Rating: 
Summary: Stunning Insight
Review: Michael Ondaatje has the ability to look at things in new ways. In The English Patient he gave us new insight into World War Two and how it affected people of different backgrounds. Anil's Ghost is set in recent times in Sri Lanka; a scene of immense trouble and shocking violence. It is an indictment on us that the Sri Lankan civil war was not all that well known or understood in the western world. With Ondaatje's empathy for his homeland expressed through his lyrical prose we can now reflect on the extreme situations of lesser known parts of the world.
That is one reason why Anil's Ghost should be essential reading. Ondaatje, with his background in the east and the west, can and does explore the maze of Sri Lankan culture and politics. And what powers of observation the writer possesses. There's plenty else too. Archeology,forensic sciences, culture and religion are all examined.
As a bonus it's a great story with and intriguing mystery at the centre of the plot. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Despite all the meandering, a good book
Review: I hate to admit it, but I enjoyed the book. I say I hate to admit it because the book just simply meandered too much -- flowing into the past, going hither and yon, digging into parts of the past that really didn't reveal much about the characters. The information about Sarath and his brother, ultimately, proved fairly revealing, but all that stuff about Anil and her friend Leaf could have been left out in favor of more information about the political underpinnings of the novel. We get hints, for example, that Sarath may have mixed motives in his involvement in working with Anil, but they are never made clear, so Anil's actions toward the end of the novel don't make as much sense.
Still, what makes "Anil's Ghost" worthwhile is Ondaatje's beautiful, poetic writing style, his unerring sense of place, and his ability to reveal layers of characters, like pealing layers of an onion. And yes, sometimes making us cry in the process. I expect to see this book not only perused in book clubs, but in college literature classes as well, as students ponder Ondaatje's use of water, of eyes and faces, of family relations, in this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Drudgery
Review: I really wanted to give this book a chance, but am abandoning that notion. I'm halfway through it and it has become a chore to finish it. I came to this site to check out the reviews to see if other readers say it gets better towards the end, but it doesn't seem so. Overall, it seems that the readers either loved it or hated it. Unfortunately, I am of the latter opinion for the very same reasons that the ones who didn't enjoy the novel.
Rating:
Summary: Luminous
Review: Ondaatje has written a brilliant book of light and shadows. Anil is a young Sri Lankan woman, a forensic scientist, educated in Britain and the U.S. who returns to Sri Lanka on a project to exhume victims of the brutal three-way civil war that randomly slaughtered civilians there in the 1980s and 90s. Chaos, fear, and anarchy hang ominously over the story - a truck driver nailed to the road, assassinations by suicide bombers, a human rights worker who quits her job because she can no longer keep straight the details of all the massacres. The prose is penetrating, Ondaatje's imagination is vivid. The book is constructed as a series of anecdotes, sometimes teasingly out of order, some breathtakingly powerful, some happily trivial, that explore and illuminate Anil and the Sri Lankan brothers she befriends: Sareth the mystical and forbearing archaeologist, Gamini the obsessively self-contained physician who thrives in apocalyptic emergency rooms. "Anil's Ghost" is luminous, a book to be read slowly. The texture of the prose is liquid on the tongue. Anil is a powerfully-drawn complicated character. Westernized and introspective, she resents the utter lack of privacy throughout Sri Lanka and the sympathy she feels for its people. Self-possessed, in one of the most amazing scenes as a schoolgirl she insists on buying her brother's name and remains "Anil" ever after. She will make you think about many things: the insidious power of history, the gravitational pull of family and place, the futility of violence without cause, the corrosiveness of fear, and the fatal consequences of secrecy. Ondaatje is quite simply a great writer and this is a magnificent book, powerful, evocative, and brilliantly-written.
Rating: 
Summary: Like a lazy flowing river
Review: Ondaatje's writing is flawless. His continued exploration into the boundaries of narrative style are brave and interesting. The story and the characters however lack the power of what I enjoyed so much in the English Patient. Drifting and hazy are the adjectives that really stick with me when I think back on the book. Although it was enjoyable and engrossing, in the end, I felt the subject-matter covered by this book warranted a more powerful story. I really wanted to like it. But in fact, the subject deserved a more dynamic and focused story, and I don't think Ondaatje's style was a a good fit here.
