The English Patient

published	2006 by McClelland & Stewart
first published	1993
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0771068719 (isbn13: 9780771068713)
pages	320
literary awards	Man Booker Prize Winner 1992
description	Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an I...more [close] 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. [close]
date added	12-18-06 edit book

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Jennifer rated it:

02/07/08

Read in January, 2005

The English Patient is an illuminating novel written by Michael Ondaatje, who tells the story of four damaged lives tangled together at the end of World War II. The story involves characters like: the melancholy, childlike nurse Hana; the emotionally and physically maimed thief, Caravaggio; the pensive and wary Indian bomb-disposal expert, Kip; and the burnt and broken English patient, a mysterious wounded soul without a name. The story revolves around several major themes such as: war and the p...more The English Patient is an illuminating novel written by Michael Ondaatje, who tells the story of four damaged lives tangled together at the end of World War II. The story involves characters like: the melancholy, childlike nurse Hana; the emotionally and physically maimed thief, Caravaggio; the pensive and wary Indian bomb-disposal expert, Kip; and the burnt and broken English patient, a mysterious wounded soul without a name. The story revolves around several major themes such as: war and the paradigm shift that takes place as cultures and people recover from such; love and the depths one will go to to acquire it; and the illusive but essential search for self-identity. The themes stretch across all aspects of human nature, but it is the development of self that receives the most attention. Ondaatje brings you into a transformative exploration of identity through multiple layering of meaning in each description. The author does this by drawing you far into the fantasy by luscious, sensuous elucidations. This book is not merely a thing to be read on an intellectual level. The book is to be sensed and physically processed, as you filter through smokey comprehension and hazy daydreams.
The book is a web of memories, and if you are expecting a linear story, you may be discouraged by the nonconformity to typical plot lines. The book weaves back and forth as memories reveal themselves into a tapestry of dream-like narratives. Ondaatje’s novel is a quilt of a story, much like the English patient's stitched together copy of Herodotus. The web of narrative is displayed much like how Hana reads to her patient from the books she tiptoes out of the library. She opens randomly to any page and begins reading. The plots of the stories are irrelevant to Hana and the English patient. The relevance for them lies in the moment, in the singular experiences that combine to make up the whole. The English Patient should be read on this level. Ondaatje says that he doesn’t know what his books are about until he finishes writing them. You may not completely understand what the book is about until you are done reading it, and even then the story changes and evolves as your own identity transforms. Very few books take you through this kind of self-discovery and leave you with a new awareness of the corporeal.
The book is a sensual journey that must be taken step by step, yet it is without a beginning or an ending point. The relevance of Ondaatje’s message is destroyed by constantly looking at the horizon to find the end of the road. And what is the message? For many it is the examination of self through poetically saturated text that the author employs to evoke personal discovery. The book brings up many questions to its watery surface for you to find answers to. For much of the text, the question you’ll be asking yourself is “Who is the English Patient”? For most of the narration you have no idea who this burned shadow of a man is. He seems to be a reminder of desperation and betrayal, pain and lost love, but this is not the story the author wants you to focus on. The English patient is merely a catalyst for the other characters, and you as well, to discover identity. Without him, the others would never have been able to interlace their stories and find understanding and comfort in each other.

