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The English Patient
 
 
The English Patient (Paperback)
by Michael Ondaatje (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 16 customer reviews (16 customer reviews)

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Product details

Product Description
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Guardian
'One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Customer Reviews
16 Reviews
5 star: 68%  (11)
4 star: 18%  (3)
3 star: 6%  (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star: 6%  (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome, 15 Oct 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: The English Patient (Hardcover)
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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars This is a book to read slowly and preferably aloud., 28 Oct 1999
By A Customer
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.

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, complex book - don't just watch the movie!, 12 Nov 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The English Patient (Hardcover)
The English Patient is a beautiful and complex novel - it has two story lines which are intermingled but are separate in time and place. I don't agree at all that it is boring, but it is a difficult book to read because of these two stories and the very poetic style of the prose. It is absolutely worth the effort though, because you quickly realise that where the movie tends to simplify and romanticise the relationships, the book adds layer upon layer of ambiguity and complexity. The book enhances, I find, the importance of the Hana-Kip love story, presenting it as a beautiful and constructive love relationship in counterpoint to the destructive, menacing, almost violent love between the English patient and Katherine. The latter love affair dominates both the book and the movie - but in the book it is infinitely more troubling, tragic and lonely. This book is worth every one of the 5 crowns I gave it - try it!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars not bad, nothing like the film though.
I watched the film and thought it was brilliant so I read the book and was disappointed. It is written beautifully but it was just so different to what I expected... Read more
Published 27 days ago by Zoe Challis

5.0 out of 5 stars Sublime.
I picked this book up after watching the film on television, and read it in a day.
The English Patient is not only the story of the burned "English Patient" and his tragic... Read more
Published 1 month ago by A. Clark-Brown

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful book
See the film, but do read the book, as both are just magnificent.
I especially like the character, Kip. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Kasablanca

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Storytelling
As a great fan of the film,and reading the book afterwards I find it in some ways more enjoable as others a little less so. Read more
Published on 22 Nov 2004 by GeeJayBee

5.0 out of 5 stars Timeless
A book to capture the spirit of all the world's people.
Published on 9 Jul 2003

5.0 out of 5 stars about loving the desert, about loving a woman
This is one of the timeless novels. It is a novel about love. Not only for a woman (as in the film version) but in the first place for the desert, for the Sahara. Read more
Published on 7 Jan 2003 by janmarien

4.0 out of 5 stars Better than the film
The characters in this book are amazing; we met the nurse Hana and the thief Caraveggio in "In the skin of a Lion". Read more
Published on 6 April 2002 by pennymwood2

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
I saw the film, expecting the book to be a better version. I was wrong. Eventhough I thought the film was good, the book is just sublime in comparison. Read more
Published on 19 Jul 2000

4.0 out of 5 stars Why watch the movie? Ondaatje's work is more comprehensive
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje provides more entertainment than the movie. Whilst the movie focuses mainly on exposing Fiennes and Scott-Thomas's aesthetically-pleasing... Read more
Published on 16 Feb 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars A book to enjoy reading 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. Read more
Published on 28 Oct 1999

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