Product Description

Set at the end of World War II, this novel explores the lives of four very disparate people who find themselves holed up together in a ruined villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them. The author was awarded the 1992 Booker Prize for this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21443 in Books
• Published on: 1993-07-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 307 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
Booker Prize Winner 1992. At the end of World War II a nurse is living in a ruined villa in Tuscany, tending a single patient - an English pilot who had stepped, burned black, from his crashed plane into the arms of a North African desert tribe which added their wisdom to his own. To the villa come her old friend Caravaggio, maimed physically and mentally by the war, and a young Sikh bomb disposal officer. Pellucid prose, mysterious compelling symbolism, fluid movement backward and forward in time make this enigmatic, sometimes difficult novel impossible to forget. (Kirkus UK)

Canadian poet/novelist Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion, 1987, etc.) assembles, mosaic-fashion, the lives of four occupants of an Italian villa near Florence at the end of WW II. The war-damaged villa, its grounds strewn with mines, has gone from to German stronghold to Allied hospital, its sole occupants now a young Canadian nurse, Hana, and her last patient, a born victim. They are joined by David Caravaggio, an Italian-Canadian friend of Hana's father but also a thief used by Western intelligence, and Kip (Kirpal Singh), an Indian sapper in the British Army. So: a dying man and two wrecks - for David has become a morphine addict after his recent capture and torture, while Hana, who coped with the loss of her soldier sweetheart and their child (aborted), has been undone by news of her father's death. Only Kip is functioning efficiently, defusing the mines. Ondaatje superimposes on this tableau the landscape of the pre-war North African desert, with its strange brotherhood of Western explorers, filtered through the consciousness of Harm's patient. Though he claims to have forgotten his identity during the fiery fall from his plane into the desert, it seems the putative Englishman is the Hungarian explorer (and sometime German spy) Almasy, but such puzzles count for less than his erudition (his beloved Herodotus is the novel's presiding spirit), his internationalism ("Erase nations!"), and his doomed but incandescent love affair with the bride of an English explorer - an affair ignited by the desert and Herodotus, and a dramatic contrast to the "formal celibacy" of the love developing at the villa between Hana and Kip, which ends (crudely) when Kip learns of the Hiroshima bombing, discovers his racial identity, and quits the white man's war. A challenging, disorienting, periodically captivating journey without maps, best when least showy, as in the marvelous account of Kip's adoption by an eccentric English peer, his bomb-disposal instructor. (Kirkus Reviews)

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

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

An excellent voice for an excellent story!!
Michael York reads the U.S. version of The English Patient audio book. If you're in the U.S., spend a few extra dollars and GET THIS VERSION. Ralph Fiennes adds passion to this story in his perfect reading. I wanted to slap York everytime he did his "Hana" voice. Go to sleep listening to Ralph's reading, and you'll definitely have pleasant dreams. :)