MICHAEL ONDAATJE AND INFINITE SPIRITUAL POSSIBILITY

Michael Ondaatje haunts me. The lyrical intensity of his prose finds the right level, the delicate balance between earth and ether. His novels are big in the best sense of literary ambition -- the psychological intensity of Shakespeare pitted against the power of the sentence that aspires and frequently achieves the level of intensity of Joyce or Woolf. So curious to see what his next novel will deliver.

I was excited for him, given his years of laboring in relative obscurity, that The English Patient was made into a major release and won so many awards. I thought the screenplay simplified his relationship to politics, making it seemingly palatable for the Count to sell the maps to the Nazis, whereas the book seemed to be so much broader in it search for a global equanimity. Well, that's Hollywood for ya...

JEANETTE WINTERSON REVISTED

It's been twenty years since Jeanette Winterson stunned the literary world with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I recently finished The Passion and found it curiously flat. It was as if the story had driven the engine of the experience so completely, that in the words of Virginia Woolf "the text failed to vibrate." I find this question so intriguing: what creates a Picasso or a James Joyce who push the edges of anartform incessantly, constantly expanding the envelope, right up until their deaths. And what creates an artist who makes a stunning debut but devolves from that point of origin into a product? All ideas on this welcomed.