Rating: 
Summary: Snooty prose attracts devotees
Review: While most are raving over this novel, here's another "thumbs down." Ondaatje gives little life to his characters -- but mostly relies on descriptions of their surroundings to convey their thoughts and emotions. Very well, it's been done before with great success. But the problem here is that Ondaatje is obviously too in love with his own prose.
Reading this book is sort of like being lectured to by a snooty english prof. who thinks he's got a better handle on setting symbolism than you ever will. Oh well, folks seem to love it anyway. Go figure.
Rating: 
Summary: Superbly delightful reading!
Review: What a smooth and effortless delight. You are initiated into this marvelous plot almost unconsciously. A must for every reader
Rating:
Summary: The ultimate horror story...great love lost.
Review: "Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain..."
--Matthew Arnold, 1867
If you've seen the movie, you'll find that the book concentrates on Kip and Hana, not Katharine and the English Patient. The novel, unlike the film, is really two intertwined tales of great loves which are lost and should not be. And both loves are lost for similar reasons.
The movie is astounding. So is this novel. For different reasons.
Rating:
Summary: Sensuous and seductive, poetical tale of intense pleasures.
Review: Michael Ondaatje at his best! Memories of war, love, deceit, and passion flashes across like strikes of lightning. The minds of four ruined lives intersects to form the story of a man with no name, no past, and no country. Flash backs brings readers back to South Cairo in the 1930s and the mysterious Almasy and Katherine.
This exceptional story with which the four elements, air, Earth, water, and fire played a vital role symbolically. Countless layers...worth reading many times. TIDBITS FROM THE BOOK --
<<"I just want you to know. I don't miss you yet."__
"You will." she says.>>
.....
<<"What do you hate most?" he asks.__
"A lie. And you?"__
"Ownership, when you leave me, forget me.">>
.....
<<"If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?"__
I said nothing.__
"Deny it, damn you.">>
Rating: 
Summary: Couldn't even finish it.
Review: I found the book to be slow moving. I never felt a connection with any of the characters and, thus, didn't find the story worth finishing.
If I didn't read a lot I'd have gotten a complex from my feelings towards this book. While everyone else is ranting about it, I found it a good cure for a couple nights of insomnia!
Rating:
Summary: A stunning work of complex relationships. Intoxicating !
Review: I had to read this book twice. The first time I tried to read
it as a novel, without serious thought. This was not the way to read this book. The author weaves his story with a slow and
deliberate web encircling the characters and drawing them together. Events in their lives are told from one angle and
immediately repeated from another to give the reader a more
complete understanding of the story and the impact each character has on the other. The second time I read the book slowly, savoring each character and the place each fit into
the others life. It is a book about love, levels of love, the loves of one's life. Complex love stories: of Hanna and the love of a nurse for a patient, the love she and Kip share, as two who have loved and
lost over and over again. Of the English patient and Kathrine,
two people thrown together, finding each other during the most difficult
of times. Of Carraviago and his relationship with all three characters, Hanna, Kip and the English patient, all a caring
relationship on different levels. I found myself constantly thinking of this story. Drawn to it again and again. When I saw the movie, I was
even more moved. Simply put this book and it's story is absolutly intoxicating.
Rating:
Summary: Do you like music? Read this book...
Review: I had just finished reading Bukowski's _Ham_on_Rye_ when I picked up this reading... the Bukowski was abrasive, blunt; the content was wholesome and rich, yet the style of reading was quite rudimentary, real 4th grading reading material... Bukowski and Ondaatje are two authors who reside on different ends of the spectrum as _English_Patient_ is anything but abrasive and blunt: Ondaatje imbued this book with a bunch of subtleties, well worth a second, third reading to capture the emotion just like Copland's "Appalachian Spring" required a second listening in order to catch the the essence of the mountain range described by the musical piece. As multitextured as music, _The_English_Patient_ also is deep in individual character development... a facet of each individual doesn't seem to be missing and each event doubles as a cultural eye-opener and a thought provoker. Read it
Rating: 
Summary: Masterfully told tale exploring the 20th century spirit
Review: Any reader of _The English Patient_ is so much more fortunate than any of the novel's four principal characters, for the reader cannot help but fall in love, not with the characters, but with Ondaatje's fluid prose, if not on the first page, then surely no later than the second page where this stunner of a sentence will instantly and irrevocably seduce even the hardest heart: "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." In Italy in the aftermath of World War II four disparate and, in some ways, desperate people find themselves together: a psychologically wounded young Canadian nurse, a middle-aged thief turned intelligence agent whom the nurse knew back home before his wartime enemies punished him by amputating his thumbs, a Sikh soldier who is expert in the delicate art of disarming explosive devices, and the badly burned "English patient." Because all of them have learned through their own disillusioning experiences to survive the war by isolating themselves, they struggle to connect with one another. Their interactions, often conducted at cross purposes, are set against the patient's unfolding recollections of his pre-war past in Egypt where he carried on historical explorations in the desert and an illicit love affair in Cairo. Only after his lover's death does this affair resolve itself, ironically in an incident--his one act of kindness towards her, as futile as it is dramatic--that seals his own fate. Ondaatje masterfully weaves together past and present through rich prose that, at the same time it evokes mental images as brilliant as fireworks, soothes the ear as gently as water burbling over worn rocks in a clear mountain stream. Through his characters, unable to love and unwilling to be loved, Ondaatje has created a powerful parable indicting war's brutalization of the human spirit even when it spares its survivors' bodies
Rating:
Summary: Moving and poetic
Review: THE ENGLISH PATIENT IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOKS I'VE READ IN A LONG TIME. THE TALE IS GRIPPING AND IS ABLE TO TRANSPORT THE READER FROM HER LIVINGROOM COUCH TO THE SAHARA AND THE RUINED ITALIAN MONASTARY. THE LANGUAGE IS SMOOTH AND POETIC. IF YOU WANT TO ESCAPE FOR THE DAY FROM THE MUNDANE THAT IS YOUR LIFE, THIS IS THE BOOK THAT WILL DO IT FOR YOU
Rating:
Summary: A blanket of emotions that covers you in feeling
Review: There are some fictional works that can tell more truths than any non fiction book could ever come close to examining. The English Patient is one of those novels. The relationships developed between the characters are so cleverly done that they show the sometimes painful truth about living. While the love story between Katherine and The Count takes a lesser role in the book than the movie the author creates a love that hurts us because even though it is forbidden it is beautiful when it happens All in all the dialouges between the lives of the characters past and present lead to an unforgettable tale that is fated to move readers just like the characters with the rawness of pure emotion
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