inside the skin of a lion michael ondaatje and Maylis de Kerangal

This evening I've been inside the pages of a The Skin of A Lion by Michael Ondaatje. Reading this book feels like biting into a raw lemon, diving into a January sea, the words steal seconds of my beating heart. Ondaatje captures bodies both in work and leisure,  making love, setting explosives and building bridges with sensuality. The images from the book are, this evening, branded in my mind: a nun falling at night from the half-built bridge; the imprint of a women's spine on a white-washed wall; a secret, like a small pebble that a man eats as a child, that grows inside him, that could have been cast away at the age of seven or twenty, but that now weighs down on his every walking step. I am reminded of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal Naissance d'un pont, The birth of a bridge. The mechanic of these two books are linked by steel and the stories of the strangers who come from elsewhere, to construct structures joining together two pieces of land.