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The English Patient
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Manufacturer: Vintage
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Vintage
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Our Price: $10.17
You Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Vintage
Average Customer Rating:
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The English Patient Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679745204
ISBN: 0679745203
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 320
Publication Date: 1993-11-30
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1993-11-30
Studio: Vintage
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679745204
ISBN: 0679745203
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 320
Publication Date: 1993-11-30
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1993-11-30
Studio: Vintage
Editorial Review of The English Patient
Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.
A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family.
Customer Reviews of The English Patient
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Fragments, shards, and drifts of sand
Review: In reviewing Michael Ondaatje's recent novel DIVISADERO, I remarked that his narrative technique involved writing short fragments, loosely connected in theme but jumping around in subject and time, and leaving it to the reader to connect them. Such an appeal to the imagination is rare and gratifying, and the results are complex and evocative. If I try to forget the movie, the same could be true of the earlier ENGLISH PATIENT, although here Ondaatje is dealing with a subject of greater historical resonance -- the Second World War in Egypt and Italy -- and the interplay of personal narrative and hard fact is more difficult to bring off than the largely private scale of DIVISADERO.
Both books are about people recovering from trauma. In DIVISADERO, the scarring was psychological; here, it is physical as well. The setting is a ruined Italian villa north of Florence, just after the German retreat. It had been used as a temporary hospital, but now only one patient remains, the supposed Englishman of the title. He is attended by Hana, a young Canadian nurse, who has seen so many men die that she can no longer weep the recent death of her own father. She is joined by David Caravaggio, an old friend of the family, a professional thief recruited to work in intelligence, who has had his thumbs cut off during an interrogation. And camping in the garden is Kirpal Singh (Kip), a Sikh bomb-disposal expert, who has only his rigid self-discipline and skills to protect him from disaster. The English Patient himself is an unrecognizable figure, burned all over his body, brought out of the North African desert by Bedouin tribesmen. It later becomes clear that he is not English at all, but a British-educated Hungarian count, Ladislaus de Almásy, an explorer of some renown.
Each of the characters is gradually opened out. Caravaggio is the least fully realized emotionally, but he becomes increasingly significant in the back-story. Conversely, Hana's history needs little filling-in, since we see life in the villa mainly through her eyes and feel through her skin. Her relationship with Kip is one of the loveliest things about this rich book, and the Sikh's character is developed in considerable depth, especially as he finds a purpose to his life during his training in England. His work as a bomb-disposal expert is described in always fascinating and sometimes breath-stopping detail.
But the most space is devoted to Almásy's time in the desert, his years of patient exploration of the Great Sand Sea and the Gilf Kebir in the 1930s, his passionate but intermittent affair with the wife of a colleague, and his activities during the war itself. These things are dug up gradually, as shards of memory, some relatively objectively, some under the influence of morphia, some that might even be hallucinations. The events of the thirties emerge most clearly, but more recent happenings must sometimes be pieced together from the briefest of references. I am not sure that a fully coherent scenario would ever emerge from reading the book alone, or that it was intended to.
Here, of course, I have to mention the 1997 movie. Anthony Minghella, the director, has in fact written such a scenario, connecting the fragments into one persuasive interpretation of the novel. Largely focusing on Almásy's story, he has tidied the narrative and greatly compressed the time-frame to create a combination of war story and grand romance with the epic sweep of Tolstoy or Pasternak. The movie is filled with such unforgettable imagery and such strongly-acted characters that his version cannot easily be put aside. But the fact that Ondaatje approved this adaptation does not make it the only possible one, and it is now much harder to enjoy the open-ended quality of his story-telling in its own terms.
For those who have seen the movie, the greatest pleasure in the book may come from the elements that Minghella played down: the stories of Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio, and Ondaatje's quiet portrayal of life in the ruined villa. Consider his description of a bonfire of weeds that Hana would gather and burn "...during the late afternoon's pivot into dusk. The damp fires steam and burn, and the plant-odoured smoke sidles into the bushes, up into the trees, then withers on the terrace in front of the house. It reaches the window of the English patient, who can hear the drift of voices, now and then a laugh from the smoky garden. He translates the smell, evolving it backward to what had been burned. Rosemary, he thinks, milkweed, wormwood...". It is simple writing, but a passage that excites the imagination, involving all the senses, creating its own images in the mind. The whole book will do the same, if you are lucky enough to be able to come to it without preconception.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Enjoyable....the film is good too.
Review: I watched the film long ago and have enjoyed reading the book as its own piece. The characters are humbling and facing true tragedy and change in life. I was drawn in by where their intermingling would take them.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: I loved it.
