In the Skin of a Lion

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The novel lets us see the birth of Toronto through the eyes of the immigrant construction workers that built it. Ondaatje's more famous 1992 novel, The English Patient, is, in part, a sequel to In the Skin of a Lion, continuing the characters of Hana and Caravaggio as well as revealing the fate of this novel's main character, Patrick Lewis. Immersed in the lives of the people who surround him - the immigrants building the city, as well as those who dreamed it into being - Patrick begins to learn, from their stories, the history of the city itself. After Hazen experiments with dynamite, he becomes part of the logging process himself, working as a dynamiter for companies in charge of taking logs down the river.

Finally, I must note that "In the Skin of a Lion" introduces Hana who will be the leading character of "The English Patient" and for this reason alone is worth reading. When Alice joins them, Patrick is amazed by the friendship and complicity that exists between the two women. No mention is made of the size of her wimple or the ballooning of her skirts, but it must be her clothes that catch the wind. The hard labor of these men and women is directly responsible for the creation of countries that have since developed and prospered, but the very people who made them are mostly unmentioned and forgotten by history.Many times I’ve been asked whether I think I am embarking on a journey that will lead me to a useless degree. The real lover is elsewhere and, for reasons I cannot explain, this sense of being off-stage, off-centre, this feeling that love is something stolen or borrowed, still makes the erotics of the book fascinating to me.

And as I neared the end and realized where we were headed, I also realized I'd forgotten where we started, because in between -- how we get from the beginning to the end -- is a dazzling feast, and feat. She advocates against societal injustice, accusing the rich of exploiting the working class for their own advantage and believing in the necessity of a working-class revolution.It would have helped if there were a single character to anchor me to the narrative, but they all feel interchangeable, even Patrick. Neke scene su nezaboravne - vetar koji nosi časne sestre preko nezavršenog mosta, veoma domišljato bežanje iz zatvora, sabotaža vodovoda i ronjenje kroz mračni tunel.