Michael Ondaatje

WINNER OF THE GOLDEN MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018'Magnificent' Sunday Times'The best piece of fiction I've read in years' Independent on SundayThe final curtain is closing on the Second World War and in an abandoned Italian village. Hana, a nurse, tends to her sole remaining patient. Rescued from a burning plane, the anonymous Englishman is damaged beyond recognition and haunted by painful memories. The only clue Hana has to unlocking his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes detailing a tragic love affair.

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

Sarah Christine Gill

Within two weeks even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller. Sandford called it geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles.

The desert could not be claimed or owned-it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis. The places water came to and touched.  Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn't want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.

As he lay there the mined bridge exploded and he was flung upwards and then down as part of the end of the world. He opened his eyes and there was a giant head beside him. He breathed in and his chest filled with water. He was underwater. There was a bearded head beside him in the shallow water of the Arno. He reached towards it but couldn't even nudge it. Light was pouring into the river. He swam up to the surface, parts of which were on fire.

She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reaching his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, and he mutters. 

What? she asks, coming out of her concentration. 

He turns his dark face with its grey eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth. 

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.

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

Someone described George Saunders as a writer who makes you feel as if you’re reading fiction for the first time and I think the same is true here in a totally different way. Pure sublime.

Incredible. Literally dream-like.

Someone described George Saunders as a writer who makes you feel as if you’re reading fiction for the first time and I think the same is true here in a totally different way. Pure sublime.



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.

Siya S

It took me 3.5 years to finally finish the final 30 pages because I dreaded the boredom more than I cared about an *actual* ending of the story. I wasn't sure about the point, and thoughts of anyone enjoying this dull brick was lost on me. 

Also FYI, from the very first page, someone's penis was described as "sleeping like a seahorse". I did not make this up, y'all. 

Loved the movie, however. It has an ambience of an extended Dior perfume ads lol with such great cinematography and all.

The English patient

taryn a.

Easy to read, hard to find someone to recommend it to.

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.

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.

Abigail Mills

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.

Cat Imb

Review on the blog :) http://thereadingcat.weebly.com/book-...

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.

The English Patient

Reviews

Highlights