Man-Eater of Punanai: A Journey of Discovery to the Jungles of Old Ceylon

Rating:
Summary: A Philanthropist re-visits the ghosts of his father
Review: Christopher Ondaatje is almost a billionaire and a well known philanthropist. This wonderful book combines a travelogue and autobiography including a commentary on his brother's work "Running in the family" by Michael Ondaatje.

The best thing about this book are the pictures. Only a picture edition in colour works. Not the subsequent black and white paperback reprints.

Most of the book is set as a trip to Sri Lanka visiting Punanai where there lived a man eating leopard in the 1920s. This trip is actually a recreation of trips with his father in the 1940s, a search for a lost childhood and a devil that drove Christopher's father and drives him - symbolised by the leopard.

Interspersed with this is a story of the Ondaatjes in Sri Lanka, particularly with reference to his family - his father, mother, siblings and himself.

It is also an account of Sri Lanka written impartially, in the worst throes of civil war in the late 1980s with Tamil Tiger rebels fighting for a separate state.

Ondaatje visits troubled territory, but is eager to photograph leopards at Yala national park. His photos of people, animals and monuments are breathtaking. Some of the best taken. So much colour and poignancy, like portraits of a totally exotic world.

This book is something of a triumph where Ondaatje, without embelishment talks about the secrets of his own success. Determination, perseverence, his background. This is probably as close as he will get to an autobiography. Much is hidden - his family comes first. By his own account his best book.

A wonderful if sometimes stressful journey through past and present.