The English Patient-Rack Size

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.

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.

Serious readers of literature should read this novel more than once, for its subtleties, imagery, and the force of its lyricism. More casual readers may find it tough reading, not because the language is inaccessible but because of the way Ondaatje backs into his story. Those who stick with the author's poetic turns will be well-rewarded by the end.


Heartbreakingly Gorgeous   April 12, 2002
25 out of 27 found this review helpful

"The English Patient" is, without a doubt, one of my very favorite books. It is lush, beautiful and gorgeous. And the glory of it is that it got that way with fine, first-rate writing. You won't find any gimmicks or ... tricks here.

Unlike the movie, the book begins in war-torn Italy (1944) where we encounter Hana, a Canadian nurse and a horribly burned man known only as, "the English patient." Alone in an isolated, abandoned convent, Hana stays behind when her friends move on to care for the dying English patient. Hana is a rare individual and truly caring. She spends her days reading to the English patient from the volume of Herodotus that was found with him and, when his pain becomes too great, she injects him with morphine.

Hana and the English patient aren't alone long, however. A mysterious man named Caravaggio soon arrives and it becomes clear that he has an agenda all his own. Nevertheless, it is Caravaggio who succeeds with the English patient where others have failed. This trio is soon joined by a Sikh named Kip, a man who will play a role in Hana's life, just as she will play a role in his.

Eventually, of course, we learn all about the English patient, who really isn't English at all, but a Hungarian count named, Almasy. We learn where he's been and why and how he came to be so horribly burned. We learn about the great love of his life, a love that sadly, was doomed from the very start.

This is a book that is told on two levels and contains two love stories. One takes place in the past and the other takes place in the present. While Hana's story is told in the present tense, it is not as involving or as intense as is the love story involving Almasy that takes place in the past. I think this is because Hana and her lover are not as fully-realized as are Almasy and his lover, though Hana is by far the most sympathetic character in the book.

The character of Caravaggio is as mysterious as is the English patient. We do learn about him, however, and about his mysterious connection to Almasy. The stories of Hana and Caravaggio are heartbreaking and heartbreakingly beautiful.

"The English Patient" is a quiet love story, one told without the necessity of melodrama or "fireworks." However, it is one that cuts deep, and one that any reader will remember long after the book is finished. This is a story that simply rings with universal chords...of love, of loss, of sadness, of betrayal.

If I have one quibble with this book, it is with the denouement. I didn't really want to know what happened to some of the characters in the distant future. I wanted Ondaatje to leave a little for my imagination. But he didn't and that's his choice. It certainly didn't ruin the book for me.

The writing in "The English Patient" is lyrical and beautiful, though spare. Ondaatje is first and foremost a poet, and it shows. This is a book that flows, that cascades, that washes over you with its words.

I first read "The English Patient" years ago and I haven't forgotten a single detail. "The English Patient" is a book that captures your heart and never lets go. It is a book that will haunt you with its beauty and with its sadness for many years to come, perhaps even for the rest of your life. Yes, it's that good.


If you've ever NOT read a book because it became a movie....   January 15, 2006
Mark DeRespinis (Boulder, CO USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

There was a time, not too long ago, when you could sit in a cafe and hear the words The English Patient within the half hour, either that or see someone with their head ducked into the pages of the book between slurps of coffee. Of course this popularity made me wary of the book and the movie and I formed ready stereotypes and turned my attention elsewhere. Then the paperback copies of the book started to come out with the actors faces on it, and I have vowed never to by a book that brandishes its connection to the movie version of the story - call me a grumpy old man, but it seems that the book was the book before it was the movie and I'd much rather form my own visual and dramatic accompaniment to the text without seeing the face of some actor. (Disclaimer: I might love the movie if I actually saw it, but that's not the point!)
And yet, poetic justice prevails. On a slow winter morning at my coffee shop, I looked warily over at a copy of The English Patient that someone had left on the shelf months ago. In fact, I didn't even think that I was picking up "The English Patient", and instead looked to the merits of the book's fine author Michael Ondaatje. I thought of Anil's Ghost, which I enjoyed, and Coming through Slaughter, and thought it might do me good to start off my day with a glance at the inspired prose of a great writer. Later, I would read about Hana reading to the English patient: "When she begins a book she enters through stilted doorwas into large courtyards. Parma and Paris and India spread their carpets." In the first paragraph of this book, we enter into The Villa, following Hana into the room where the English patient lies. "She turns into the room which is another garden - this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls and ceiling. The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, and he turns his head slowly towards her as she enters..." We are introduced to a relationship, and through the relationship, to a place, and through the place, to a war, and through the war, to the strange lurches of a civilization in a time of great change and to individuals trying to situate themselves amidst the absurdly ordered chaos of it all. Once you fall under the spell of the story, you are left to dream, and to be changed forever by the experience.


