Contemporary Literary Criticism | Ondaatje, Michael - Constance Merritt (review date spring 2001)

Constance Merritt (review date spring 2001)

SOURCE: Merritt, Constance. Review of Handwriting: Poems, by Michael Ondaatje. Prairie Schooner 75, no. 1 (spring 2001): 182-84.

[In the following review, Merritt compares the historical themes and narrative elements of Handwriting with those of Running in the Family.]

As in his 1982 memoir Running in the Family, the subject and setting of Handwriting, Michael Ondaatje's latest book of poems, is Sri Lanka, the author's birthplace and childhood home; here comparisons end. Contrasts, however, abound. Whereas the memoir is a diffuse, meandering affair, cobbled out of anecdote, inference and rumor; Handwriting—spare, imagistic, lyrical—is a deep spell woven of history, imagination, and the chiaroscuro of fairy tale. While the memoir recites seemingly endless accounts of the shenanigans and social rounds of the prominent, European-influenced families of...

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