Product Description

The final curtain is closing on the Second World War, and Hana, a nurse, stays behind in an abandoned Italian villa to tend to her only remaining patient. Rescued by Bedouins from a burning plane, he is English, anonymous, damaged beyond recognition and haunted by his memories of passion and betrayal. The only clue Hana has to his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes describing a painful and ultimately tragic love affair.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16384 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 the second world war 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 sheet 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 secured 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.

Review
'One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time' Guardian 'Magnificent A wise and graceful book about history itself' Sunday Times 'The best piece of fiction in English I've read in years' Independent on Sunday 'Ondaatje has now written the extraordinary novel we have been awaiting from him: THE ENGLISH PATIENT is a masterpiece' Financial Times

Independent on Sunday
'The best piece of fiction in English I've read in years'

Customer Reviews

This is a book to read slowly and preferably aloud.
This is a book which should be read slowly and preferably aloud. In this highly recommended piece of literature we are taken on a sensual exploration of place and people. It is worth savoring the language which evokes the taste, touch, sight, sound and smell of the characters who are inextricably bound up with their own geographical and human journeys.

Hanna, 'imagines all of Asia through the gestures of this one man.' When Kip looks at Hanna, 'he sees a fragment of her lean cheek in relation to the landscape behind it.' The English Patient vividly recalls the dry heat of the desert being refreshed by a breeze eventually increasing and transforming the surface of the desert. 'We had to keep moving. If you pause sand builds up...and locks you in.' This is the same desert which had just been described as: 'The grooves and the corrugated sand (which) resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog's mouth.' In contrast we experience the freezing cold mud as Kip prepares to defuse an unexploded bomb: 'He had come down barefoot...being caught within the clay, unable to get a firm hold down there in the cold water. He wasn't wearing boots - they would have locked within the clay, and when he was pulleyed up later the jerk out of it could break his ankles.' The faceless English patient wears, 'an amber shell within his ear' so he can hear the clawing and breathing of the dog. He hears, 'the drift of voices, now and then a laugh from the smoky garden. He translates the smell, evolving it backwards to what had been burned.'

This is not a book for those who want a quick read in anticiapation of a comfortable resolution. The language compels us to linger as through our senses it transports us in space and time to places and events that have the appearance of fact rather than fiction.

Awesome
I agree with the last reviewer - don't let Antony Minghella's half-baked and completely unsubtle adaptation put you off. Or, if you liked the film, rest assured that the book is a hundred times better. Here is a novel that hovers between poetry and prose. I heard the author took 8 years to write it and it shows. Possibly the best 'Booker Prize' winner of the 90s decade, this is a stunning novel which combines prose to make your imagination and senses reel, and (rare in most literary novels) a plot that is as dramatic and intriuging as a modern thriller. The array of places and scenes is mesmerising, from Kip dismantling a bomb, to the intensity of the patient's love affair memories in Eygpt. It is in many ways a challenging read - there are times when the narrative is bewildering and difficult, but persevere - as one review put it, read the book, put your faith in it and it will be repayed.

A wonderful, complex book - don't just watch the movie!
The English Patient is a beautiful and complex novel - it has two story lines which are intermingled but are separate in time and place. I don't agree at all that it is boring, but it is a difficult book to read because of these two stories and the very poetic style of the prose. It is absolutely worth the effort though, because you quickly realise that where the movie tends to simplify and romanticise the relationships, the book adds layer upon layer of ambiguity and complexity. The book enhances, I find, the importance of the Hana-Kip love story, presenting it as a beautiful and constructive love relationship in counterpoint to the destructive, menacing, almost violent love between the English patient and Katherine. The latter love affair dominates both the book and the movie - but in the book it is infinitely more troubling, tragic and lonely. This book is worth every one of the 5 crowns I gave it - try it!