The English Patient

I finished my first book for the Armchair Traveling reading challenge, and it was spectacular!

My friend Elise recommended The English Patient several times, and I've had it on my near-toppling stack of "to read" books for years (literally, years). I'm really glad I finally picked it up because it was much more than I ever expected. In fact, it was one of those very rare books that made me desperately want to immediately re-read in an effort to soak it up entirely and catch all the little nuances I might've missed the first time around. It's definitely a book that deserves re-reading.

To summarize, it's the story of Hana, a WWII nurse in Italy who stays behind in a bombed out villa to take care of a severely burned Englishman known only as the "English patient" until late in the story. Hana and the English patient are joined by Caravaggio, a long-time friend of Hana's and a thief mutilated during the course of his job as a spy. And, finally, an Indian sapper (expert at dismantling bombs) named Kip.

I think what I loved most about this story was the intricate interweaving of the four characters' stories, experiences and points of view. Ondaatje crafts a vivid identity for each character, but it's slow in coming. The reader is given small snatches of each's background throughout the novel, but the slowest to unfold is the English patient himself. Through a mixture of straightforward recollections, bits of writing and morphine-clouded ramblings, the reader understands the English patient's harrowing past, tragic love story and how he came to exist among the villa's odd family.

The draw for any book lover is certainly the abundance of literary references and the dependence and importance that books and words play in several of the characters' experiences.
A few quotes for you:

"She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water" (238).

"Now, months later in the Villa San Girolamo, in the hill town north of Florence, in the arbour room that is his bedroom, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna. He speaks in fragments about oasis towns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh. And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herotodus' Histories, are other fragments--maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name. There is still no clue to who he actually is, nameless, without rank or battalion or squadron. The references in his book are all pre-war, the deserts of Egypt and Libya in the 1930s, interspersed with references to cave art or gallery art or journal notes in his own small handwriting" (96).

"Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot. I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise" (94).

This book was a fantastic way to start off the challenge, and it's made picking my next book extremely difficult. However, finally, I think I've settled on The Last Communist Virgin, by Wang Ping. It's a book of short stories and just different enough in tone and writing style to help me avoid the slump that could come from reading a great book like The English Patient.