This is a novel of revelation, and just as the identity of the English patient is slowly revealed as the novel progresses, so too are the inner selves and spiritual identities of the other characters in the novels. Every sentence is beautifully crafted and evocative, keeping you completely enthralled in the story. The story reaches across all boundaries of time and space to connect with people from all walks of life. Each of us who reads the story as the author intended, will find many connections with the story and its characters.
The text begins with Hana and the English patient living alone in a bombed out and abandoned hospital/monastery. From this location, all other places in the story are visited through memories and often painful recollections. Hana cares for both herself and her patient by keeping a simple garden and trading medical supplies for their other physical needs. For their intellectual needs she reads passages from odd books found in the possibly mined library. Throughout the story, Hana represents the scarred, insecure child in each of us; afraid to move beyond our sphere of comfort, but whimsical and playful within it. Hana cares for her patient as a substitute for how she would like to be cared for. She wants desperately to be wrapped and held and whispered to, and she does this vicariously through her patient, caring for him like he was a small frightened child in need of comfort. Yet, the English patient does not need this kind of comfort from Hana. The English patient no longer needs solace from others. He represents the resolve that the broken and tired have, who no longer have a choice in what they are given, and who can accept the circumstances without challenging them. He realizes that it’s the journey that gives birth to his identity and the means by which it ends is inconsequential. The duo is presently joined by a old friend of Hana’s father. The friend is Caravaggio, a thief and a morphine addict. The confused and wounded Caravaggio comes to find Hana as he looks for ties to the past and clues to his confused identity. The thief typifies most of us, who are somehow maimed whether physically or emotionally, who need to piece back the severed parts of our identities to make a new whole. Finally they are joined by Kip, the diviner, never looking at what is in front of his eyes, always searching through the layers beneath. He is afraid of connection and of loss. He is constantly aware of the dangers around him and therefore cannot appreciate the simple pleasures and safety nets of relationships. Many who have been afflicted with great loss and insecurity can identify with this character.
Ondaatje’s work draws many parallels to our own quest for self-awareness and our desire for peace with the past. The book is an examination of the nature of identity. Who are we when our world is torn apart? Who are we when our names are taken from us? Who are we when we no longer can be identified by our physical characteristics? Are we what other people make of us? Ondaatje doesn’t give you the answers, he gives you the questions and leads you lyrically through the journey of others on the same mission so that you may discover the answer for yourself. Ondaatje’s work is organic and alive. It will change your self-perception and gives charge to electrical pulses of discovery as you allow it to guide the form of your ever-changing identity.

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Michael rated it:

07/25/08

Read in April, 2001

When I first experienced this novel, I was a freshman in college. My grades had been poor because the journalism major I had thought I wanted to pursue turned out to just be a series of courses on how to write with hot air and the unnecessary rules that bind that style of writing--it was clear that Hunter S. Thompson had made no impression on the School of Journalism at the University of Maine. I was clearly too depressed and listless to make any real attempt at passing those journalism courses,...more When I first experienced this novel, I was a freshman in college. My grades had been poor because the journalism major I had thought I wanted to pursue turned out to just be a series of courses on how to write with hot air and the unnecessary rules that bind that style of writing--it was clear that Hunter S. Thompson had made no impression on the School of Journalism at the University of Maine. I was clearly too depressed and listless to make any real attempt at passing those journalism courses, and the few English classes I was taking were "core" classes and so crammed lots of Shakespeare down my throat (despite my current infatuation with the Bard, I was then much too restless to appreciate the finer qualities of his plays).

And then, Professor Norris assigned us The English Patient.

I remember thinking within the first few pages of reading how bizarre the novel seemed to be. After all, the tense shifts frequently back and forth from present to past in an apparently random fashion. The setting jumped all over the place, from an abandoned Italian monastery towards the end of World War II to a cartographers' camp outside of Cairo, and so on. And yet, it was clear to me by the time I finished that, despite the apparent randomness of the technical aspects of the novel, no other novel had ever left such a definite and lucid impression on me. I truly knew the characters, how they thought, how they acted, and how they interacted with one another. The plot, while it seemed difficult to follow at first, was not only understandable by the end but moreover heartrending and tragic. I had no idea that novels could do this, be so disjointed and yet singularly impressive and evocative. Needless to say, my faith in literature was completely renewed after reading The English Patient, and while it is perhaps not the best example of the novel (remember, this was years before I first encountered Ulysses), it nevertheless showed me the infinite possibilities of the narrative form.

Indulge me for a moment to divulge a bit more about the novel itself:

The characters in the novel are among those from literature I will remember and cherish as long as my memory remains intact. There is Hana, the young Canadian nurse who is clearly suffering from PTSD (for many things experienced during the War, including the death of her father, a pilot who was shot down) and is trying to make it right by caring for someone who will remain alive. There is Almasy--the titular patient--who we first encounter as a mystery burn victim, a man pulled from the wreckage of a crashed plane (as Hana's father would have been had he survived...), but who we later learn is a much, much more complex character. There is Caravaggio, the Canadian thief (and apparent friend of Hana's father) and sometime secret agent who is now mysteriously missing both of his thumbs. And there is Kip, the Sikh sapper who has joined the British Army in an attempt to show his loyalty to the British Empire and assimilate himself into it, despite protests from his anti-Imperial brother.

