1This collection of thirteen essays in English by Canadian and European writers, critics, and academics combines the studies presented at the international conference held in 1997 at the Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle on Michael Ondaatje, who, awarded the Booker Prize, has achieved the international recognition accorded to other great writers of the Commonwealth such as Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Jean-Michel Lacroix’s introduction in French goes beyond a mere contextualisation for those less familiar with Ondaatje’s work, and offers an insightful analysis of his writing, which he compares to a game with masks. Although half of the articles focus on The English Patient, the contributors cover quite a broad spectrum of his work.

2Canadian writer and critic George Bowering examines his fellow writer’s fundamentally unstable, unclassifiable works. He identifies Ondaatje’s systematic parody of genres as part of a current of fiction based on a shifting of genres that allows readers to participate not only in a sociocultural community, but also in a literary community that transcends national or ethnic boundaries. D. Whetter in turn tackles Ondaatje’s intense – and critically problematic – use of metaphor and the lyric within the genre of the novel. P. Cumming studies the input of biography and psychoanalysis, while K. Press focusses on the use of (pseudo)autobiography and liminal space. P. Easingwood explores the text as locus of resistance to violence and oppression as well as to literary codes and conventions, and argues that it bears witness to modes of cultural interpenetration and transmutation. Coming Through Slaughter is thoughtfully analysed by M. Green, who raises the problems of representation and reception in this highly metaphorical novel, and demonstrates the interplay – even metatextual fusion – between the dynamics of fragmentation and of unification that the textual mode shares with the musical mode of jazz. Two other contributors choose In the Skin of a Lion as their object of study: J. Murray offers a psychoanalytical reading of the novel, while J. Dolphin deals with the postmodern, syncretic, palimpsestic, and subversive treatment of myth.

3The English Patient remains at the heart of the authors’ critical enquiry. C. Commelini highlights the reflexion on colonialism and postcolonialism, on centre and margin. She places the techniques of the novel within the broader context of postcolonial literatures and their strategies of blurring temporal and spatial settings and genres, as well as their ironic subversion of leitmotiv and symbol. For R. Sool, the novel is a reflexion on nationality and naming, seen as a form of mapping, a sign of ownership. M. Goldman posits that the novel celebrates deterritorialisation and heralds a post-national era, all the while that it suggests, through a parallel drawn between play and war for example, a continuity in the way societies generate their vision of the world and transmit their values. J. Leclaire positions The English Patient within the framework of Canadian literature and its central structuring motif of the challenge of survival, while J. Pesch narrows the scope still further, concentrating on Minghella’s film adaptation of the novel, and foregrounding the processes of transformation and distortion.

4This collection of essays is all the more welcome as Michael Ondaatje has just published his latest – and long-awaited – novel, Amil’s Ghost. These critical gazes looking back allow us to approach the new novel with a layered perspective conducive to an even fuller appreciation.