Bøger af Michael Ondaatje

"Et stille mesterværk." Weekendavisen»Ondaatjes vidunderlige roman er en roman om alt det gådefulde i livet og om at lade fortællinger vokse frem af det lidt, man ved med sikkerhed.« – InformationPolitiken 5 hjerter Berlingske 5 stjerner Jyllands-Posten 5 stjernerKRIGSLYS ER EN ROMAN om eventyr og kærlighed, intriger og begær. Året er 1945 og vi møder den fjortenårige Nathaniel og hans storesøster Rachel som bliver efterladt i London i Natsværmerens varetægt da deres forældre flytter til Singapore. De to søskende mistænker at Natsværmeren er kriminel efterhånden som de lærer hans excentriske gruppe af venner at kende: mænd og kvinder som har det til fælles at de var involveret i en mystisk tjeneste under krigen. De virker nu alle sammen opsatte på at beskytte og oplære Rachel og Nathaniel. Men er de virkelig det de udgiver sig for at være? Og hvad betyder det når de to søskendes mor kommer tilbage efter måneders tavshed, uden deres far, uden at forklare noget, uden at undskylde for noget?Mange år senere begynder Nathaniel at afdække alt det han ikke vidste eller forstod på det tidspunkt, og det er denne rejse – gennem fakta, minder, og fantasi – han fortæller om i dette mesterværk fra en af de store forfattere i vores tid. Michael Ondaatje blev født på Ceylon i 1943, men flyttede som dreng til England, hvorfra han i 1962 emigrerede til Canada. Han har et stort forfatterskab bag sig og fik i 2018 The Golden Man Booker Prize for Den engelske patient – som den bedste Bookerprisvinder i 50 år.»Krigslys er endnu et stilfærdigt mesterværk af Michael Ondaatje … En elegant thriller med samme magnetiske tiltrækningskraft som et mørkt eventyr.« – Washington PostFørste oplag blev udsolgt på fem dage.

"English Patient" is the winner of the 1992 Booker Prize.

The Conversations is a treasure, essential for any lover or student of film, and a rare, intimate glimpse into the worlds of two accomplished artists who share a great passion for film and storytelling, and whose knowledge and love of the crafts of writing and film shine through. It was on the set of the movie adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, that Michael Ondaatje met the master film and sound editor Walter Murch, and the two began a remarkable personal conversation about the making of films and books in our time that continued over two years. From those conversations stemmed this enlightened, affectionate book -- a mine of wonderful, surprising observations and information about editing, writing and literature, music and sound, the I-Ching, dreams, art and history. The Conversations is filled with stories about how some of the most important movies of the last thirty years were made and about the people who brought them to the screen. It traces the artistic growth of Murch, as well as his friends and contemporaries -- including directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Fred Zinneman and Anthony Minghella -- from the creation of the independent, anti-Hollywood Zoetrope by a handful of brilliant, bearded young men to the recent triumph of Apocalypse Now Redux. Among the films Murch has worked on are American Graffiti, The Conversation, the remake of A Touch of Evil, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (all three), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The English Patient. "Walter Murch is a true oddity in Hollywood. A genuine intellectual and renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with film making and his whole generation of filmmakers. He knows, probably, where a lot of the bodies are buried."

Transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war.

By the age of twenty-one, Billy the Kid had killed a man for each year he'd been alive. Then he was shot dead in the night by a man he once called a friend.Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Each is haunted by the riddle of the fourth member, an English patient -- a nameless, burned man whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning novelist, a gorgeous and most of all surprising poetry collection about memory, love, and the act of looking back'His thrilling poems often read like exquisite, unwritten Ondaatje novels'Independent on SundayFollowing several of his internationally acclaimed, beloved novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje's long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes wittily funny, moving and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and abandoned landscapes we hold onto to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Moliere's chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to a California coast, and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges his past and present, in the way memory and the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence all that surrounds him.These poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world who has never conformed to western traditions - always describing himself as a 'mongrel', someone who contains multitudes. Looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss, this is an intercultural and brave book. Poetry - where language is made to work hardest - is what Ondaatje has returned to, and this is both an intimate personal record of a life lived and a great artist's guide to the vital, various world around us.

