Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Originality, Ondaatje implies, is never just novelty for its own sake. It has to arrive with consequences. The line captures a craft tension that serious fiction wrestles with: the urge to push form, perception, even language into unfamiliar territory while still honoring the reader's primal need for narrative payoff. "Suggest something new" is deliberately modest phrasing. He doesn't say "announce" or "invent" or "revolutionize". He says suggest - as if innovation in a novel should feel like an aura, a pressure in the margins, something sensed before it's named. That's classic Ondaatje: the lyrical, the oblique, the trust that implication can be more destabilizing than proclamation.

Then he yokes that softness to a hard demand: "resolve the drama of the action". Resolve doesn't mean tidy. It means the story's emotional and moral energies can't just dissipate into style. Even a fragmented, poetic, time-scrambled narrative still owes its characters and its audience an earned landing. The subtext is a quiet skepticism toward experimental writing that mistakes open-endedness for depth, or that uses innovation as a way of ducking responsibility for plot, causality, and stakes.

Context matters: Ondaatje's novels often move like memory itself - partial, sensory, stitched from scenes rather than straightforward chronology. Yet they do not drift. They accumulate tension, then release it. This quote reads like a manifesto for that balancing act: make the familiar feel strange, but don't break the ancient contract of storytelling where desire, conflict, and choice have to lead somewhere that hurts, clarifies, or changes us.