Name: The English Patient
Rating: 3.804761904761905 (105 reviews)

Michael Ondaatje

Anthony Minghella

A screenplay tells the story of an unknown man, the sole survivor of a plane shot down near the beginning of World War II, who remembers his past

A Screenplay

The English Patient

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening

Dreamlike, what a strange time post-WW2 must have been. 

g.m.

a novel

The  English patient

Sarah Sammis

Read because I didn't especially like the movie. The book clicked for me in ways that the film didn't.

Jim Hagan

English Patient

Rohan Uddin

Most wonderful post-World War II novel I have ever read. It follows the lives of four people from different parts of the world inside an Italian villa. The desert tales of the English Patient, and the human tales of loss and love are charted in this book with such beautiful prose that it truly warms the heart.
An excerpt:
“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead.” 
Five stars to this Booker Winner.

Arianna M

I really loved this book. The characters, the writing style, the intertextual references, the way narration weaves in and out of the present moment to go back to a character's memories they share with the others… it's beautiful. I think I must've highlighted half of it, mostly because I was so fascinated by the sentences and the relationships.

The English patient

Fraser Simons

4.5 rounded up 

Good prose, for those that like the ephemeral and the flowery, anyway. There’s a mystery that is compelling because the question of who the patient is ties directly into larger themes at play: identity, how and if people can substantively change (especially considering influence of upbringing and specific state indoctrination) and, the big one, trauma.

What nourishes a person and facilitates core shifts in who they are? How much is a person essentially just reacting to what happens to them rather than acting with agency. There is so much that goes into the makeup of an identity that people don’t think about or interrogate, but drive their most memorable decisions. 

The scenes are free form and weave its way like memories cascading. They aren’t bound by time or place. It can be jarring and honestly takes more cognitive load than some people want. You’re piecing together the actual structure along with the mystery. I found it thematic as hell. But it’s certainly challenging at times.

The more I think about this book, the more I like it. Apparently it’s fairly polarizing for people, as lots of popular things are. But the themes and prose and structure resonated with me. I’m all about trauma and memory stories, so this is kind of my bag. Plus the exploration of selfhood just elevated the whole thing. Especially now with nationalism being a Very large topic of conversation and primary driving force of media consumption and primary western cultural identity crisis.

Vivian

Nooshin

I had very high expectations of The English Patient. Regardless of the Booker[s] the book received, its movie adaptation, which I first saw in my early teens, includes one of my favorite intensely romantic tales to which I used to return time and time again for years. I do confess, I might have grown out of my poetic-romantic phase, but I was indeed not ready to be put down so vehemently by the origin story of a movie I loved.

This book, to me, seemed in many ways unfinished. A large proportion of this impression can be attributed to the generally ephemeral atmosphere of the narrative, no doubt purposefully applied, however contrary to my taste. But there were bits and pieces scattered in the text that felt so out of place, extra, and even wrong that I could hardly ever feel connected to what the author was trying to convey. Take an anecdote, very dear to my heart, that was a highlight of the movie: Almásy is, at some point, wondering aloud about the name of 'the hollow at the base of a woman's neck'. Many pages/scenes later, a friend gives him an answer while saying goodbye to him for the last time—it's called a suprasternal notch, correctly mentioned in the movie. The book, instead, offers a nonexistent expression, 'vascular sizood'*, partially ruining the intricate magic of the brief exchange. There are many such occasions that led me, as a reader, to feel like the book fell far short of what it aspired to be.

The integrity and coherence of the four main characters frequently fell victim to the orchestration of the—admittedly, not so simplistic—Model UN archetype that was constantly of the utmost importance in the Italian villa storyline: the many verbal and non-verbal exchanges between the Canadian nurse, the ex-pat Italian thief, the still-colonized-but-on-the-verge-of-breaking-free Indian bomb neutralizer, and the non-English and exoticist English Patient occupied page upon page of this novel, but lost most appeal and meaning in light of the very loosely meshed character structures.

I did, of course, naïvely get into this book to relive a much-beloved love story in a more sophisticated manner, the joke's on me; but I do have the right to protest when I'm being fed overfragmented anecdotes with a barely perceptible trace of a plot in the place of a novel. At times it felt like I'm reading a random inline compilation of four completely unrelated short stories of highly divergent qualities. There were flickers of brilliance in some parts, specifically The Cave of Swimmers and In Situ, but the flames don't ever catch for long in the whirlpool of repetitive geographical descriptions, incomprehensible time/narrator shifts, and the general messiness of the text despite the intense poetry.

All in all, I tip my hat off to Anthony Minghella for excavating the beauties of this tale and will be revisiting his much more palatable version if ever I miss the exceptional romance that, alas, takes up about 15% of the bulk of this book. However, I must mention that the problem here might also be that I've lost my soul and am living a very unpoetic and pitiful life, which is not at all unlikely.


* Ondaatje himself has admitted to making the expression up and forgetting to fix it. If this is not an editorial disaster I don't know what is.

Daryl Houston

This felt like a much longer book than it was. At times it was a bit of a slog, I guess because the characters and setting just didn't connect much with me. Sections revolving around Kirpal I found the most appealing, and by the end, I could see why it's considered a good book, but on the whole it just didn't do much for me. Ondaatje is 0 for 2 for me so far. I've got another one queued up, and I hope I like it more than I did this one and Divisadero.

Elad Schulman

This book was not easy to read. I didn’t understand a lot of the references, and though I understand the significance of the non-linear narrative, it was too all over for me. 

There were parts that I did like, though. I really liked the ending, and the way that Ondaatje brought everyone back to reality.

jordan

Udit Desai

Niki Sotiropoulou-Nassika

Jesse White

Wonko the Sane

Meniah

In an Italian villa at the end of World War II, a mysterious English patient lies nameless and burned in an upstairs room.

The English Patient A Screenplay

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