It seems unfortunate that I saw the movie before I read the book, because I couldn't help but read the book with the characters already cast. I enjoyed the deeper profiles of the characters, stories told and other intricacies that did not translate to the film. I especially enjoyed getting to know Kip a little better. And the love scenes between Almasy and Katharine were so lyrically beautiful in their spare intimacy. His explorations of her body, so intimate, so graceful, so achingly beautiful. I found Ondaatje's descriptions of the soul-altering, spirit-disassembling nature of love and our inability to stay away from those most forbidden passionate connections to be lovely in their accuracy. A wonderfully moving book. ( )

In an Italian villa turned Canadian field hospital at the end of World War II, twenty-year-old Hana watches as her colleagues move on to their next station. She has made the decision to stay behind to nurse a badly burned English patient who cannot be moved. The English patient does not remember his name or much of his life. He knows he spent time in the North African desert as an explorer, and he has retained his knowledge of ancient history.

Hana, tired of death, spends her days scrounging for food, trying to make a garden, and tending to the English patient. Their solitary existence is suddenly disrupted by the appearance of David Caravaggio, a prewar friend of Hanna's father. Caravaggio, a thief by trade, was used by the army to gather intelligence; he was caught by the enemy and tortured but managed to escape. When he hears of Hana's location, the injured man, heads off to find her.

Finally, Kip, an Indian sapper, sets up his tent on the villa's grounds and becomes part of the circle whose focal point is the English patient. Although he ventures out into Florence each day to defuse bombs and land mines with his British Army company, he returns to the villa as night falls.

Through flashbacks and conversations among the characters, we learn the stories of the three men and one woman. Each has suffered from the horrors of war. Although they are all leery of making close connections with others, they cannot help unburdening themselves, in bits and pieces, during the long nights.

The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize, often appears in the those lists of must-read novels or the best all-time fiction. And indeed Ondaatje's writing can be beautiful and vivid:

It was 1943. The First Canadian Infantry Division worked its way up Italy, and the destroyed bodies were fed back to the field hospitals like mud passed back by tunnellers in the dark. (p. 49)

But other times it is just plain obscure:

When sunlight enters a room where there is a fire, the fire will go out. (p. 197)

And at other times, I just didn't know what to think—profound or . . . what?

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence. (p. 141)

I found the book slow going and unsatisfying over all. I had difficulty making an emotional investment in the characters, and thus I wasn't really curious about their ultimate fate. Kip was the most sympathetic character and perhaps the most realistic and least damaged. Maybe it is significant that he is also the only non-Westerner.

I am not at all sorry to have read The English Patient. Do I actually recommend it? That's hard to say. It is a book worth trying. I had seen the movie (which I hated), and thus some of the characters' secrets were already known to me. If I had started the book fresh, I may have had more motivation to discover the stories and sorrows, of Hana and the three men. ( )

I love this novel, my favourite Ondaatje. The story is well-constructed and is well-considered from end to end. While the overall situation may be a bit farfetched, there is enough backstory and explanation to understand who the characters are and why it is reasonable that they would meet at a villa in Italy during the last days of the war. ( )

http://pixxiefishbooks.blogspot.com/2...

In my last year of high school, I was expressing my discontent about what I had read recently (I don't remember what it was now) to one of my English teachers (I was taking 3 different English classes that year), and he recommended I read some poetry by a Canadian poet and author called Michael Ondaatje, as well as Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion. Well, there's been no turning back. Michael Ondaatje, without a doubt, has been my favourite author, bar none, ever since then.

I'm never quite sure which I like better, The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion. I think The English Patient edges out ahead, but then I re-read the other and remember how excellent it is.*

The English Patient has some of the same characters as the other book, but you don't need to have read In the Skin of a Lion to appreciate this one. Hana is a young Canadian girl who is in Italy working as a nurse in the last days of World War Two. She has stayed behind in an old Italian villa to nurse a dying patient who suffered extensive burns to most of his body a few years earlier, does not remember who he is (or so he claims), and is not expected to recover. The story unfolds parts of the English patient's past in a wonderful, sometimes dream-like, narrative. There is also a romance between Hana and a young Indian sapper who has come to defuse mines in the area, as well as the reintroduction of Caravaggio into Hana's life, an old friend of her father's (who was killed in the war) who worked as a spy for the Allies through the war and has now come to join Hana in her isolation. But the focus of the story is the English patient and the strange circumstances that led him to the villa where he now lays dying.

I was so excited, though trepidatious, when plans for a movie were announced. Well, the movie was awful. Elements of the story were changed, apparently at random, that made the story lose so much of its powerful magic for me. If you've only seen the movie, don't hold it against the book. Please.

People seem to either really like Ondaatje or really don't. I personally am addicted to his fluid prose, so poetic and often dreamy. Others find him wordy and inaccessible. While I generally tend to agree with the posit 'why say in 25 words what you could say in 10', I don't think that always works so well in fiction. I remember, in university, in 4th-year poetry class, being irritated by Elizabeth Bishop who, as I told my dismayed teacher, needed a serious editor to cut out the superfluous words she was tossing in. I switched my project to P.K. Page who was much better at being concise. Salman Rushdie is a prime example of a writer in love with the sound of his (boring, pedantic, unnecessary) words. But there is very little I would cut out of Ondaatje's work. His words are precise and appropriate to generate the extremely vivid images that I get when I read his books and his poetry (his poetry tends to be a lot more sparse in words). I see faces, I hear voices, I can even smell the place he is describing.

So, yeah. I like this book. Everyone should read it.

* If you still can't make yourself like The English Patient, at least try In the Skin of a Lion. It's written in a more concrete style. I know a number of people who have liked that one but couldn't get into The English Patient. And for those of you who are history buffs, it's about Toronto in the 1930's. ( )

All I knew about this novel going in was that its movie adaptation was the subject of a Seinfeld episode where everyone in the world loved it other than Elaine, which isn't very much. Between this, the Alexandria quartet, and Moon Tiger, I'm starting to realize that nonlinear love stories set in Egypt during World War II form their own subgenre of Commonwealth literature. Actually, though, most of this book occurs in Italy during the waning days of the war, as four characters are thrown together in a villa, and they all try to unearth each others' secrets. To be honest, the eponymous English patient was probably the least-interesting character, though even his history has some good stuff in it, as he falls in and out of love with an English noblewoman. Hana, his Canadian nurse, is probably the least-developed character in the book, as she tries to come to terms with all the death she's seen. Anyone who knows me will be unsurprised that I thought Caravaggio, the thief and lovable rogue made legitimate by the war, was the book's coolest character, but he doesn't get as much to do as the others, which is a real shame. The real star of the novel is Kip, an Indian bomb-disposal officer serving in the British forces. We see him across the entire course of the war, giving up his career as a doctor to join the Army, training with his mentor in England, suffering through the death of his mentor, disposing off bomb after bomb in dangerous monotony, reconnecting to humanity thanks to his relationship with Hana, and then suffering a devastating blow to his faith as the war finally ends. Kip's journey is the emotional center of the novel, and a strong center it is, too, elevating the book from fairly good to very good. Now I must get around to seeing the movie...