A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje, a wistful and wondrous assemblage of poetry and prose journeying through time and across continents, elegantly illuminates the past with poignant imagery of bygone days. From the nurturing companionship of beloved pets to friendships that fortify, startling details lost to time are resurrected and infused with the weight they deserve.
Ondaatje (Warlight; The Cat's Table; The English Patient) was a poet before turning his attention to fiction, and this collection concerns itself with "all those small recalls of this and that/ before our walk up a staircase into the dark." These memories appear "like a gift/ from forgetfulness,/ as a desire can wake you." There is a nomadic quality to the pieces, the narrator crossing multiple time zones and traveling to Bulgaria, Italy, Morocco, and beyond, seeking solace and desiring to escape his "thought-driven head."
Closer to home, "Stella" is a fond tribute to Ondaatje's late dog and the comic eagerness with which she guarded against the FedEx truck and raccoons, while the prose piece "Winchester House" returns to the boarding school in Colombo, Sri Lanka, that the author and his classmates have spent a lifetime trying to forget. Here, Ondaatje melds place and memory so firmly that his troubled recollections of a Father Barnabas shudder to life through the pages, an emotionally charged wrenching.
Ondaatje's signature narrative style and formidable literary talents are on glorious display in A Year of Last Things as he attempts to make sense of this "deliriously random" world. --Shahina Piyarali