The English Patient: Man Booker Prize Winner

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road”.I came to know of the award winning ‘the English Patient’ through a quiz program and there the announcer was talking of Michael Ondaatje the golden Booker Prize winning author from Sri Lanka. It is true that Mr. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, but we must admit that he is now a Canadian. He is yet another treasure we failed to keep in the island nation. That day I decided to add The English Patient to my collection and purchased the kindle version.I was not short of enthusiasm but reading it at the beginning was like eating string hoppers without curry. String hoppers are a delicacy made of rice or wheat flour and has these fine strands woven together into a circle. You eat them with a Sambol and ideally with a curry. Without a curry it is a bit bland, and you will have trouble swallowing. I do.The book starts abruptly. Characters just immerge out of nowhere without any warning or even an introduction. ‘But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance’.The story was shattered or fractured. Pieces of the plot were lying everywhere throughout the book. Getting through the story required some jigsaw puzzle building skills and a lot of focused brain power.You had to travel between the Italian villa and the dessert quite often as the scene shifts between them.The sentences were not anything like what we learnt during our English lessons. Some lacked a noun. Some sentences were just one word. the fine balance between prose and poetic nature in the book in entertaining. The oddly shortened and out of place wording reminded me of the worry, intimidation, and suspicious nature of the souls in an era of war.The author had given life to inanimate objects with no restrictions. “As he passed the lamps in the long hall, they flung his shadow forward ahead of him”.I really admired the subtle hints or life lessons the author had brought to life through his characters.“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams”.This same statement written in the book is proved to be very true for the same. I finished reading the book immersed in the lives of Hanna, Caravaggio, Kip and the English patient.I, as a book addict have no trouble acknowledging the reading lesson depicted in the book - “Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window, and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”Some reviewers had openly accused the book of being erotic. Though it is true there is a lot of references towards intimacy and sexuality, it is beyond doubt logical and applicable to a post conflict mentality. Young men and women who were solely concerned about survival amidst death and destruction will revert back to seeking pleasures of the flesh and physical urges when things calmed.Its difficult to write further about the reading experience without hinting towards the actual content itself. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and it was indeed worthy of the Golden Booker.

The English Patient is a story about four lives that converge in a war torn part of Italy. All four characters have been profoundly touched by the war and must now rebuild their lives and move on. There is the anonymous and mysterious english patient who is coming to terms with a deceitful past, a young nurse who in order to numb the pain of loss becomes obsessed with nursing the patient back to health, a retired thief who has gone through life with no thought given to where his actions might lead him and a young idealistic bomb specialist who has his ideals turned upside down. Not only are these characters dealing with the aftermath of an external war but there are many inner demons they are all battling, histories they must confront and truths they must question.Ondaatje writes with powerful and captivating intensity but due to his poetic style the text is often weirdly and uncomfortably fragmented and because of this I found the book to be a laborious read. This poeticism made it hard to connect to the characters even when their emotions were described in detail. The book is filled with beautiful and vivid descriptions but it seems that more attention was given to pretty writing than to a substantial plot. What I enjoyed most about The English Patient was Ondaatje's handling of the Identity theme. He makes you think about how identity is constantly changing and that a person's identity is a complex mix of their history, how they perceive themselves, how others perceive them and the lies they tell themselves in order to be able to live with themselves.

I found The English Patient to be a fantastic book, but one which is a bit emotionally taxing, particularly the utterly heart-rending ending, which I won't give away, but which tears the community of World War II survivors apart.I know that for most people The English Patient conjurs up ideas about a great tragic love story between the main character--the English patient--and his forbidden love. For me, however, the love story fell a little bit flat. Maybe it was because I had heard so much about the romantic side of the narrative and perhaps had expected too much from it in terms of romance. And while the love story certainly is central to the plot surrounding the English patient, it's hardly the kind of romance for which anyone would hope themselves. This is not the kind of love story which will make young women fantacize about being Katherine and falling for the mysterious desert-obsessed English patient. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I didn't shed any tears over the end of their doomed romance, as I had found it rather uninspiring myself.*note that I have not yet seen the film of The English Patient. My understanding is that the impact of the final scenes is significantly different, bringing more focus and attention to the love story, and for this reason the love story may be more powerful in the film, but I'm not in a position to judge.*What truly touched me about the narrative of The English Patient was everything but the English patient. Hana was one of the most interesting characters in the novel, in my opinion, as was Kip. Now that I consider this, it's really not all that surprising given my interst in postcolonialism--particularly Indian literature--since Kip and his relationship with the other characters in the novel, all of whom are western define the final conflict of the narrative as a conflict between the west--symbolized in England--and the east--symbolized in both Japan and India. I'm afraid to go on about the powerful nature of this relationship and the consequences for the end of the novel because I don't want to give away too much about the end of the book. My hope, after all, is to inspire others to read great literature, not to make reading great literature unnecessary as I summarize it all. :)Another very powerful relationship within the novel was the relationship between Hana and her father. I found Caravaggio a rather uninspiring character, but his role within the context of Hana's relationship with her father was crucial. I found that Caravaggio was most interesting and complex when he reminisced about his history as a friend of Hana's father and his memories of her as a child. Hana's final coming to terms with her relationship with her father, with her place in the war, and with the circumstances of her father's life was also extremely powerful, but again I don't want to give too much away.Suffice it to say that The English Patient is one of those books which everyone ought to read, though be warned that while it is a deceptively slim novel it is also powerfully heavy and an incredibly serious novel. This is one which you won't forget any time soon, and which you will likely mentally chew over for a long time to come.Read all of my book reviews on my blog at [...]

