Like Ernest Hemingway, Michael Ondaatje — for my money the greatest Canadian writer who has ever lived — didn’t move to Canada until after he turned 18. Ondaatje arrived in Toronto in 1963, 43 years after Hemingway first moved to the city and two years after the older man shot himself to death at his house in Ketchum, Idaho. But unlike Hemingway, Ondaatje stayed. He studied at the University of Toronto, got a job teaching English, fell in with the local poets and became one of a handful of the most important artists in this city’s history.
Where Hemingway found a “milling, stinking, sweating, money grubbing place,” in Toronto, Ondaatje found a canvas. “Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined,” he wrote in “In the Skin of a Lion,” his best and most Toronto-centric novel. And the city Ondaatje imagined in the years after the First World War was the opposite of the one Hemingway experienced, in two stints between 1920 and 1924.
