To celebrate Sri Lankan human rights activist Sunila Abeysekera's work in Sri Lanka, and her 2007 award of human rights defender from Human Rights Watch, we will be reading Michael Ondaatje's novel, "Anil's Ghost" set in Sri Lanka. This is the same author who wrote "The English Patient". Here is an audio excerpt of the novel.
We had a very interesting discussion about Anil's Ghost. This book was for most readers in our group a very interesting read. In some ways the book was very much a personal story about the main characters. It could have been a story set anywhere in the world where ongoing violence and civil war has shaped people's lives and deaths.
We noticed how the novel uncovered beauty in the landscape, in people, and in life in spite of the violence and ugliness of civil war. The way the novel is written evokes a chaotic, otherworldly, unsettled, insecure and shuttered/closed-off atmosphere created by the ongoing civil war. At the same time, this chaos is echoed in the character Anil's own personal state of mind. This chaotic, insecure and emotional element of Anil's life is also in stark contrast to her job as a forensic scientist who is looking for truth and fact.
We found that the book was an absorbing and personal look into the complexities of doing work in conflict zones, something particularly interesting because of Human Rights Watch's role in sending researchers out into conflict zones to do research on human rights abuses.
For more information on Sri Lanka, and to read the reports produced by HRW researchers, click here.
We had a very interesting discussion about Anil's Ghost. This book was for most readers in our group a very interesting read. In some ways the book was very much a personal story about the main characters. It could have been a story set anywhere in the world where ongoing violence and civil war has shaped people's lives and deaths.
We noticed how the novel uncovered beauty in the landscape, in people, and in life in spite of the violence and ugliness of civil war. The way the novel is written evokes a chaotic, otherworldly, unsettled, insecure and shuttered/closed-off atmosphere created by the ongoing civil war. At the same time, this chaos is echoed in the character Anil's own personal state of mind. This chaotic, insecure and emotional element of Anil's life is also in stark contrast to her job as a forensic scientist who is looking for truth and fact.
We found that the book was an absorbing and personal look into the complexities of doing work in conflict zones, something particularly interesting because of Human Rights Watch's role in sending researchers out into conflict zones to do research on human rights abuses.
For more information on Sri Lanka, and to read the reports produced by HRW researchers, click here.
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