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  • Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing by Milena Marinkova
  • Coral Ann Howells
Milena Marinkova , Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing (New York and London: Continuum/Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 224 pp. Cased. £60. ISBN 978-1-4411-9439-8. Paper. £24.99. ISBN 978-1-62356-302-8.

Milena Marinkova's book is that rare thing, an impassioned critical and theoretical study of one writer's collected works. When the writer is Michael Ondaatje, her emphasis on the reader's affective engagement is especially apt, for his fiction and poetr y always focus on representations of bodily experience, sensations and emotions, often in vividly cinematic ways: 'Such an aesthetic', Marinkova argues, 'forges an intimately embodied and ethically responsible relationship among audience, author, and text' (p. 4) where the literar y and the sociopolitical dimensions of the work intersect. The key word Marinkova uses to describe Ondaatje's creative practice and her own critical approach which argues for a fusion of the aesthetic and the political is 'haptic', a term appropriated from art and film criticism which lays emphasis on touch and texture rather than on what is seen. In a reading heavily influenced by affect theor y, Marinkova focuses on Ondaatje's narrative strategies, which create the illusion of substance and multisensor y appeal - his use of photographs, maps and drawings, his consistent emphasis on physical bodies and corporeal images, cinematic close-ups that blur the boundaries between reader and fictional protagonist, encouraging feelings of intimacy and empathy.

The book is structured in three main chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue, where 'haptic' is explicated via theoretical framings and wonderfully close readings of Ondaatje's texts. The first chapter, 'Haptic Writing as Affective Cinema', offers extended analyses of his early narratives Billy the Kid and Coming through Slaughter and his experimental 1970s films, while signalling his 'artistic indebtedness to the postmodern' (p. 56). The second, 'Haptic Aesthetics and Witness Writing', which treats his two South Asian texts, Running in the Family (1982) and Anil's Ghost (2000), is for me the most intriguing and coherent chapter with its subtle investigation of the affective and ethical difficulties of 'bearing witness to unwitnessed stories' (p. 68), be it Ondaatje's family history in pre-Independence Ceylon or human rights' abuses in post-Independence Sri Lanka. These situations are further complicated by the expatriate status of the main narrator or protagonist who are both distanced and implicated. Marinkova analyses Ondaatje's postmodern blend of historical fact and fiction in his excavation and reconstruction of these multi-voiced narratives and the writer's metafictional commentar y on these belated witnessing exercises. The third, 'Haptic Writing and Micropolitical Betrayals', discusses Ondaatje's breakthrough novels nationally and internationally, In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and The English Patient (1992), as prizewinning novel and film. With these historical novels Marinkova broaches interesting questions, not only about national and transnational identities, but also how Ondaatje negotiates the micropolitical as a form of private dialogue running beneath official histories, opening spaces for empathetic relation to [End Page 119] those others erased from the records. In the epilogue, Divisadero (2007) is treated briefly in a reprise of the thematics of this study, which ends with a gesture of inclusion to 'the responsive and responsible reader in each of us' (p. 141).

This book not only deserves to be read but needs to be read by anyone interested in Ondaatje, for it offers an innovative and intricately argued totalising approach to his often challenging postmodernist fictions.

Coral Ann Howells
University of London/University of Reading
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