And these are only the characters we meet in the "present" time of the novel, that is, the end of World War II. I have said nothing of Katharine, around whom Almasy's stories and memories constantly revolve, or Geoffrey Clifton, Katharine's husband, who becomes an obvious obstacle for Almasy (though the author, Michael Ondaatje, never allows his narrative to sink to the level of a soap opera). These characters live only in the memory of the novel, and we never see them in the "present."

The reason we never see them in the present is one of the reasons why the novel's plot is so heartrending. I will say nothing of what happens, except to say that if you have seen the equally wonderful--but incredibly different--Academy Award-winning film adaptation, you only know half of the story. There is so much more going on in the novel, things that cannot be fully translated to the screen because they are emoted in such a dreamlike and poetic fashion.

Michael Ondaatje is one of the contemporary authors I admire most. He follows the "rules" of novel-writing, but only until they hamper his ideas, at which point he bends them or ignores them altogether. He seamlessly blends poetry and prose and is therefore able to touch emotions that most other novelists completely ignore. Undoubtedly, it is for these reasons that I found The English Patient so refreshing back in the spring of 2001, and why I have since returned to it time and time again....less

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Tara rated it:

(review of isbn 0679745203)

03/28/07

Favorite Quotes

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.

You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her...

He knows tha...more Favorite Quotes

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.

You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her...

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life....less

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Thomas rated it:

12/03/07

Read in December, 2007

The English Patient is a most unusual book. I approached it expecting it to be a love story, but it is far more complicated than that. Set in Italy at the end of the second World War, there are four principle characters. The first is Hana, a nurse suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, better known at this time as "shellshock". During the war, her father died, her boyfriend died, she terminated her pregnancy, and she treated hundreds of dying young men. In her psycholo...more The English Patient is a most unusual book. I approached it expecting it to be a love story, but it is far more complicated than that. Set in Italy at the end of the second World War, there are four principle characters. The first is Hana, a nurse suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, better known at this time as "shellshock". During the war, her father died, her boyfriend died, she terminated her pregnancy, and she treated hundreds of dying young men. In her psychologically battered battered state, she took to caring for a nameless English patient suffering from terrible burns. These two were left alone in an Italian villa after both the Germans and Allies pulled out, leaving hundreds of unexploded bombs and mines in their wake.

The next to arrive in this town is Carravagio, a friend of Hana's father. He too was suffering greatly, losing both thumbs after being caught as a suspected spy. At first he charms us with his stories of his previous life as a professional thief and a lover of women, but as we get to know him, he emerges as a morphine addict, hardly able to function without his fix.

Then comes Kip, an Indian-born bomb-defusing expert who works for the British. He is very proper, formal, and self-sufficient, holding himself somewhat aloof from the others, but that does not stop a burgeoning love relationship from forming between him and Hana. He is just what Hana needs, allowing her to heal and lower all the emotional barriers she has erected.

The other love story, if one can call it that, involves the English patient. After Carravagio administers a powerful dose of morphine to lower his defenses, the Englishman tells of the affair he had with a recently married woman, Katharine Clifton. Their relationship gnaws continuously at both of them, and they finally decide to break it off. But afterwards, Katharine's husband discovers their infidelity and attempts a murder-suicide. It is through these events that the Englishman came to have such terrible burns.

Kip spends his days defusing bombs nearby, but one awful day he hears on his radio that the Allies have dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. As a man who has committed his life to disarming weapons and saving lives, this is far too much to bear, and he abandons the others, including the woman he loves. He returns to India to become a doctor, marry another woman, and start a family. What becomes of Hana, we do not know.

The English Patient is certainly not a traditional love story, but perhaps a reader who could better relate to Hana's character could rescue the sentiments of love from the powerfully sad and disabling circumstances. I have found it quite difficult to make full sense of the book, and I am eager to view the cinematic interpretation of this story....less

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Nathaniel rated it:

05/05/08

Read in April, 2008

Just about every major character in this book is self-sacrificing to the point of abstract goodness without traction. Saintliness makes numerous appearances in character sketches and many actions are drenched in its overtones. This robs the book of any real driving tension--unless you are truly concerned with the English Patient's mysterious identity, which the author almost too obviously wants you to realize should not be the point.

