The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

I first read this book about 15 years ago, and was blown away. I rushed to finish it the day before the movie came out, and thus ruined my enjoyment of a highly acclaimed film.

My disappointment stemmed from the filmmakers choosing what I considered to be the secondary love story as their main theme. Otherwise, I remember it as beautiful and moving. What can I say, the book is always better...

Rereads are so satisfying. I love to see how I'll react to a book once I've moved into a different phase of life. And then, of course, I already know the ending. When I read this the first time, I was closer in age to Kip and Hana; now I'd call Caravaggio and the English patient my contemporaries. I feel more nostalgia for the younger pair, and having been disappointed and having disappointed in turn, I have more sympathy for those characters who fail to act honorably, or who suffer lapses in judgment.

The story takes place in 1945, in a bombed out Italian villa. A young Canadian nurse takes care of a badly burned man, known only as the English patient. Her wounded surrogate uncle stumbles them, and joins the household. Which coincidence somehow seems reasonable. A young Indian sapper, a bomb-defuser, lives in the garden while he clears mines from the countryside. The story relies on flashbacks and internal dialogue, as the four of them limp through the physical and emotional aftermath of the war. There is a mystery to solved, which takes pressure off the rest of the story; the relationships among those present and missing is the real meat of the novel.

The writing in this book is gorgeous. Ondaatje evokes landscape vividly, and is one of those authors who says a lot with just a few words. Each character is given a lot of attention, and all are fascinating. Despite being a wartime novel, this is less about the horrors of war then about the profound solitude they engender. The two older men embody loads of moral ambiguity, while Kip and Hana are mostly reacting to the unrelenting sorrow they've been exposed to, and do so with strength and grace. This may be a comment on the complexities that arise from age and experience; it's hard to stay untarnished over the course of a lifetime.

There's an undercurrent throughout of disaffection, isolation, people intentionally turning their backs on familiarity and tradition, and the damaging aspects of obsession. This is a terrific book, worthy of rereading, and definitely deserves to be called a classic.

1992 - The English Patient

It’s a different experience, reading a novel after seeing the film first. As I lost myself in the pages of The English Patient I could see the thin, taut faces of the characters as they were in the film, and I could see how perfectly the adaptation and casting had captured the brittleness of the world they inhabited. My own mother is the only other one I know ever to so perfectly explain the sense of living for the fragile moment during the Second World War. Perhaps that was because she too had a sense of perspective about human life that came from a love of wild, desolate places, indifferent and unforgiving…

The English Patient won the Governor General’s Award in Canada and shared the Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger in 1992. It’s an enchantment, one that made it very difficult for me to tear myself away from it. So you can imagine my astonishment when I saw some consumer reviews that claimed to have hated the book, dismissing it as pretentious or frustrating. I didn’t read much of this criticism (too depressing! too inane!) but I got the impression that these readers disliked having to ‘put together pieces of a jigsaw’.

Well, there are readers who like things to be straightforward (as if life is like that) and there are those who enjoy a carefully constructed artifice that gradually reveals the complexity of characters and events. In this tale of four people damaged by the loss of innocence that inevitably accompanies war, Ondaatje has woven fragments of their past lives into their uncertain present as they themselves reveal it (as, in life, we do). It is a beautiful story which creates a romantic setting out of a ruined Italian villa booby-trapped by the mines of the retreating German army, and juxtaposes it with the pre-war heroic age of discovery in the harsh deserts of Egypt and Libya.

To read the rest of my review, please visit my ANZ LitLovers blog.
I read and blogged this Booker Prize winner on July 17th 2011.
Cross-posted at GoodReads.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (Jill)

The English Patient
By Michael Ondaatje
Completed November 24, 2008

Sometimes, a movie can do a story better justice than the book. It’s a rarity indeed, but I believe it to be the case with The English Patient.

I watched the movie nine years ago. I was hugely pregnant, curled up on my sofa and enraptured by this Oscar-winning film of war, love and sacrifice. Having enjoyed the movie, I longed to read the book, and The English Patient finally found itself on my reading list.

Don’t get me wrong; the book was not bad. Parts of it were artistic and introspective with compelling characters. Hana was sad but still had a lust for life; Kip was lost but ready to move on; Caravaggio finally found a purpose for this conniving ways. But the English Patient and his beloved Katharine remained a secret to me. I could never wrap my arms around their relationship. It seemed destructive and loveless, but so little was written about it that I could never tell. To me, this gap was too large to ignore.

Where Michael Ondaatje blossomed with The English Patient was illustrating the destructiveness of war on the soldiers, nurses, civilians and cities involved. War is hell on everyone, and this story drove this point home very well.

If you are a fan of Booker winners, than The English Patient might be one for you; however, I believe the movie is a better way to witness this story. The book, in effect, fell short for me. ( )