Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,6, University of Tubingen, language: English, abstract: This essay will argue that the life of the immigrant in Michael Ondaatje's "In the Skin of a Lion" is represented as hard, but also that the presence of the immigrants changed the city of Toronto in a positive way. The term paper will first introduce the author of "In the Skin of a Lion" and then compare the characters from the book by explaining the immigrant and native status. Furthermore, it will give an overview of the immigrants who changed the city of Toronto. At the end, this paper will point out today's immigration life with all of its difficulties.

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

Michael Ondaatje is the first comprehensive and fully up-to-date study of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje’s beginnings as a poet, this volume offers an intensive account of each of his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work. The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje’s career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer. As the fullest account of Ondaatje’s work to date, Spinks’s approach draws on a range of postcolonial theory and, as well as being a landmark in Ondaatje scholarship, makes a distinctive contribution to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.

Annotation It is an event in literary criticism and culture scholarship that we have new studies on the work of such an original writer as Michael Ondaatje. In this collection, some of the most perceptive scholars working in cultural and literary studies examine Ondaatje's texts - his poetry, his novels In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient (novel and film), and Anil's Ghost.

Winning a Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Anil’s Ghost is another award-winning novel from Michael Ondaatje. Steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition, Sri Lanka has been ravaged in the late twentieth century by bloody civil war. Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka but educated in England and the U.S., is sent by an international human rights group to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders in her homeland. Working with an archaeologist, she discovers a skeleton whose identity takes Anil on a fascinating journey that involves a riveting mystery. What follows, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love and loss, about family, identity and the unknown enemy. And it is a quest to unlock the hidden past—like a handful of soil analyzed by an archaeologist, the story becomes more diffuse the farther we reach into history. A universal tale of the casualties of war, unfolding as a detective story, the book gradually gives way to a more intricate exploration of its characters, a symphony of loss and loneliness haunted by a cast of solitary strangers and ghosts. The atrocities of a seemingly futile, muddled war are juxtaposed against the ancient, complex and ultimately redemptive culture and landscape of Sri Lanka.

From Giller Prize-winning author Michael Redhill comes a literary thriller about a woman who fears for her sanity--and then her life--when she learns that her doppelganger has appeared in a local park. Jean Mason has a doppelganger. She's never seen her, but others swear they have. Apparently, her identical twin hangs out in Kensington Market, where she sometimes buys churros and drags an empty shopping cart down the streets, like she's looking for something to put in it. Jean's a grown woman with a husband and two kids, as well as a thriving bookstore in downtown Toronto, and she doesn't rattle easily--not like she used to. But after two customers insist they've seen her double, Jean decides to investigate. She begins at the crossroads of Kensington Market: a city park called Bellevue Square. Although she sees no one who looks like her, it only takes a few visits to the park for her to become obsessed with the possibility of encountering her twin in the flesh. With the aid of a small army of locals who hang around in the park, she expands her surveillance, making it known she'll pay for information or sightings. A peculiar collection of drug addicts, scam artists, philanthropists, philosophers and vagrants--the regulars of Bellevue Square--are eager to contribute to Jean's investigation. But when some of them start disappearing, she fears her alleged double has a sinister agenda. Unless Jean stops her, she and everyone she cares about will face a fate much stranger than death.