Review: This book was given to me on an airplane and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I had seen the movie and thought it was OK. The book however, I absolutly loved. The movie focused primarily on the English Patient, but the book was different in that you got to know each character quite intimately. They all were in the house for different reasons and each of them had very unique and intrieging backgrounds. I was sucked in immediately. Each charachter is developed and you are able to understand who they are and why. All of their strengths and weaknesses are revealed and they are quite vulnerable. If you are someone who likes to bond with a characters and watch them develop, this book is for you.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: 2.5 stars. The author tries too hard and does not succeed in creating a masterpiece
Review: Before I start I have to say that I loved the English Patient film. Minghella (director) manages to capture the beautiful romance between the characters and the stark beauty of the desert like no other director has been able to.
This book however, doesn't. Don't get me wrong. Ondaatje isn't a terrible writer. He's just not great. He tries very hard to be different (speechmarks are obviously passe?) and it shows. The English Patient novel doesn't really have any of the elements that make the movie so likeable. For starters, the book isn't coherent. It jumps everywhere. Some of the jumps are clear. Others are not. One gets the feeling that they're in there just for kicks, not for any real story-driving purpose.
Secondly...a LOT of Ondaatje's metaphors just.don't.work.
For example you have the ones that almost work:
"I don't think (Clifton) he loved the desert, but he had an affection for it that grew out of awe at our stark order, into which he wanted to fit himself - like a joyous undergraduate who respects silent behaviour in a library."
The ones that seem very high school:
"He (caravaggio) rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet."
And the bewildering:
"He (Kip) knew he was now a king...it was strange to him. As if he had been handed a large suit of clothes rhat he could roll around in and whose sleeves would drag behind him."
This is not so say that Ondaatje doesn't paint some beautiful imagery as well. He does. But those instances tend to be few and far between. He also has the infuriating tendency to marr prefectly stunning imagery. For example, at the beginning of the book, he gives you this fantastic image of a young boy dancing next to a fire. Next thing you know, semen is being picked up from the sand. ?!? He does this over and over again.
I have never said this about any book/movie, but honestly, watch the movie as it is an infinitely better interpretation of the the book, than the book itself. The characters in the movie are likeable, and the story is complex and beautiful. The same, strangely, cannot be said of the book.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: pretentious
Review: English patient has some interesting characters and the plot does have some intrigue, but please, an astounding book? Not. Too many little-finger-in-the-air chardonnays for the book review set. The author's prose is like reading a college literature student's overdone ramblings, he tries way to hard to be artful with words, which is really an inconsideration to the reader. The author's ability to be creative should be secondary to his ability to communicate. A lot of the metaphors don't work, simply leaving you puzzled. This book is like going to dinner with people who can speak the same language as you, but decide they will talk in another, company be damned.
Review Summary: Fragments, shards, and drifts of sand
Review: In reviewing Michael Ondaatje's recent novel DIVISADERO, I remarked that his narrative technique involved writing short fragments, loosely connected in theme but jumping around in subject and time, and leaving it to the reader to connect them. Such an appeal to the imagination is rare and gratifying, and the results are complex and evocative. If I try to forget the movie, the same could be true of the earlier ENGLISH PATIENT, although here Ondaatje is dealing with a subject of greater historical resonance -- the Second World War in Egypt and Italy -- and the interplay of personal narrative and hard fact is more difficult to bring off than the largely private scale of DIVISADERO.
Both books are about people recovering from trauma. In DIVISADERO, the scarring was psychological; here, it is physical as well. The setting is a ruined Italian villa north of Florence, just after the German retreat. It had been used as a temporary hospital, but now only one patient remains, the supposed Englishman of the title. He is attended by Hana, a young Canadian nurse, who has seen so many men die that she can no longer weep the recent death of her own father. She is joined by David Caravaggio, an old friend of the family, a professional thief recruited to work in intelligence, who has had his thumbs cut off during an interrogation. And camping in the garden is Kirpal Singh (Kip), a Sikh bomb-disposal expert, who has only his rigid self-discipline and skills to protect him from disaster. The English Patient himself is an unrecognizable figure, burned all over his body, brought out of the North African desert by Bedouin tribesmen. It later becomes clear that he is not English at all, but a British-educated Hungarian count, Ladislaus de Almásy, an explorer of some renown.
Each of the characters is gradually opened out. Caravaggio is the least fully realized emotionally, but he becomes increasingly significant in the back-story. Conversely, Hana's history needs little filling-in, since we see life in the villa mainly through her eyes and feel through her skin. Her relationship with Kip is one of the loveliest things about this rich book, and the Sikh's character is developed in considerable depth, especially as he finds a purpose to his life during his training in England. His work as a bomb-disposal expert is described in always fascinating and sometimes breath-stopping detail.