"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso.

Die junge Liebe zwischen Anna und Coop nimmt ein gewaltsames Ende, als Annas Vater sie entdeckt. Auf verschlungenen Wegen gehen die Getrennten fortan durchs Leben: Coop betäubt seinen Lebensschmerz in den Spielhöllen von Las Vegas beim Poker. Seine an Übersinnlichkeit grenzende Begabung macht ihn zu einem der gefürchtetsten Spieler der Szene. Anna flüchtet nach Südfrankreich, wo sie sich völlig der Arbeit an einer Künstlerbiographie hingibt. Michael Ondaatje führt uns mitten hinein in einen Strudel aus Leidenschaft, Verlust und Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  Michael Ondaatje, 1943 in Sri Lanka geboren, lebt heute in Toronto. Mit seinem Roman "Der englische Patient" für den er den Booker-Preis erhielt, wurde er weltberühmt.

Auf einem gewaltigen Dampfer reisen drei Jungen zu Beginn der 50er Jahre von Sri Lanka nach England. Für den elfjährigen Michael und seine Freunde wird die Überfahrt zu einem unvergeßlichen Erlebnis. Immer auf der Suche nach Abenteuern treiben sich die drei herum, beobachten und spioniere - und werden Zeugen dramatischer Ereignisse. Im Rückblick erkennt Michael die lebensprägende Bedeutung der lang zurückliegenden Seereise und erinnert sich ...

1945, kurze nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, lassen die Eltern des 14-jährigen Nathaniel ihn zusammen mit seiner Schwester Rachel allein in London zurück. Die Kinder bleiben in der Obhut des mysteriösen Mannes. Sie vermuten, dass er ein im Schmuggler sein könnte, doch sie geben ihre Vorbehalte auf, als sie seine exzentrischen Freunde kennenlernen. Es sind Männer und Frauen, die im Krieg an verschiedenen Missionen teilgenommen hatten. Sie werden zur Ersatzfamilie für Nathanael und Rachel. Ihre Erziehung ist dabei fürsorglich wie unkonventionell. Doch sind diese Menschen in Wahrheit auch jene, für sie sich geben? Ebenso eigenartig ist die Rückkehr der Mutter der beiden, ohne den Vater, ohne irgendeine Erklärung zu geben und ohne sich zu entschuldigen. Zwölf Jahre später beginnt Nathaniel all das aufzudecken, was er in jener Zeit nicht wissen und nicht verstehen konnte – und dieses Unternehmen erzählt Ondaatje anhand von Fakten, Erinnerungen und Phantasie in einem seiner schönsten Romane.Michael Ondaatje, 1943 in Sri Lanka geboren, lebt heute in Toronto. Mit seinem Roman "Der englische Patient" für den er den Booker-Preis erhielt, wurde er weltberühmt.

Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday TimesBased on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb which he was unable to stop.

'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed... I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.'Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with his siblings and children, Ondaatje gathers rumours, anecdotes, poems, records and memories to piece together this fragmented portrayal of his family's past, his father's destructive alcoholism and the colourful stories and secrets of ancestors both disgraced and adored throughout centuries of Sri Lankan society.In an exotic, evocative portrait of the heat, wildlife, sounds and silences of the Sri Lankan landscape, Ondaatje combines vivid recreations of a privileged, eccentric older generation with a deeply personal reconciliatory journey in which he explores his own ghosts, and how his family's extraordinary history continues to influence his life.

Michael Ondaatje's selected poems,The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection,Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.

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.

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the ';cat's table'as far from the Captain's Table as can bewith a ragtag group of ';insignificant' adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature. The narrator's elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to see himself ';with a distant eye' for the first time, and to feel the first stirring of desire. Another Cat's Table denizen, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy's adult years, it tells a spellbinding storyby turns poignant and electrifyingabout the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.

