AUTHORS
What: Michael Ondaatje in conversation with Steven Price
Where: Alix Goolden Performance Hall
When: Sunday, June 3. Doors, 7 p.m., talk 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $40, $50 including book, at Munro’s Books or online at munrobooks.com
Victoria author Steven Price first came to Michael Ondaatje’s work through his poetry. At 18, the former University of Victoria poetry student was reading modern poetry for the first time.
“One of the first poems I ever read was an Ondaatje poem that just astonished me. It felt so alive and vibrant and living,” Price said this week as he recalled the sensuousness of The Cinnamon Peeler.
When the two men sit down together at Alix Goolden Performance Hall on Sunday evening, it is unlikely they’ll have time to talk about poetry.
“I have so many questions I could ask,” said Price, author of the Giller-nominated By Gaslight. “But I’d like to keep the focus on his new book.”
Warlight is Ondaatje’s first book in seven years. It is the story of Nathaniel and Rachel, teenage siblings left to unravel their parents’ secrets after an abrupt and unexplained estrangement in 1945 postwar London.
“I think it’s exquisite. I think it’s beautiful,” Price said. “Everything Michael Ondaatje writes is beautiful. But this feels like it’s both pushing into a new place for him, as well as returning to the same kinds of themes that we’ve seen in his work over the years.”
These are questions of identity and the fundamental problem of who we are in the present and who we are in our own memories and how our memories of the past form the present and determine our fates, Price said.
“The real richness of the book is the novel’s tension. It has to do with the fact the story is being told as a retrospective tale by the brother and he’s looking back on those years, trying to make sense of them.”
Ondaatje, 74, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 1992 for The English Patient, and the Giller Prize for Anil’s Ghost, will read from Warlight. Then Price will ask him about the book, where it came from, how he wrote it.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Price said. “I’m excited. I’ve been an admirer of his work for a very long time. He’s one of the great writers of the English language, not just in Canada, but of the language itself.
“It’s always fascinating to have the opportunity to meet these people, hear the sorts of things they have to say, listen to the way that they think. I’m given to understand that Michael Ondaatje is a generous, kind and lovely man. I think it will be a wonderful evening for everybody.”
Jessica Paul, events manager at Munro’s Books, said she had heard from lots of customers that Warlight is wonderful and stunning.
“I think it’s going to be absolutely fantastic. We’ve had many big names in the past, but Michael Ondaatje is certainly up there,” Paul said.
“This is one of our biggest authors in the past two years.”
Ondaatje is now a contender for the Golden Man Booker Prize, one of five finalists created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize for fiction. A panel of judges selected one book from each decade since the Booker was founded in 1969. The winner will be announced on July 8.
The English Patient is competing against Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively and In A Free State by V.S. Naipaul.
Tickets for Sunday’s event can be pre-ordered. One ticket with one book costs $40; two tickets with one book are $50.