Rating:
Summary: Rare Beauty
Review: Ondaatje has, in Anil's Ghost, managed to convey the full horror and senselessness of civil war/genocide. Through all-too-human, vulnerable and flawed but deeply honorable characters, he takes us through the madness that has taken hold of Sri Lanka (but could be any other country riven by warring factions) and personalized it so that we get a clear and painful inside look at how people are destroyed, both physically and emotionally. His language is simple yet profoundly eloquent, spare (as only a poet can make it) and sharpened so finely that the overall effect is akin to a slim blade through the heart. For anyone who's ever wondered what it might be like to have your homeland eviscerated from the inside out, Anil's Ghost will supply all the answers. It's an exquisite, heartbreaking book. Most highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!
Review: I have read many of Michael Ondaatje's work, and in my eyes this is by far the best. Having grown up in Sri Lanka during the years in which all of what Ondaatje talks about happened, it brought back memories from my childhood. Ondaatje has done a good job of summing up what exactly happened through the 1980's and 90's. It is an amazing work of literature which takes the experinces of two people, and has been able to portray what went through many a person's mind during that time. For me it has reinforced the reason behind my working towards being a war correspondent - Ondaatje has reminded me what it was like to grown up with war all around. Anyone that enjoyed his work 'The English Patient', will most definitely enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: haunting
Review: this book is so engrossing that it is hard to figure out what to make of it until you are done and can get some perspective. it is also one of those books which absolutely cannot be evaluated until the very ending because of the how subtly all-encompassing the climax is. i liked this book okay while reading it, but having read it, i loved it. it's the story of anil, a forensic anthropologist, raised in Sri Lanka, but now comfortably western, who returns to her homeland on a mission from Amnesty International to uncover and give names to the nameless bodies of the bloody civil war ravaging the land. She comes across forensic evidence that can prove government-sactioned killings. her partner is sarath, as interpollated in the vortex of wartime Sri Lanka as Anil is distant from it. Maybe she can trust him, maybe she cannot. He studied to be an archaeologist, but unlike his blind teacher he cannot withdraw to a life of a hermit in the woods. Still, for most of the book he is stranded on a moral impasse, unlike his brother, who is completely immersed in his lifestyle as a war doctor, grim, hopeless, with no end of corpses in sight. there is death, blood, torture--and yet the book is written in dreamlike prose, where the sense of time is suspended, and any urgency is contexutualized within the larger scope of history that permeates the book in the passions of the character, in the leitmotif of Buddha's statues that need to be given eyes by artists who cannot look directly at the deity's face while they paint. In some ways it's a story about a nation brought face to face with something as horrible as Medusa's head in the Greek myth, something that should never be looked directly in the face. Most of all it's a story about haunting nostalgia, horror of war, coming to terms with one's responsibility and trying to chart a way to do the best thing when it is virtually impossible to do so.
Rating:
Summary: Slow paced and thought provoking
Review: As I finished this book, I wasn't really sure how I felt about it. Some of the sections are just haunting, and the prose is beautiful. But the overall pace of the book is very slow, and there is no compelling plotline. It's possible to pick the book up, read a couple of pages, and then put the book back down again for days. So it's not a summer, take to the beach, book. But if that's not what you're looking for, this is a beautiful book.
Rating:
Summary: A most elusive world of phantoms
Review: Michael Ondaatje certainly has a gift for presenting elusive characters and situations, and none moreso than Anil and the Sri Lanka she chooses to return to. One is swept away by Ondaatje's flowing narrative. There is such a remarkable ease to his writing. However, upon closer inspection something seems to be missing. Ondaatje doesn't seem to really get into the minds of his characters. They are more or less figurative pieces, almost poetic in nature, incapable of hard thought. However, Anil is supposed to be a forensic specialist so one expects more out of her. Her search for the identity of "Sailor" has all the allusions of being a self-exploratory search, but in the end we don't really find out much about Anil except a few odd facts. Ondaatje uses forensics more as a metaphor than an actual pallbearer for his ideas. Anil would have better served on a truth and reconciliation committee than in a special U.N. forensics team. It leads me to wonder if Mr. Ondaatje actually found something upon his return to Sri Lanka, or rather chose to use this dystopic setting as a device for presenting his own disillusionment with the western world. The ending is too pat, indicating to me that Ondaatje grew tired and weary, much like Anil, who never seemed to come to terms with her "ghost."
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