It makes sense that the period immediately following WWII w...more Just about every major character in this book is self-sacrificing to the point of abstract goodness without traction. Saintliness makes numerous appearances in character sketches and many actions are drenched in its overtones. This robs the book of any real driving tension--unless you are truly concerned with the English Patient's mysterious identity, which the author almost too obviously wants you to realize should not be the point.

It makes sense that the period immediately following WWII would be saturated in an unabsorbable diminishing of tensions and that people who had come to feel like they were aligned against forces and armies rather than individuals become a bit anchorless and developmentally stuck. If it was Ondaatje's goal to conjure up this environment in his dream-filled, morphine-soaked Italian villa that is conveniently free of any intrusions from the outside world, then he was successful.

But, I don't know . . . I have a problem with the fact that all four of the major characters are essentially fearless. I can get over them not having any real vices and them having excuses for everything questionable that they do; but the stoicism/heroism and determination that they all display is spread around too generously and makes the characters less believable.

That said, the prose was consistently fine throughout and the well-researched passages about defusing explosive devices were both memorable and arresting. Also, even if I would have liked a bit more texture to the characters, Ondaatje understands the way people interact with one another, he understands where, how and why they construct boundaries, what they choose to remember and why they fail to communicate. He builds the novel around the small, unspoken and selfish needs of his characters (attention, distraction, accuracy, belonging) and his sensitivity and insight in this area absolutely sustains the novel.

I enjoyed "In the Skin of a Lion" considerably more. And the movie did not really impact my reading of this book; because I scarcely remembered it....less

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Neal rated it:

10/24/07

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: anyone

i had put off reading the english patient for sometime, i think it fell in my mind under the catagory of hollywood historical romanticism and thus to be avoided. foolish, yes, but nevertheless these things happen and it takes a while to get over ones pre-concieved ideas no matter how wrong they are. so i picked it up one evening, tired of the normal fare, and was immediately entranced. its been a while since i had been so totally caught up in a story: the lives of the characters, the historical ...more

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Andrew rated it:

12/05/07

bookshelves: completed

Read in December, 2007

A much better book than I anticipated. The novel follows four characters and their interactions in an abandoned Italian villa in the waning days of World War II.

Originally, there is Hana (the shellshocked nurse) and the English patient (a burn victim with a mysterious past). Joining them is Carvaggio, a theif who knew Hana before the war and who has suffered a horrific handicap. Arriving last is Kip, a fragile bomb expert struggling to find his identity in a radically shifting world.

E...more

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Jenni rated it:

02/17/08

One of the most haunting and lyrical novels I've ever devoured; the images are indelible. The movie is an unworthy and entirely incomplete and unpoetic creation if you've read the book. Ondaatje sets the novel in post World War II Italy, and explores isolation, loneliness, alienation, and intense, breathtaking love through the relationships, and sometimes flashback, of the four protagonists (Hana, a nurse; Caravaggio, an old family friend of Hana's and an unctious thief; the English patient [...more

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Lindsey rated it:

(review of isbn 0676970087)

10/09/07

Read in September, 2007

I waffle on how I feel about this book. I always read the book before reading the book, but I didn't on this one. It's a great book and a great movie, but the love story is definitely not central as advertised, by hmmm...the cover perhaps? I enjoy the rest of the story better than love story anyways. The character of the bomb sapper (and the history of bomb sapping) is the best one in the book (and probably the least screwed up). For being the outcast Indian in war-time England, he has more...more

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Jan rated it:

(review of isbn 0747572593)

08/28/07

Read in August, 2007

Granted, The English Patient is a beautifully written, moving and interesting novel, but ultimately I feel disappointed as I was expecting it to affect me a lot more than it did.

The story is about four people who end up staying together at an abandoned florentine villa in the closing stages of the second world war. The novel describes the protagonists' wartime experiences including the patient's tragic love affair.

The language of this novel is poetic and I had problems with i...more

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Spiros rated it:

(review of isbn 0679745203)

10/17/07

bookshelves: cantbelieveineverread, cinerelated, freebox

Read in October, 2007

A fogbank through which images appear, faintly: a young Sikh sapper, setting his rifle on a piano; a middleaged Italian expatriate, with no thumbs; a nurse, playing hopscotch in a deserted, candle-lit former nunnery; a man lying in a bed, his penis burned into the shape of a seahorse, a cipher wrapped in an enigma wrapped in charred flesh. Gradually, the internal winds generated by the fogbank cause the mist to dissipate, revealing sharper details, paradoxically increasing both clarity and depth...more

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Mrs. Turnbow rated it:

12/24/07

Read in January, 2005

recommends it for: those who like history/love stories

I had seen the movies years before reading the book so I knew what to expect. However, I really enjoyed the book.

