Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47832 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-14
• Released on: 1997-01-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A young man from the Canadian back country moves to Toronto and becomes involved with two actresses, experiencing love, despair and, eventually, compulsion to commit a violent act. "A spellbinding writer, Ondaatje exhibits a poet's sensibility and care for the precise, illuminating word," praised PW .
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In the Canadian wilderness, early in this century, Patrick Lewis grows up a child apart. Some time later in Toronto, an immigrant worker, suspended beneath the bridge he is helping to build, rescues from mid-air a nun swept away by the wind. The paths of these three people eventually cross, with explosive results. Born in Sri Lanka and now living in Canada, Ondaatje writes feelingly of the immigrant experience. That experiencethe ethnic mix, the battle against nature, the battle of worker against exploitationis familiar in outline but subtly different in detail because of the Canadian setting and Ondaatje's particular gifts. A fine poet, he gives us a series of piercing, beautifully controlled passages. If the novel finally spins out of controlepisodic, it seems not so much to resolve as dissolveit remains evocative throughout. Highly recommended for readers of serious fiction. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap
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.

Customer Reviews

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I cannot say that I fell in love with this book upon first reading--in fact, had I not been stuck waiting for several hours with nothing else to do, I probably would never have made it through. It is constructed very tediously, the structure being as intricate (and perhaps, as initially inaccessible) as the stylistic language itself.

That being said, there are reasons why this has taken and retained the role as one of my favorite books. The characters have been dismissed by many others as flighty, 2-dimensional, ephemeral, unconvincing--to me, their elusive quality is an incredible and attractive one (as reflected in the style of the writing itself). In a way each character is a poem grounded in the idea of a person; the language used to weave them into spidersilk existence is inexpressibly eloquent and beautiful.

For readers of prose poems & wistful, wandering works of art, this is the book for you. Read it once. Read it twice, savoring each world. Read it a third time and look at the embryonic world around you, and you might notice that you have started to break free.

Not Ondaatje at his best
I was completely floored by Ondaatje's 'Coming through the slaughter'. It is a superb novel of interconnected stories. 'In the skin of a lion' uses the same form and surpasses Slaughter in evoking atmosphere and imagery, but failed me as a whole. It is not a tour de force like Slaughter.

But: I compare Ondaatje with Ondaatje. I certainly think he is one of the best novelists of our time. And In the Skin of a Lion is a book worth reading.

In the Skin of A Lion
Stay with this book for the first 150 pages of mostly gritty stories about building the infra-structure of Toronto in the 1920's. Then, the poetic, magic realism, dreamy writing begins and it is beautiful and kind of crazy but fun to read. Enjoyable, thought provoking and interesting, that is all I can say.