SOURCE: Simmons, Rochelle. “In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist Novel.” University of Toronto Quarterly 67, no. 3 (summer 1998): 699-714.

In the following essay, Simmons analyzes the Cubist aspects of In the Skin of a Lion, exploring the visual features of the novel and examining its intertextual relationship to the Cubist criticism and fiction of John Berger.

I'm drawn to a form that can have a … cubist or mural voice to capture the variousness of things.

‘Michael Ondaatje: An Interview,’ 248

In a 1984 interview, Michael Ondaatje declared that he would ‘pick up and read anything by John Berger’ (328). Although some critics have taken note of this interest, they have not explored the dense web of intertextual reference to Berger's writing that can be discerned in Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion.¹ Yet, this text refers directly to works by Berger on a couple of occasions. One of...