Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
The action takes place at the end of World War II, in an Italian villa in a hill town north of Florence. Hana, a nurse, has decided to stay behind with a severely burned patient when the rest of the military medical staff moved on. She has lost everyone to the war: her father, the man she loved and the child she was carrying. She takes care of the patient, faceless and nameless (he claims to have forgotten his name), in part because he helps her sink deeper into oblivion. She reads to this mysterious man who has already read a lot, speaks several languages and knows the location of the remotest places in the world. He even manages to identify the villa as having belonged to Poliziano, a friend of Pico della Mirandola, whose famous learning the English patient does not have to envy.
David Caravaggio, a thief who was a spy for the allies and had his thumbs chopped off by the Germans, hears about Hana’s whereabouts and comes to join her: he is an old friend of her father. He has his own ideas concerning the identity of the English patient and doesn’t believe him to be English, despite his impeccable accent. Addicted to morphine himself, he will use it on the patient to learn the truth about him…
Kip, a Sikh who defuses bombs that the Germans had left behind before their retreat, is also drawn to the villa and to Hana. Ties will evolve between these four people as they learn to discover themselves and one another. Along the way, the mystery surrounding the English patient is slowly unraveled…
The main theme of the novel is a reflection on identity: the English patient has to come to terms with his past and eventually accept who he is, Hana who has refused to look at herself in a mirror for a year, must rebuild her now rootless life, Caravaggio must redefine his personality, now that the tools of his trade have been damaged, and Kip, whose true name nobody remembers and whose biggest trial is yet to come, has to juggle his Indian heritage with his choice to serve the British Empire.
The originality of this novel is undeniably its style: oneiric, aesthetic, rich in metaphors and poetic sentences, it makes up for a sometimes slow-paced story. The evocation of the desert, where the English patient’s love story takes place in a series of flashbacks, is a powerful and ongoing metaphor for forgetfulness, for memory erased. The sometimes fragmentary quality of the writing echoes the fragmentary knowledge we gain of the different protagonists, as the author lets us have insights into their consciousness. The English Patient is a book of fragments: fragments of memories, fragments of novels read to the English patient during his waking phases, fragments of his life pasted into his Herodotus’s Histories…
The English Patient displays four destinies forever changed and shattered by the war and shows that when everything has been taken away: family, love, face and name, what is left is the sum of experiences, of memories and the books read. Intertextuality is an important part of both the novel and the life of the English patient and in that respect, he is truly a literary character whose life can be read in masterpieces (Herodotus’s Histories, Anna Karenina…).
Rating: 4/5
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