The English Patient

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly pretentious...
Review: The Booker Prize Committee got hoodwinked. A writing style entirely lacking in subtlety and full of bad metaphors (one character compares her step-mother to a barge...); far-fetched plot divices; self-absorbed, unlikeable characters with no voices of their own (they all speak like the poet Ondaatje). Now I know why I disliked the movie so much...

Rating:
Summary: Original Style
Review: This very original novel has more style than any other novel I have read from the last twenty years. Ondaatje's style jumps points-of-view and timelines but does it in an understandable and clear way. It often follows a train-of-thought style but is a much easier read than any books I have read with this style. The mood is a somber war-time mood that really creates the story and adds an intense feel to the novel. This is a brilliant book. Everything from setting to character relationships to style melds to create the perfect historical romance. Ondaatje has done a wonderful job here.

This novel brings together four varied characters at the end of World War II. Hana, a Canadian; Caravaggio, an Italian; Kip, an Indian; and the nameless English patient. Hana is a nurse staying in an Italian villa that had been used as a temporary hospital; she is looking out for the Englishman who was burned when his plane crashed and caught on fire; Caravaggio is a friend of Hana's father and is at the villa because he has learned she is there; Kip is a sapper who is staying at the villa while extinguishing bombs in the area.

This book taught me much about the time period, but more importantly, it taught me about relationships. The relationships between Kip, Caravaggio, Hana, and the Englishman were each very different but all very real. Ondaatje creates a realistic world with here that you can just fall into. My interest was maintained all the way through the novel, regardless of the sometimes choppy style.

This is a great book for any lovers of history, romance, or simply any good book! I highly recommend The English Patient.

Rating:
Summary: Near Perfect
Review: This novel is sensual and thrilling. The characters are so interwoven and intricate. It is a fairly quick read with a complex story. Even more fasinating are the allusions to history and art. Allusions that work themselves into the plot unlike anyother novel I have ever read.

The only flaw in this novel (and it is a major one)is that the character of Kip (one of the most interesting characters) behaves out of character and more for the political protest of the author. This is the only reason why I gave the book 4 stars rather than 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: I prefered the picture....
Review: I read the book after watching the pictures, which may be a mistake. The book is a bit hard to read, and it's hard to follow its thread. While reading, you can'i imagine the magnificent feelings, love and light wrapping the film. A bit disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Complicated, dense, poetic, erotic, wow, wow, wow!
Review: Don't miss this - and don't miss the movie, either.
The English Patient is a completely enthralling novel of war, honor, romance, and courage. The parts written in the point of view of the English patient while under the effects of morphine are especially difficult, but just as especially lyrical, dense, and captivating.
Wow.

Rating:
Summary: The enigmatic patient
Review: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Recommended.

In this poetic novel by poet Michael Ondaatje, the author explores the past and present (the closing days of World War II) lives of young Canadian nurse Hana, her English patient, her family friend and accomplished thief David Caravaggio, and Indian sapper Kirpal Singh (nicknamed Kip).

Hana, who has lost her father and her lover during the war, has been desensitised and traumatised-only 19, she has held cigarettes to the lips of armless boys and moved patients only to find that they are already being consumed by worms. When the Italian villa-turned-hospital where she works is abandoned toward the end of the conflict, she insists on remaining behind with the one patient who cannot be moved-an enigmatic English patient whose skin is burned black from a plane crash in North Africa and who does not seem to remember who he is. The only clue he carries is The Histories of Herodotus, which he uses as a commonplace book.

Caravaggio, thief turned intelligence agent, has lost the practical use of his hands when he is caught stealing by the Italians and loses his thumbs as a physically and emotionally brutal punishment. A morphine addict, Caravaggio cannot rest until he knows all the secrets-those of Hana's heart but especially those of the mysterious Englishman.

Like the others, Kip belongs nowhere to no one. Estranged from his family by his nontraditional beliefs and pursuits, he is also a man without a country-an Indian sapper in an English army that does not welcome foreigners, especially Indians. A loner by nature and by circumstances, Kip finds respite if not meaning in Hana's arms.

For a professed amnesiac, the English patient remembers great detail, from his post-accident discovery in the desert by Bedouins and their subsequent treatment of his injuries to his earlier life as a member of a 1930s group of explorers seeking to answer such riddles as how Cambyses and his army could attempt to cross a desert-unless there were a Zerzura to be found. Of equal or greater importance to his exploration reminiscences are his memories of his hot affair with a fellow explorer's wife that burns itself out in tragedy.

The long passages in which the English patient slowly unravels (but never admits to) the mystery of his identity and past are intriguing, spellbinding, revealing, and poetic. Those with any curiosity will find themselves wanting to read more about not only 1930s European expeditions into the desert, but about the desert itself-where dozens of different types of winds inspire the Bedouins to don them with dozens of beautiful names descriptive of their moods.

On the other hand, Caravaggio, who feels safest revealing nothing, pieces together his own knowledge with the clues dropped by the English patient to come up with a plausible theory about his identity, actions, and movements during the war-but not his motivations. Even as his name and his past are gradually unveiled, his character remains elusive-perhaps explaining why Hana is in love with the living remains of a dead man.

