MICHAEL ONDAATJE'S FICTION: Poetics of Exile

The Booker Prize winning author Michael Ondaatje is a powerful presence among contemporary writers and especially amongst the diaspora. His poetics traverses diverse terrains, times and genres working across histories, memories and spaces, opening up pathways between life and art. The present book explores the multiple dimensions of Ondaatje’s works and attempts to present a critique of his poetics in the larger context of the poetics of exile. Poetics of exile is a theoretical approach of significance in the works of the writers who live away from their cultures of origin, and is illustrative of the way in which writers inhabit, adopt and interpret cultures as they open up spaces of negotiations between the hitherto segregated worlds.

The present work is an in-depth study not only of Ondaatje’s fiction, such as The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost but moving beyond them looks closely at his poetry and his negotiations of myths from other cultures as in Billy the Kid and In the Skin of the Lion. The final chapter also provides an insightful analysis of his latest work Divisadero, adding to the overall view of the writer’s engagement with the problematics of the self and the other. Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction: Poetics of Exile adds a comprehensive critique to the Ondaatje critical corpus as a whole and to the poetics of exile in particular.