But the most space is devoted to Almásy's time in the desert, his years of patient exploration of the Great Sand Sea and the Gilf Kebir in the 1930s, his passionate but intermittent affair with the wife of a colleague, and his activities during the war itself. These things are dug up gradually, as shards of memory, some relatively objectively, some under the influence of morphia, some that might even be hallucinations. The events of the thirties emerge most clearly, but more recent happenings must sometimes be pieced together from the briefest of references. I am not sure that a fully coherent scenario would ever emerge from reading the book alone, or that it was intended to.
Here, of course, I have to mention the 1997 movie. Anthony Minghella, the director, has in fact written such a scenario, connecting the fragments into one persuasive interpretation of the novel. Largely focusing on Almásy's story, he has tidied the narrative and greatly compressed the time-frame to create a combination of war story and grand romance with the epic sweep of Tolstoy or Pasternak. The movie is filled with such unforgettable imagery and such strongly-acted characters that his version cannot easily be put aside. But the fact that Ondaatje approved this adaptation does not make it the only possible one, and it is now much harder to enjoy the open-ended quality of his story-telling in its own terms.
For those who have seen the movie, the greatest pleasure in the book may come from the elements that Minghella played down: the stories of Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio, and Ondaatje's quiet portrayal of life in the ruined villa. Consider his description of a bonfire of weeds that Hana would gather and burn "...during the late afternoon's pivot into dusk. The damp fires steam and burn, and the plant-odoured smoke sidles into the bushes, up into the trees, then withers on the terrace in front of the house. It reaches the window of the English patient, who can hear the drift of voices, now and then a laugh from the smoky garden. He translates the smell, evolving it backward to what had been burned. Rosemary, he thinks, milkweed, wormwood...". It is simple writing, but a passage that excites the imagination, involving all the senses, creating its own images in the mind. The whole book will do the same, if you are lucky enough to be able to come to it without preconception.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Enjoyable....the film is good too.
Review: I watched the film long ago and have enjoyed reading the book as its own piece. The characters are humbling and facing true tragedy and change in life. I was drawn in by where their intermingling would take them.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: I loved it.
Review: This book was given to me on an airplane and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I had seen the movie and thought it was OK. The book however, I absolutly loved. The movie focused primarily on the English Patient, but the book was different in that you got to know each character quite intimately. They all were in the house for different reasons and each of them had very unique and intrieging backgrounds. I was sucked in immediately. Each charachter is developed and you are able to understand who they are and why. All of their strengths and weaknesses are revealed and they are quite vulnerable. If you are someone who likes to bond with a characters and watch them develop, this book is for you.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: 2.5 stars. The author tries too hard and does not succeed in creating a masterpiece
Review: Before I start I have to say that I loved the English Patient film. Minghella (director) manages to capture the beautiful romance between the characters and the stark beauty of the desert like no other director has been able to.
This book however, doesn't. Don't get me wrong. Ondaatje isn't a terrible writer. He's just not great. He tries very hard to be different (speechmarks are obviously passe?) and it shows. The English Patient novel doesn't really have any of the elements that make the movie so likeable. For starters, the book isn't coherent. It jumps everywhere. Some of the jumps are clear. Others are not. One gets the feeling that they're in there just for kicks, not for any real story-driving purpose.
Secondly...a LOT of Ondaatje's metaphors just.don't.work.
For example you have the ones that almost work:
"I don't think (Clifton) he loved the desert, but he had an affection for it that grew out of awe at our stark order, into which he wanted to fit himself - like a joyous undergraduate who respects silent behaviour in a library."
The ones that seem very high school:
"He (caravaggio) rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet."
And the bewildering:
"He (Kip) knew he was now a king...it was strange to him. As if he had been handed a large suit of clothes rhat he could roll around in and whose sleeves would drag behind him."
This is not so say that Ondaatje doesn't paint some beautiful imagery as well. He does. But those instances tend to be few and far between. He also has the infuriating tendency to marr prefectly stunning imagery. For example, at the beginning of the book, he gives you this fantastic image of a young boy dancing next to a fire. Next thing you know, semen is being picked up from the sand. ?!? He does this over and over again.
I have never said this about any book/movie, but honestly, watch the movie as it is an infinitely better interpretation of the the book, than the book itself. The characters in the movie are likeable, and the story is complex and beautiful. The same, strangely, cannot be said of the book.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: pretentious
Review: English patient has some interesting characters and the plot does have some intrigue, but please, an astounding book? Not. Too many little-finger-in-the-air chardonnays for the book review set. The author's prose is like reading a college literature student's overdone ramblings, he tries way to hard to be artful with words, which is really an inconsideration to the reader. The author's ability to be creative should be secondary to his ability to communicate. A lot of the metaphors don't work, simply leaving you puzzled. This book is like going to dinner with people who can speak the same language as you, but decide they will talk in another, company be damned.