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Michael Ondaatje: ‘shadowed and prismatic prose’. Photograph: Murdo Macleod |
My hero:
Michael Ondaatje by Teju Cole
Here’s a celebrated writer who can’t stop taking risks on the page
Teju Cole
Friday 17 February 2012
W
hen you are starting out, each great writer gives you specific forms of permission. Michael Ondaatje's work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them "unfinished" the way Chopin's Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.
In Coming Through Slaughter, I encountered the use of photographs in a text in a non-straightforwardly illustrative way, long before WG Sebald did the same thing. Running in the Family was an exhilarating confusion of genres that I read and reread, and loved each time, and still couldn't decode. The English Patient was like a fine film by Chris Marker (quite different from the fine film Anthony Minghella made of the same book). And the latest, The Cat's Table, is fleet and gently magical, a book full of love.
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words. Ondaatje makes language translucent – the exact word, the exact placement of a comma – and the reader has the uncanny feeling of encountering ideas directly. His work is about the things I care most about: memory, threshholds, solitude, work (usually the work of hands), dangerous loves, half-remembered songs and scars of all kinds. It is a particular constellation of thoughts and experiences, so particular to me, I sometimes feel, that I'm unsure if I'm reading or if I'm the one being read.
The kind of hushed attention that Ondaatje brings to his work isn't to everyone's taste. His lyricism leaves some sceptical. The shadowed and prismatic prose regularly runs into unsympathetic critics. But that is precisely what I value about it. Here's a celebrated writer, celebrated and loved by many, who can't stop taking risks on the page, who can't stop making one-of-a-kind books. To read him is to understand that he's very good at being free. No noisy certainties here. His ambiguities are quiet and precise. I want to be like that when I grow up.
• Teju Cole's Open City has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award.
THE GUARDIAN
2010
2011
2013
2015
2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
006 My hero / Ted Hughes by Michael Morpurgo (Kiss)
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
006 My hero / Ted Hughes by Michael Morpurgo (Kiss)
2010
036 My hero / Rober Lowell by Jonathan Raban (Kiss)
2011
100 My hero / Tomas Tranströmer (Kiss)
2013
2015
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