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The English Patient: Man Booker Prize Winner Paperback – November 30, 1993

by Michael Ondaatje (Author)

4.2 3,958 ratings

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BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Warlight traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. “A rare spellbinding web of dreams.” —Time

The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions—and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Canadian author Ondaatje offers a poetic novel set in a desolate Italian villa in the final days of WWII--a one-week PW bestseller--and an evocative account of a visit with his family in Sri Lanka.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A rare and spellbinding web of dreams." —Time

"Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic, it transports the reader to another world .... Ondaatje's most probing examination yet of the nature of identity." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Mr. Ondaatje [is] one of North America's finest novelists.... The spell of his haunted villa remains with us, inviting us to reread passages for the pure pleasure of being there." —The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

"A rare and spellbinding web of dreams."
--Time magazine

"A magically told novel...ravishing...many-layered."
--Los Angeles Times

"Profound, beautiful and heart-quickening."
--Toni Morrison

"Lyrical.... An exquisite ballet that takes place in the dark." --Boston Sunday Globe

"A tale of many pleasures--an intensely theatrical tour de force but grounded in Michael Ondaatje's strong feeling for distant times and places."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A poetry of smoke and mirrors."
--Washington Post Book World

"It is an adventure, mystery, romance, and philosophical novel in one.... Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet."
--Chicago Tribune

From the Inside Flap

The Booker Prize-winning novel, now a critically acclaimed major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas. With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

From the Back Cover

The Booker Prize-winning novel, now a critically acclaimed major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas. With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

About the Author

MICHAEL ONDAATJE is the author of six previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize and subsequently the Golden Man Booker Prize, given in honor of the Prize's 50th anniversary; Anil's Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje now lives in Toronto.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill toward the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house.

In the kitchen she doesn't pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.

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.

Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding it above his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he murmurs, seeing his smile. Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone.

She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky.

She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reaching his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, and he mutters.

What? she asks, coming out of her concentration.

He turns his dark face with its gray eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Books (November 30, 1993)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 305 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679745203
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679745204
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 910L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.65 x 7.98 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #54,981 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #383 in Historical British & Irish Literature
- #464 in TV, Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction
- #4,246 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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4.2 3,958 ratings

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Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje is the author of several novels, as well as a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. Among his many Canadian and international recognitions, his novel The English Patient won the 1992 Man Booker Prize, was adapted into a multi-award winning Oscar movie, and was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018; Anil’s Ghost won the Giller Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the Prix Médicis; and Warlight was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.

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Librarian in Training

Powerful novel about relationships

Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2010

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I found The English Patient to be a fantastic book, but one which is a bit emotionally taxing, particularly the utterly heart-rending ending, which I won't give away, but which tears the community of World War II survivors apart.

I know that for most people The English Patient conjurs up ideas about a great tragic love story between the main character--the English patient--and his forbidden love. For me, however, the love story fell a little bit flat. Maybe it was because I had heard so much about the romantic side of the narrative and perhaps had expected too much from it in terms of romance. And while the love story certainly is central to the plot surrounding the English patient, it's hardly the kind of romance for which anyone would hope themselves. This is not the kind of love story which will make young women fantacize about being Katherine and falling for the mysterious desert-obsessed English patient. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I didn't shed any tears over the end of their doomed romance, as I had found it rather uninspiring myself.

*note that I have not yet seen the film of The English Patient. My understanding is that the impact of the final scenes is significantly different, bringing more focus and attention to the love story, and for this reason the love story may be more powerful in the film, but I'm not in a position to judge.*

What truly touched me about the narrative of The English Patient was everything but the English patient. Hana was one of the most interesting characters in the novel, in my opinion, as was Kip. Now that I consider this, it's really not all that surprising given my interst in postcolonialism--particularly Indian literature--since Kip and his relationship with the other characters in the novel, all of whom are western define the final conflict of the narrative as a conflict between the west--symbolized in England--and the east--symbolized in both Japan and India. I'm afraid to go on about the powerful nature of this relationship and the consequences for the end of the novel because I don't want to give away too much about the end of the book. My hope, after all, is to inspire others to read great literature, not to make reading great literature unnecessary as I summarize it all. :)

Another very powerful relationship within the novel was the relationship between Hana and her father. I found Caravaggio a rather uninspiring character, but his role within the context of Hana's relationship with her father was crucial. I found that Caravaggio was most interesting and complex when he reminisced about his history as a friend of Hana's father and his memories of her as a child. Hana's final coming to terms with her relationship with her father, with her place in the war, and with the circumstances of her father's life was also extremely powerful, but again I don't want to give too much away.

