Michael Ondaatje, In Peak Form

Are the two stories linked?

Yes, they're filled with subtle parallels and thematic echoes.

Will readers see all the links the first time through?

Maybe not.

"It's a quite radical form," Ondaatje says. He can imagine reviewers scratching their heads with disapproval. "Oh yeah, I'm going to get that. It'll happen."

Then again:

When Ondaatje wrote "The English Patient," he used the same intuitive, build-from-fragments technique. For something approaching a year, he didn't know who his title character was. Two major characters wandered in, unplanned, from his previous novel. Another showed up, "out of the blue," quite late in the game.

That particular improvisation, published in 1992, won the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards, and became an Academy Award-winning film. It made Ondaatje, as he puts it, "more than just reasonably famous" and endowed him with the financial independence to write books any way he chooses.

Which, as a look at his track record shows, is precisely what he has been doing all along.

'Blah, Blah, Blah, T.S. Eliot'

There's a kind of controlled wildness to Ondaatje's appearance. Blue-eyed, white-bearded, his uncombed hair seeming to rise straight from his head, he evokes -- at 63 -- a combination of Prospero and Lear.

He has arranged to meet a reporter at the Coach House Press, the funky little publisher that put out his first poetry collection four decades ago. The walls are lined with the kind of literary efforts that generate press runs of 300 copies.

"All these books have survived here, Stan. That's not bad," he tells Coach House founder Stan Bevington.