It is near the end of World War II in Italy and a badly injured patient, who crashed in a small airplane, is being observed by a single nurse in a ruined town. He is so injured that no one knows his identity - they all assume he is English, because the English are "good", and during war, everyone must have an identity. The English patient, as we learn, was a mapmaker who...more

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Erie rated it:

(review of isbn 0676970087)

02/24/08

bookshelves: book-to-movies, fiksi

Read in February, 2008

Pelajaran moral dari buku ini adalah...

Jangan coba-coba mengganggu istri orang, apalagi statusnya masih penganten baru, apalagi kalo ketahuan suaminya! (meski affair-nya sudah berakhir) Runyam dah (dua kali jatoh dari pesawat!) Hehehe

The desert could not be claimed or owned--it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, tho...more

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15 comments

Adam rated it:

(review of isbn 0679745203)

07/19/07

bookshelves: booker-prize, fiction

Read in February, 1999

The English Patient is one of my least favorite novels of all time. Michael Ondaatje's prose is the literary equivalent of having a gossamer skein repeatedly thrown over your face and then dragged away; fleeting and insubstantial, but just present enough to be really fucking annoying. Also, his dialogue sucks. People in the 1940s absolutely did not speak the way Ondaatje has them speaking. This novel won the Booker Prize in 1992, an award which was, for some God-unknown reason, split with...more

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Kate rated it:

(review of isbn 0676970087)

09/10/07

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: everyone

This book really gets 3.5 stars from me. And Ondaatje in general is a 5-star writer. His prose is poetry, his characters captivating. Four characters--the sad nurse, the burned patient, the maimed thief, and the heroic "sapper" (someone who dismantles bombs!) live together in a ruined Italian villa at the end of World War II. The book marks an intersection of lives at a critical point of self-examination and transformation.

I enjoyed the history lessons, the geography of the desert...more

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Soomanaat rated it:

07/22/08

تا آنجايي كه اطلاع دارم اين رمان به فارسي ترجمه نشده و فارسي زبانان از طريق فيلمي كه بر اساس آن ساخته شد اين رمان را مي‌شناسند. اين رمان داراي داستاني بسيار زيبا‌ست كه البته فيلمي هم كه از آن ساخته شد فيلم خوبي از آب درآمد و توانست 9 اسكار و 41 جايزه از جشنواره‌هاي ديگر كسب كند و...more

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Gavin rated it:

04/14/07

Read in January, 2007

I think this is probably the best Ralph Fiennes to book translation. (Okay, so it chronologically goes the other way, but we all know that Ralph is what really makes the book what it is). That is, of all the books Ralph has acted, this is the best. Sorry, the literary canon may be dead, but I'm purposefully excluding Harry Potter (don't whack me!). The Constant Gardener? Don't think so, based on other people's reviews. Maid in Manhattan? Not likely. Red Dragon? Not quite the breadth to be a clas...more

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Joan rated it:

10/31/07

Read in October, 2007

I was not expecting this. In my mind, I had the poster/cover of the movie where Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas are dancing, their romance backdropped by the desert. While their characters' relationship is sort of the center of the book, its details slowly being revealed in bits and pieces and out of order throughout, I found that the romance that blossoms between two other characters, Hana and Kip, was more interesting. The language of the book was very poetic (as the author also writes ...more

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Jennifer rated it:

(review of isbn 0747572593)

05/28/08

recommends it for: NO ONE

To paraphrase Rowan Atkinson, "Spurn this book as you would spurn a rabid dog."

I hate this whole phenomenon. I hated the original book, I despised the movie, and am generally made nauseous by the screenplay. Honestly, this is one of those works which took off for reasons which were never clear to me, and suddenly everyone on the PLANET was going on and on about it (I have similar feelings on "Bridges of Madison County"). Then, when the furor had finally died down to a dul...more

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Michelle rated it:

02/24/08

bookshelves: 1001, canadian

Read in November, 2006

Canadian author, Michael Ondaatje's "The English Pa