In the Skin of a Lion

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In the water works that Commissioner Harris embarks upon after the bridge is completed, "The brass railings curved up three flights like an immaculate fiction. Sometimes their stories touch and correlate and sometimes they don't, dissolving like wisps of spider silk in the early morning sunlight. The hero of the book is Patrick Lewis, an explosives expert who nurses a broken heart among the immigrant Macedonians and Finns. As in other novels, Ondaatje presents an intriguing set of characters who fight the good fight of life and arouse our sympathy when they are inevitably crushed by harshness of this cruel world.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. I was on the creative writing course, and by the spring term I was living almost entirely by night, watching the other lights go out and come back on, sometime before dawn. After she sends a doctor for him, the two of them make love, leaving bloodstains on the sheets from Patrick’s wounds. Radnja ovog romana je smeštena u Torontu početkom XX veka gde se preduzimaju kapitalni radovi poput izgradnje visećeg mosta, kopanja tunela ispod jezera Ontario za potrebe novog vodovoda, prenos drvene građe rečnim tokovima.

Epic romantic films with Ralph Fiennes aside, Ondaatje's writing is top notch, and it doesn't get better than this one.

Frankly speaking, I did lose the plot half-way through to lap up all scenes between our main protagonists, Patrick Lewis, Alice Gull, and Clara Dickens.

This is a political novel that encompasses the frenetic construction of Toronto, the harsh winters and glorious summers of the Ontario countryside, the universal struggles of immigrants in a new world; above all it is 200 pages of absolutely sublime writing that somehow captures the pace and the thrill of pivotal moments both in history and in our lives. In the Skin of a Lion study guide contains a biography of Michael Ondaatje, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.