In the Skin of a Lion

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It is a book with many pleasures, romantic and poetic in part, and greatly rewarding for anyone who wishes to read some thought provoking stuff. For some reason, I always choose to read a complex or very “literary” type of novel on what turn out to be my busiest weeks. Patrick confronts Harris about his extravagance and his project that caused so many men to die building it. Exquisite and musical, In the Skin of a Lion is a novel that challenges the boundary between history and myth.

The viaduct was to be a double-decked truss arched bridge, carrying water, electricity and traffic and linking eastern Toronto with the city center.

And in between all of this, he gives us a sweet and sad story of immigrants, torn between destitution and the promise of the New World, between loves past and loves present, between rich and poor, that are vivid, precise, lived-in.

Patrick’s investigations lead him to Small’s lover, the actress Clara Dickens, with whom Patrick soon falls in love. This felt to me like Ondaatje had a lot of beautiful images in his head that he wanted to string together, but had no cohesive, workable story, so instead, he opted for the pastiche of past and present, from the perspectives of a dozen different people, so he could get them out but hide the fact that the story was weak. Her friend Alice is the former lover of Cato, a labour agitator, who is murdered at Onion Lake, near Thunder Bay. 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.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.

The scene has some of the hypnagogic strangeness of all false falls: the stair we miss as we fall asleep.

As a young man, Patrick leaves the profession that killed his father and sets out to find the vanished millionaire Ambrose Small. This explains the italicized prologue that all of the stories in this novel are being told to a young girl on a drive in a car. When they go to Clara’s friend Alice Gull’s country house for a few days, Patrick learns more about Clara’s past life, and in particular her erotic anecdotes, but he feels that a part of her will always remain out of his reach.