This novel is a grandiose undertaking on the themes of love, sex, identity, nations, races in multiple places in different periods.Plot primarily takes place at an abandoned Villa in Florence at the time of German withdrawal from Italy in during World War II.There are five main characters.The man known as English Patient is in fact a Hungarian; his true name is Almásy. He was unrecognizably burned in a plane crash in North African dessert.Hana is a young nurse in the Army from Canada looking after English Patient in the villa.Caravaggio is a thief and hired by Intelligence.Kip is an Indian working as sapper in British Army.And narration takes the plot different places like Cairo, dessert on north Africa, London, Canada, India.Relationship between Hana and English Patient appears as if that hers is a love of taking care of a man, for the man she feels compassion.Later first Caravaggio then Kip also arrives at the Villa.Caravaggio knows Hana from Canada.Caravaggio is suspicious of on the identity of English Patient. And old thief's suspicion was right. English Patient also worked for Germans;He guided German spies in the desert to reach Cairo.Kip and Hana fell in love with each other.With this setup, villa hosts a strange combination of characters and has an unlikely life.This novel is like a sphere of anything goes. Plot, setting in a way show the intention of the author, life has no predefined templates, rules.Caravaggio feels like advising Hana the way she is dealing with English Patient and Kip.Sometimes Almásy takes over the narration telling how he was burned in an plan crash, and saved by Arab tribes in the dessert.He was a desert expert in North Africa but also helping German spies to reach Cairo.He fell in love with the wife a British intelligence officer in Cairo.This part of the novel is more interesting and indulging than the Villa part because of secret and forbidden love.These different and unrelated spheres in the plot makes the novel very interesting even though authors writing style is derailing.Husband of his lover learns this affair and decides to kill English Patient, his own wife, and himself in a plane crush.English patient survives this and but his lover injures badly. He places her in a cave and go to Cairo walking in the dessert to bring help.When he returns he finds out she is dead, and makes love to her dead body.So this sounds like fairy tale story, but then one can say that is possible.Author reflects the life in its complete odd possibilities, and harshness.English Patient's hope that he can save he life was an illusion, but he still believed in it.In general story flows with the daily life of four in the villa.Kip and Hana loves each other, make love.But, when Kip hears America dropped atomic bomb in Japan, he thinks West is inhumane against East, because they would not have done that against Germany.So he leaves the villa. Although Kip joined British Army voluntarily, he always maintains his strong National Identity.His brother has anti-British sentiments, and stayed in India.One of the most interesting part was where Kip is narrating about his supervisor in London who trained him and become fried with him.While describing him, Kip says he was a true British enlightened man who believe Britain should bring out and look after all the talents in her Empire.Kip finds his him very visionary.But at the end, Kip had both hope and disappointment in the West.

Well, this hard four me to review. I was looking forward to reading this and there were things that I really liked. I liked some of the imagery, indeed, I loved the imagery of the villa, the Tuscan setting and descriptions of bomb disposal. I liked the distant, almost reluctant relationship between kip and hana and some of the poetic prose really hit home for me. But here's the thing, whilst I absolutely understand how people love this, love the words, the style of the prose, but for me, some of the time, the endless metaphors, long flowery descriptions and random linking off ideas began to turn not attention away. Personally, I also found the love affair off the English patient and Katherine mostly dull. It's most probably 3 and a half stars for me, it's great in places which makes the issues I have with our, all the more frustrating.

This book is truly brilliant. For the imagination and complexity and startling characters. For the way the story unfolds, criss-crossing the thoughts and light and shadows that constitute the nurse, the thief, the bomb-disposer and the burned desert explorer - each broken and displaced by the unravelling war that throws them together in a deserted Italian villa. The narrative untangles the web of delicate lines that hold them together. A story of exceptional beauty, which does not hold back.

Such a brilliant bookI'm in love with the film and the book for different reasons. The book is quite different but you see so much more of the characters in this. Don't expect a script for the film, but it's so absorbing, I've read it several times now.

Probably the best anti war book ever written because of the fact it is more of a character study than a story with a message drilled into you.Just finished The Naked and the Dead which carries the title of the greatest anti war book by being all about war.The writing in the English Patient is devine and is up there with my favourite booker winner's.So if you want to immerse yourself in a beautifully written story and learn some very interesting facts on many topics give it a go.