a 'mongrel', someone who contains multitudes. Looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss, this is an intercultural and brave book. Poetry - where language is made to work hardest - is what Ondaatje has returned to, and this is both an intimate personal record of a life lived and a great artist's guide to the vital, various world around us.

"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso.

'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed... I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.'Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with his siblings and children, Ondaatje gathers rumours, anecdotes, poems, records and memories to piece together this fragmented portrayal of his family's past, his father's destructive alcoholism and the colourful stories and secrets of ancestors both disgraced and adored throughout centuries of Sri Lankan society.In an exotic, evocative portrait of the heat, wildlife, sounds and silences of the Sri Lankan landscape, Ondaatje combines vivid recreations of a privileged, eccentric older generation with a deeply personal reconciliatory journey in which he explores his own ghosts, and how his family's extraordinary history continues to influence his life.

Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday TimesBased on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb which he was unable to stop.

London, 1945. I kaoset etter andre verdenskrig blir 14 år gamle Nathaniel og søsteren Rachel forlatt av foreldrene som visstnok reiser til Singapore. Barna etterlates i en gåtefull manns varetekt. Han har et underlig kroppsspråk og kalles Møllen, og søsknene mistenker at han er kriminell. De blir både mer overbevist og mindre bekymret etter hvert som de blir kjent med Møllens fargerike og eksentriske omgangskrets. Både mennene og kvinnene virker underlig opptatt av å beskytte de to søsknene men mot hva? Hvem er egentlig disse menneskene? Og hvor er mor og far? Tolv år senere begynner Nathaniel å undersøke hva det var, alt det han ikke forsto den gangen. Han trekkes gradvis inn igjen i den moralsk ambivalente skyggeverdenen som etterkrigstiden - og søsknene - befant seg i.

Michael Ondaatje er kanskje mest som romanforfatter, særlig etter sukses på både papir og lerret med Den engelske pasienten, men han er også en ledende poet blant engelskspråklige forfattere. Hans tidvis sentimentale, men også lekne og musikalske familie- og kjærlighetsdikt er rørende og morsomme, og et lite utvalg av disse har Espen Stueland nå gjendiktet til norsk. Utvalget er gjort i samarbeid med forfatteren selv. Etterord ved Tor Eystein Øverås og Niels Fredrik Dahl.

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

From the Booker Prize-winning author comes the sparkling and lyrical predecessor to the bestselling The English Patient.