"In The Skin of a Lion" by Michael Ondaatje ****

> Originally published 1987
> Sri Lankan author

> Characters: Patrick Lewis (protagonist), Kenan Lewis (Patrick's father, "abashed man", dynamiter)

> Vocabulary:

• pelmanism:   a system of training to improve the memory

> Quotes:

• "So at this stage of his life his mind raced ahead of his body.".....age 12
• "Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting."...p.29
• "This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.".....the bridge is the child of Commissioner Harris, and someone fell off of it
• "The event that will light the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture."...interesting
• "He was bare-knuckle capitalism.  He was a hawk who hovered over the whole province, swooping down for the kill, buying up every field of wealth, and eating the profit in mid-air.  He was a jackal.".....referring to Ambrose Small, a missing industrialist
• "Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page.  They altered when the author's eye was somewhere else.  Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth.  Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere."
• "His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices.  Patrick saw a wondrous night web--all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was boirn into or the headlines of the day.  A num on a bridge, a daredevil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire - the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned."
• "Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events.  Only the best can ralign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become."
• "He lay down to sleep, until he was woken from out of a dream.  He saw the lions around him glorying in life; then he took his axe in his hand, he drew his sword from his belt, and he fell upon them like an arrow from the string."

> Notes:

• powerful imagery...Finnish loggers in early morning light, Patrick and his father saving the cow in the icy river, loggers skating with cattail torches in the middle of the night
• Interesting notion that immigrants would latch onto a particular actor and attend all his/her performances learning pronunciation..,.,there is even a story of a logger jumping in to take over a role when an actor was injured because he knew the lines

> LibraryThing Review:   Michael Ondaatje creates the most powerful images with words!  He is so gifted!  This story follows, in a somewhat convoluted manner, the path of Patrick Lewis, from the deep woods in Ontario, Canada to Toronto.  Patrick loves two women, holds two jobs, and makes some rather dramatic choices, involving explosives!  Along the way the reader learns some of the history of Toronto's infrastructure and the people who built it.  The plot flows like a lazy, beautiful river, taking unexpected turns all along the way.  It is a dreamy ride, sometimes confusing, but well worth it in the end.  Lovely writing!