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Amazon.co.uk Review
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a book to read slowly and preferably aloud.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The English Patient (Paperback)
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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The English Patient,
By Book 1981 "Book1981" (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The English Patient (Paperback)
Unfortunately I saw the film before I read the book, which I normally try to avoid - Though it was years ago I saw it, I still had Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche in my minds eye. To my surprise, however, the film did not keep faithfully to the book, so I was still able to enjoy new things - For example, Count Almasy's romance with Katharine almost takes a back seat to Hana's life in the Italian villa and the story of Kip, the Sikh sapper. Caravaggio is not the menacing stranger we see in the film, but more of a tortured father figure trying to look after Hana as she slowly starts to recover from the war.
The book it written in Ondaatje's signature style - poetic and atmospheric, slow and emotional. It is powerful and beautiful at the same time, an effect the lingers long after you close the book. The draw-back for me is that sometimes the emotional prose gets a little too flaky and hazy, a bit too dreamy and wandering. I sometimes even get the feeling he is trying too hard to achieve this intimate, rhythmic effect that the result is a little clumsy and contrived. But without a doubt, this is a moving book about love, the disaster of war and the process of picking up the pieces afterwards. There are beautiful descriptions of the North African deserts and a small cast of vivid and believable characters which makes this book well worth the read.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poetry as prose,
By Essex Girl (Essex (yes, really)) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The English Patient (Paperback)
This is one of the most beautiful books ever written. I dipped into it recently (having read it twice on the past several years) and the quality and beauty of the prose left me staggered at what can be done with the English language. The descriptions put you right into the location with the characters, from Kip in a crater defusing a bomb, to the eponymous patient in the desert.
One of the cleverest things about it is the way that we become acquainted with the characters as they would have got to know one another: in fits and starts, without chronology. They are built up layer by layer, incident by incident. They become visible in the mind's eye. Not only that, but we see the world through their eyes: the image of Kip lighting flares and swinging in space to look at the paintings inside the domes of churches is magical - and I'm not sure Ondaatje could have written it had he not come at Western culture from the East, born as he was into the Ceylon Burgher community. The plot is complex, the characters are complex, the prose is amongst the best you will ever read. Now and then the switches of time and location will leave you gasping, as you turn the page expecting to read more about one of the characters, only to find yourself dropped into another part of the story. The only thing that puzzled me was the persistent survival of the patient: that anyone so badly burned could survive so long seems illogical. Aside from that, I thought it was a perfect book about loss and longing, and written with almost implausible talent and skill. Ondaatje is a poet as well as a novelist, and that is very obvious in the pages of this story.
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