
In the Skin of a Lion
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Narrated by:
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Tom McCamus
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By:
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Michael Ondaatje
Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth.
Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient.
©1987 Michael Ondaatje (P)2017 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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Transported
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Perhaps my new favorite book & Narrator
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Fine story
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This is a poetic love-letter to those nameless men and women. Michael Ondaatje writes their stories and the everyday heroism of living and working with care and lyricism.
Tom McCamus is a perfect narrator for the voices of true heroes who built nations.
A poem to the men and women who built a nation.
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The style is purposely fragmented in the beginning leaving the reader to find connections and begin to stitch together a narrative. OK. This trophe is used successfully by many novels. It requires additional work on the part of the reader but can lead to great rewards when done well.
Alas, if you are listening to this Kindle edition and have not read the book before, you'll never know how big the reward might be for all the up front work. The reader has chosen to make book's early fragmentation the cornerstone of his delivery. Every sentence is read as a separate data point with a rising or (mostly) lowered intonation to isolate the sentence from the one that follows.
There is no flow in sections that have a legitimate narrative flow. Dialogs are hard to follow since everyone has the identical voice and chopped speech pattern. Instead of being lyrical (which what I think the reader intended) the style inevitably leads to monotony.
In the end, I liked the book. But I'll never know if I would have LOVED it unless I go back to read In the Skin of a Lion on the page where I can experience it with a more natural rhythm and pacing.
Narration Pulled This Book Down
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I pity the person who cannot appreciate such a masterpiece
The different threads form a rope that twists and turns, doubles back and then returns to wrap around you
Perfectly performed by Tom McCamus
There are scenes that will never leave me
A rare gem of a book
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As I look at his method of narration, though, it’s actually steeped in the external. As he writes, he pans across landscapes. He gives us lush descriptions that become almost cinematic. In this book in particular, I often found myself lost in the larger story, but I never felt bored. I was always confident I was in the hands of someone who knew how to make words bring scenes (and, implicitly, characters) to life.
It’s a challenging method. Part of the inspiration of The English Patient is that it’s claustrophobic. Characters recall experiences of vast spaces and of epic love, but they don’t get to leave the scene of the hospital for the setting of the story’s present tense. That novel, tangled as is it, has a clear and tight focus. Everything points to the experience of our nurse and patient who, without quite knowing it, sit as the culmination of a number of great emotional arcs.
Skin of a Lion, though even shorter, is expansive in its scenery and in its setting. We go from the wilds of Canada in the days of timber empire, to the building of Toronto’s sewer system, to the birth of a radical workers’ movement in the years before World War I. It doesn’t have the same inspired focus of The English Patient. It’s never boring and always reflective of great passion, but it spins in different directions.
As an elevator pitch, this is an inspired plot: a young man who learns dynamiting from his father goes to Toronto, contributes to the great physical work of building the city, becomes radicalized through a betrayed love and from seeing the greed of the city’s capitalists, and determines to assassinate his arch enemy by swimming through the very sewer tunnels he helped build.
Given Ondaatje’s method, though, I rarely saw that plot as it unfolded. (In fact, I have to acknowledge various on-line sources as helping me sort out how one scene connected to another.) I loved the reading experience of being caught in the lush exterior reflections of the characters, but I was generally confused about how they combined. I respect the ambition behind all this – as a scholar of American multi-ethnic literature, I admire Ondaatje’s seeming goal to celebrate the mix of immigrant labor that made the city, and I recognize the philosophical claim that, when dismantling the master’s house, one cannot use the master’s tools. That is, I think I understand that he’s challenging conventional chronological narrative as a means of critiquing our received history. Still, he’s asking a lot of us. He writes brilliantly but here, in what turns out to be a prequel to The English Patient, he never lets his story cohere.
I’m all in for more Ondaatje, and I do recommend this one, but be prepared for a challenging ride once you begin.
Lush but Often Bewildering Prequel
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beautifully told adventure
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Surprising!!!
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superb
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