Hana and Kip, and their relationship, are the least interesting elements of the novel. Hana's character functions as the center around which the others meet. As a sapper, Kip's duty of disarming bombs becomes virtually his sole focus in life. When he learns of the ultimate bomb, the ultimate weapon that even he cannot disarm, and who it is used against, he in his ignorance confronts the English patient-a moment of irony. The villa, an island surrounded by a sea of turmoil and change, is not so remote that the "death of civilisation" cannot reach it.

The best of The English Patient reminded me at times of Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War) in tone and evocations. While not a great novel, it is certainly an interesting, thought-provoking, and worthwhile diversion.

Diane L. Schirf, 21 May 2003.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting....Like a pleasant dream!!
Review: Three people. Strangers. Together at a time when the Second World War is on its end. Shattered. Battered lives. In an Italian Villa - trying to reconstruct of all thats left, with the help of a burnt English Patient in a room upstairs...with a past like all of us...

I loved this book right from the word "GO". No book has enchanted me this way in months now. The English Patient is a treat for the soul. Michael Ondaatje has created a masterpiece in its own right. Soulful, Poetic and so Real. Stories that come to life. Dreams that exhale memories of a different land. All lost. Souls in transit. That is the theme of this magnificient novel that enthralled me so much....Love, Betrayal, Passion and above all a story of the Human Heart and Compassion.

A must must read for everyone who loves a good book...

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing epic
Review: Ondaatje's style is truly what stands out in this book: at once poetic and intellectual, sensual and political, it always catches you by surprise. Often I had to read a paragraph or a page several times, because meaning comes in subtle hints and images. It's frustrating at times, and there are still some parts of the book that are slightly confusing (why does Cavaraggio rob a house naked?), but it's worth the trouble for the sheer beauty of it. Consider this passage for example:

"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 makred on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography- to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps." (p261 paperback)

Read this book aloud or listen to Ralph Fienne's beautiful voice. Read it once, leave it for a while, then read it again. And again and again.

Rating:
Summary: A Life you can only Dream about
Review: I have been meaning to write a review for The English Patient, a semi-sequel to In the Skin of a Lion. I've been reluctant to do so because these two are very much alike with regards to style and characters. The two characters from In the Skin of a Lion, Hana and Carravagio, are also found in The English Patient. As always, it's always hard to accept that a sequel of a novel you love so much is as good as, and possibly better, than the original novel. My mistake here is to think of these two novels as interconnected for The English Patient stands beautifully on its own.

Here we have traumatised characters emerging from the war. Hana is a young nurse who has chosen to stay behind in an abandoned Italian villa to care for a nameless and burnt English patient. She has chosen to retreat from the world to serve an almost sanctified patient in order to forget her past - the loss of an unborn child, a lover, and her beloved father (Patrick). The patient Almasy's story begins prewar in a fractured narrative. His story involves a tragic love affair with the desert and a woman (Katherine). Then there is Caravaggio - the thief, a spy, an old friend of Hana's father, who has lost his nerve due to the brutality of the war, who finds refuge in Hana's dilapidated villa. The novel however, is more about theme and character than plot.

Ondaatje has mined these characters beautifully. He has managed to reveal to us that a life is like a landscape - it can be mapped, explored, and very much loved, but it can remain as much a mystery as when you first discovered it. The curvature and beauty of the desert becomes a symbol for a woman's body and the painting of a Queen becomes meditative relief for a traumatised Sikh during the war. In this manner, Ondaatje reveals to us the complexity and richness of a life.

It is also a treaty on grief, loss, nationhood and isolation. All the main characters that populate this novel are outsiders in search of some sense of belonging - Hana is stricken by tragedies and displaced from her homeland Canada; the patient found solitude in the desert; Katherine, a young wife who finds herself among foreigners and men; Kip is a Sikh; Caravaggio - our thief. Their discovery of each other and the change in their inner lives parallels the realignment and disappearance of national borders. To each other, they surrender a little bit of their territory by sharing a journey of recovery, and their individual stories.

I will not deny that this novel can be difficult to read and I am not surprise that many people have found the prose too difficult to grasp. That is reasonable because the cross-cutting of Ondaatje's narrative, his particular style, and the themes he explores do not make for an easy or even entertaining novel.

This novel however, is undeniably one of the best - if not the best - I have ever read. Ondaatje possesses the kind of mind that feeds on poetry, that finds the profound in the ordinary. His ability to explore themes through the subtle use of symbols, allegorical examples, and language places him in a league all of his own. For me, his novels are landscapes and a way of seeing the world that you wish to carry with you always. I hope that the reader who picks up The English Patient will cherish and love this novel as much as I do.

Rating:
Summary: Enchanting
Review: The English Patient is like a present under the Christmas tree. It is beautiful at the start, and fills you with anticipation, awaiting what is to come. It is a many layered story. Hana, the nurse and the nameless English Patient inhabit a villa north of Florence, Italy near the end of World War 2. Soon, two new characters, Caravaggio a thief and Kip, a sapper are introduced to the plotline. As they all live their lives at the villa, Ondaatje feeds us snippets of their pasts and how they came to the villa. The novel is well-written, and easy to get into. It is an experience I won't soon forget.