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In the Skin of a Lion

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In the 1920 and 30’s Toronto is building a bridge under and over the lake and when that’s done a waterworks is started. Patrick says he will tell Hana on the drive who Clara is, and more stories of his and her mother’s life. Prominence is given to the construction of two Toronto landmarks, the Prince Edward Viaduct, commonly known as the Bloor Street Viaduct, and the R. The ways our main character Patrick Lewis learns how to be in the world and develops his craft is by watching his father. I was on the creative writing course, and by the spring term I was living almost entirely by night, watching the other lights go out and come back on, sometime before dawn.

Patrick confronts Harris about his extravagance and his project that caused so many men to die building it. The hero of the book is Patrick Lewis, an explosives expert who nurses a broken heart among the immigrant Macedonians and Finns.I find this author difficult as I am never sure what the point of the stories are and this book was the same. I will re read it again though as the language is complex and there are things that still do not make totally sense in my head. Patrick finds Small living in a house owned by a timber company, and Small attempts to set him on fire—once by dropping kerosene on him and then by throwing a Molotov cocktail. People die in waters, committed crimes with its help, escaped prisons by painting themselves a fresh hue of blue.

Patrick and Hana thus embark on a journey at dawn, taking the car for a four-hour trip to Marmora, Ontario, where Clara is waiting for them.Ondaatje is clearly someone who can create a burning solvent in a lab that steams words beyond their summit of representation and into the scalding approach of what is real. The novel lets us see the birth of Toronto through the eyes of the immigrant construction workers that built it. In 2009, a passage from "The Bridge" was placed at the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto, becoming the inaugural "bookmark" for Project Bookmark Canada, and marking the beginning of Canada's literary trail .

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 meantime, in Toronto, Commissioner Harris presides over the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct. A nun did fall from the Viaduct before its completion, multi-theatre owner, Ambrose Small, did disappear, and the murder of two labour union organizers at the time was an unfortunate reality. Reading this book was like a vivid dream, were you would wake up and want to tell someone all about it. Though sparingly described, they seem more familiar than the characters so exhaustively cataloged in much pomo fiction.

I re-read this novel about once a year, and every time the first cracking of the spine is an almost spiritual experience. Back in Toronto, Patrick finds a job in the tunnels for the waterworks that Commissioner Harris is now building. One that stands out for me are skaters, on a creek, in the dark of night, each holding a sheaf of blazing cats’ tails before them.

But it is not universally accessible: it demands a certain amount of stillness, to channel Yann Martel for a moment, that I couldn’t quite provide this time around. I don't know if I can boast of reading it as soon as it was published, in the spring of 1987, though when I think of the book I also think of that time of my life: sitting in an evil little breeze-block room in the student residences at the University of East Anglia, with a view of other evil little breeze-block rooms.With an introduction by Anne EnrightBefore the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. When Alice joins them, Patrick is amazed by the friendship and complicity that exists between the two women. It sheds light on the exploitation of immigrants, the godly powers of city officials, and how expensive civilian unrest can be. Despite her frequent stories about her relationship with Cato, Alice refuses to talk about her past, focusing instead on her present and future.

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