The great triumph we might wish to have, to burst apart foundations laid and send through time our legacy, is so often missed because we sleep right past it.
Patrick Lewis watches others skate, himself weaving within light and dark, foreground and background. This novel has within it some thematics that are threaded so cleanly into its characters that one should simply feel them, rather than betraying them by naming them into clarity. So Carravaggio is painted a blue like the sky to slip outside his prison, to float up beyond its walls.
Patrick leaves history to seek out the lives of others--or, familiarly, he dims his own light to make others' shine. In their lives he finds his own, he keeps a shape though muzzled in shadow, holding up the others' happenings.
Every now and again in my mind I see flames in the distant dark, skating upon the whole world, an image that casts away plot. And I might lay and let their glinting spark keep winking at me just so they will stay. Lights.
In the Skin of a Lion is the best novel I read in 2008. So maybe read it and tell me what you think.
5 comments:
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I have to read it in a few weeks for my canadian fiction class.
Apparently, if you like Ondaatje, you will appreciate Anne Michaels.
Read fugitive pieces!
p.s. I think the relation of the two lies in the whole "trained poet" thing.
It's sexy!!!!
Really sexy, I remember being so caught up in the beautiful descriptions of sex/sexiness (i read it like 4 years ago, so i can't remember what exactly he was describing). I'd suggest reading Yann Martel's "Self" - it's somewhat similar in writing style.
It really is, and he describes scenes so incredibly. I think a really good example of that is between the nun and Temelcoff after he rescues her, where nothing really 'happens' but the atmosphere is still presented so completely. I'm glad you like it too.
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