Loving and Learning   December 18, 2006
Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful

It's hard to believe Ondaatje wasn't inspired, above all else, by "Wuthering Heights," especially in his characterization of a Katherine and Almasy whose obsession with love as possession is a latter-day equivalent of the undifferentiated passion of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. And Ondaatje's related but contrasting pair of lovers, Hana and Kip, appear to occupy a place comparable with Bronte's Cathy Linton and Hareton, whose recognition of each other's separateness at least holds forth the promise of a relationship between two individuals.

But Ondaatje surprises us. His Kip and Hana finally retreat to the boundaries of nationality, race, and past traditions, reclaiming for themselves as much identity as such markers are capable of offering. In "The English Patient" Almasy plays both the roles of Heathcliff and Hareton. It is the latter who is redeemed from the primitive through the books Cathy finally shares with him, teaching him to separate himself from the primeval natural principle and to love. Almasy learns much the same from his Kathy, who shows him the true meaning of Herodotus, of history, of words themselves. He learns he cannot remain a free agent, avoiding responsibility and "ownership," because without incurring debts to another person, agency is pointless and freedom is an illusion. Almasy must lose his fabricated identity--symbolized by the "features," or mere markers, of history, the desert, and the physical body--in order to gain his soul, which turns out to be Kathy.

When Almasy makes good on his promise and returns to the cave, the necrophilia scene (as subtle as any in all literature--compare its obvious counterpart in "Wuthering Heights") is an electric and electrifying intercourse of tongues, an exchange of lying words for a shared language. Kathy's sacrifice in taking into herself the old words of Almasy is her answer to his own sacrifice, an exorcism of the qualified, secretive language Almasy had formerly insisted on calling love. With that act Almasy is transformed from "demon lover" to lover, from a desert nomad and recorder of landmarks to co-author of and mutual participant in a new "text," an authentic discourse of love between two independent people who ultimately relate as one.

To those who distrust the story's representations of history, remember that the story itself questions all such representations. Which is not to say it's a "romance." It's a love story--above all, a love "history," and as such it rings as true as any history since Emily Bronte's.


"That night I fell in love with a voice. Only a voice."   September 5, 1999
25 out of 30 found this review helpful

The English Patient written by Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje's stunning novel takes place as the Second World War is ending. The author creates four unforgettable characters and brings them together in an abandoned and damaged Italian villa as the war retreats around them. It is their lives and memories that "The English Patient" follows and explores.

Hana is a young Canadian nurse and her late father's friend, Caravaggio, is a professional thief and Allied spy who was brutally maimed during the war. Kip, a Sikh "sapper", lives on the edge of death in the fields of bomb disposal.

And the central force around which the action spins is the mysterious title character - the English Patient, the nameless, burnt victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates the book.

They are all fascinated by this dying man, burnt beyond recognition and who refuses to unveil his name or country of origin. His story, set in the deserts of North Africa, unfolds through a series of flashbacks taking place in the abandoned villa. Through the rest of the novel, Hana, Caravaggio and Kip try to discover his true identity while he tells them stories of his past.

"The English Patient" is fabulous. It is all very poetic, the plot, the descriptions. It transforms your view of the world, turning it into a glorious, magical place that does not exist or does it? The author I read on the inside of the cover was first a poet and then became a novelist. And this novel is filled with page upon page of poetry, though it is written in novel form. "The English Patient" is perhaps the most beautiful novel I have ever read.

When I started to read the book I was a bit surprised that it was written in a third person. But later I discovered that the third person narrative voice make some kind of justice to all the characters.

Though I have to admit that it was not a very easy book to read. The author's language is lyrical and beautiful, but it requires an investment of energy from the reader especially from one whose mother tongue is not English. Sometimes the lyrical language like steels away your breath so that it becomes hard to follow the plot.

I strongly want to recommend this book and then trust me and take as long as you can to finish it. Discover every single phrase of it because it is worth it.

I want to end this book report with a sentence from the book. "That night I fell in love with a voice. Only a voice. I wanted to hear nothing more." This breathtaking sentence really hit me and stayed with me for several days.