Suffice it to say that The English Patient is one of those books which everyone ought to read, though be warned that while it is a deceptively slim novel it is also powerfully heavy and an incredibly serious novel. This is one which you won't forget any time soon, and which you will likely mentally chew over for a long time to come.

Read all of my book reviews on my blog at [...]

19 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Not an easy book

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2016

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But worthwhile, I think. I saw the movie years ago and I read the book now because I am about to watch the movie again. I remember the movie being beautifully filmed and I loved the score, but I left the theatre feeling confused. As I implied in the title, this is not an easy book to read: to puzzle out. At the end, nothing is as it appeared at the beginning. How anybody makes the book into a movie is beyond me.
But if the book is difficult to read and understand, it is beautifully written. The language is lyrical. At the end of WWII, a young woman, a nurse, winds up living with three men in a bombed out wreck of an Italian Villa. One is The English Patient, hideously burned in a plane crash in Libya, and supposed to be dying. The other three are also victims of the war, although their wounds might be more difficult to see. The interactions of these four damaged survivors are woven into a tapestry as the novel unfolds, beautiful but, at the end, still difficult to comprehend.

53 people found this helpful

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Sameera Nanayakkara

Effort full reading, but worth every second

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2022

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“A novel is a mirror walking down a road”.

I came to know of the award winning ‘the English Patient’ through a quiz program and there the announcer was talking of Michael Ondaatje the golden Booker Prize winning author from Sri Lanka. It is true that Mr. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, but we must admit that he is now a Canadian. He is yet another treasure we failed to keep in the island nation. That day I decided to add The English Patient to my collection and purchased the kindle version.

I was not short of enthusiasm but reading it at the beginning was like eating string hoppers without curry. String hoppers are a delicacy made of rice or wheat flour and has these fine strands woven together into a circle. You eat them with a Sambol and ideally with a curry. Without a curry it is a bit bland, and you will have trouble swallowing. I do.

The book starts abruptly. Characters just immerge out of nowhere without any warning or even an introduction. ‘But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance’.

The story was shattered or fractured. Pieces of the plot were lying everywhere throughout the book. Getting through the story required some jigsaw puzzle building skills and a lot of focused brain power.

You had to travel between the Italian villa and the dessert quite often as the scene shifts between them.

The sentences were not anything like what we learnt during our English lessons. Some lacked a noun. Some sentences were just one word. the fine balance between prose and poetic nature in the book in entertaining. The oddly shortened and out of place wording reminded me of the worry, intimidation, and suspicious nature of the souls in an era of war.

The author had given life to inanimate objects with no restrictions. “As he passed the lamps in the long hall, they flung his shadow forward ahead of him”.

I really admired the subtle hints or life lessons the author had brought to life through his characters.

“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams”.

This same statement written in the book is proved to be very true for the same. I finished reading the book immersed in the lives of Hanna, Caravaggio, Kip and the English patient.

I, as a book addict have no trouble acknowledging the reading lesson depicted in the book - “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.”

Some reviewers had openly accused the book of being erotic. Though it is true there is a lot of references towards intimacy and sexuality, it is beyond doubt logical and applicable to a post conflict mentality. Young men and women who were solely concerned about survival amidst death and destruction will revert back to seeking pleasures of the flesh and physical urges when things calmed.

Its difficult to write further about the reading experience without hinting towards the actual content itself. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and it was indeed worthy of the Golden Booker.

25 people found this helpful

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Pedro Nascente

Excellent

Reviewed in Brazil on April 13, 2021

Verified Purchase

The author excels in telling a good story.

H.Tg

Unversehrt und schnell

Reviewed in Germany on March 15, 2022

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angekommen! Schreibstil ist sehr flüssig und schön.

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Mr TG Russell-Jones

Writing is like liquid gold

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2022

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This is a wonderfully atmospheric book which draws you into a mesmeric world of beautiful landscapes medieval paintings war loss and love.The story lines of the four characters are captivating.The language is mellifluous and hypnotic.I could not stop reading this beautiful work.

3 people found this helpful

alessandro

Ottimo

Reviewed in Italy on May 8, 2021

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Ottimo

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Akash Srivastava

I'm a fan of Everyman's Library books.

Reviewed in India on April 28, 2021

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Everyman's Library books are the best. Quality is amazing. I got it for Rs 370. It was quite a bargain. Can't way to read it. As for the content, Michael Ondaatje is known for his craft of storytelling.

3 people found this helpful

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