With unsettling beauty and intelligence, this Golden Man Booker Prizewinning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companionsand whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in Northern California a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is shattered by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada's casinos and eventually to the landscape of southern France. As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past.

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

From the Booker Prize-winning author comes the sparkling and lyrical predecessor to the bestselling The English Patient.

Året er 1954. Skibet Oronsay stævner ud fra havnen i Ceylon med kurs mod England. For den blot 11-årige dreng Michael bliver den 21 dage lange sørejse over Det Indiske Ocean, gennem Suezkanalen og Middelhavet på alle måder en opdagelsesrejse. I skibets spisesal placeres han ved 'kattens bord', så langt væk fra kaptajnens bord som man kan komme. Her bliver han venner med de jævnaldrende drenge Cassius og Ramadhin og møder et farverigt galleri af medpassagerer, som åbner for hidtil ukendte verdener, hvor venskab, kærlighed og en vågnende seksualitet sidder til bords med halsbrækkende vovemod, heksekunst og mordere."Jeg elsker den her bog: drengene i fuld frihed under den lange sejlads, hvordan en voksenverden som de ikke forstår, åbenbarer sig, tabet af fortiden og begyndelsen på fremtiden, og tilmed en slags thriller midt i det hele! Og sprogets skønhed. Perfektion." - Salman Rushdie"Kattens bord er skrevet med et skønt overskud. Ondaatje har nydt at skrive sig op imod Mark Twain, den klassisk raske drengebog, og både Kipling og Conrad rumsterer i kulissen. Men Kattens bord er meget mere end en pastiche. Som erindringsroman gemmer den på personlige erfaringer. Ud af drengen Michael springer selvportrættet af romanens voksne forfatter som et menneske, der på den hårde måde tidligt lærte at passe på sig selv og holde hjertet på behørig afstand. Så Kattens bord er blandt meget andet også en bog om livet, der glider forbi og forvandles til kunst. En alkymistisk proces, Michael Ondaatje har gode forudsætninger for at udføre." - Kim Skotte, Politiken, ♥♥♥♥♥

“Jeg elsker den her bog: drengene i fuld frihed under den lange sejlads, hvordan en voksenverden som de ikke forstår åbenbarer sig, tabet af fortiden og begyndelsen på fremtiden, og tilmed en slags thriller midt i det hele! Og sprogets skønhed. Perfektion.” SALMAN RUSHDIE“Kattens bord er magisk, en bog fuld af kærlighed.” TEJU COLEI skibets spisesal placeres Michael ved KATTENS BORD, så langt væk fra kaptajnens bord som man kan komme. Her møder han et farverigt galleri af medpassagerer som åbner for hidtil ukendte verdener. Der er miss Lasqueti som bærer rundt på brevduer i sine forede lommer og læser kriminalromaner som hun i skuffelse og frustration slynger over bord. Der er botanikeren mr. Daniels som har den mest vidunderlig have med giftige og euforiserende planter i skibets dyb, og den afdankede men flamboyante pianist mr. Mazappa som introducerer ham for musikkens grænseløse verden. Der er den spøgelsesagtige skrædder mr. Gunesekera, hvis tavse læber holder på mange hemmeligheder, og den berygtede straffefange, som luftes på dækket om natten. Men først og fremmest får han to nye venner, Cassius og Ramadhin, som han udforsker skibet og livet sammen med, og så er der gensynet med hans smukke kusine Emily, som bliver hans fortrolige og vækker hans lyster.ANMELDERNE SKREV“… en eventyrlig beretning, en meditation over magt, erindring, kunst, barndom, kærlighed og tab … en af de sjældne bøger som man kan læse igen og igen og altid opdage noget nyt.” LONDON EVENING STANDARD“Det er en vidunderlig roman: fuld af undere.” DAILY TELEGRAPHMichael Ondaatje blev født på Ceylon i 1943, men flyttede som dreng til England, hvorfra han i 1962 emigrerede til Canada. Han har et stort forfatterskab bag sig og fik i 1992 Bookerprisen for Den engelske patient.