Will - Ondaatje - 4/11

Similar to characters in Midnight's Children like Aadam Aziz, Ondaatje's grandmother Lalla doesn't change or progress throughout the story.  She doesn't learn a lesson by overcoming early difficulty in her life.  Another similarity with Rushdie's characters is that Lalla goes through periods of peculiar obsession such as her obsession with fashioning ornate dresses for her daughter to wear:  "The crowning achievement was my mother's appearance at the Galle Face Dance as a lobster" (161).  If anything Lalla becomes more herself as she gets older.  After her husband dies and her children grown up, she is described as "in her prime" (165).  She has to sell her house and after that "She was free to move wherever she wished, to do whatever she wanted" (164).

At the same time Lalla's life is touched by the fantastic:  "My Grandmother died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree.  She could read thunder" (157).  She reads her death in thunder one day, and she dies when she is carried away in a flood after going on a bender with her brother.  Apparently they were so drunk they didn't notice the monsoon:  "For two days and nights they had been oblivious to the amount of destruction outside their home" (169).  There is also a moment when similar to Saleem in M.C. Lalla's life is intertwined with the life of the nation when Ondaatje writes, "During the forties she moved with the rest of the country towards Independence and the 20th century.  Her freedom accelerated" (167).

Ondaatje's style is pretty interesting.  He's not bombastic like Rushdie or dreamy like Roy.  But every once in a while he writes something beautiful and strange like "She gazed and listened but there seemed to be no victim or parabola end beyond her" (168) or "What was moving was rushing flood" (169).  In that way he isn't stoic like Naipaul.