The Man with Seven Toes
About this book
From "Point Narrative in Michael Ondaatje's 'the man with seven toes'" by Sam In the man with seven toes, the reader enters the nightmarelike world of an anomymous white woman who spends a period of time living with a group of primitives before being rescued by a white man and taken back to civilization. A brief note at the end of the book indicates that the source of Onedaatje's story lies in the experiences of a Mrs. Fraser who, in 1836, was shipwrecked off the Queensland coast of Australia, captured by aborigines, and finally rescued by a convict named Bracefell whom she betrayed once they reached civilization. In his hands the story becomes a mythic exploration, in the form of related brief and often imagistic poems, of how an unnamed white woman perceives and experiences a primitive and anarchic world totally alien to her civilized assumptions and mode of being.