“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.

Hauntingly beautiful. Ondaatje's writing is original. It’s lovely and haunting, poetic and intellectual, sensual and political.

Once you've been to Ondaatje's Africa and the secluded Italian villa, you will never be the same again. His character studies of how four damaged souls converge and meld seamlessly with a narrative of love and loss.

A sample passage from the book “"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography- to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps."”

Enjoy this Booker Prize-winning novel and follow it up with the equally enthralling Academy Award-winning movie of the same name.

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.

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The English Patient is a story about four lives that converge in a war torn part of Italy. All four characters have been profoundly touched by the war and must now rebuild their lives and move on. There is the anonymous and mysterious english patient who is coming to terms with a deceitful past, a young nurse who in order to numb the pain of loss becomes obsessed with nursing the patient back to health, a retired thief who has gone through life with no thought given to where his actions might lead him and a young idealistic bomb specialist who has his ideals turned upside down. Not only are these characters dealing with the aftermath of an external war but there are many inner demons they are all battling, histories they must confront and truths they must question.

Ondaatje writes with powerful and captivating intensity but due to his poetic style the text is often weirdly and uncomfortably fragmented and because of this I found the book to be a laborious read. This poeticism made it hard to connect to the characters even when their emotions were described in detail. The book is filled with beautiful and vivid descriptions but it seems that more attention was given to pretty writing than to a substantial plot. What I enjoyed most about The English Patient was Ondaatje's handling of the Identity theme. He makes you think about how identity is constantly changing and that a person's identity is a complex mix of their history, how they perceive themselves, how others perceive them and the lies they tell themselves in order to be able to live with themselves.

Historical WWII, mystery, and love. ' "Who is he speaking as now?" Carravagio thinks' (location 3236/4158). He is referring to the English patient of whome extends his arm to receive another morphine shot. The thought processes are deep and symbolism ties events and feelings to what seems to be destiny, characters express themselves as if the mind has been stimulated. Remembering the very instance one fell in love and how they knew it, every instance, every glance, every word, and everything about that person he has figured out. A hightened mind may speak of these things as if wise to everything in life, yet real events prove that love is really a small thing the grand scheme of things. That's kind of sad isn't it? The novel makes me wonder if that can be true, however, I am not a veteran of a world war, and war changes everything.

Four WWII veterans, each who have served a different and unique role, and each who have become become disabled each in a unique way as a result. The stories that unfold throughout this novel are deep. So deep, they are open to a reader's interpretation. A bombed out Italian villa, a deserted hospital still wired with hidden explosives, becomes a beautiful, peaceful place where time stands still. These four beautiful people are surviving their pasts the best way they know how. Inner depths of their hearts, thoughts, and conversations are revealed by the author's unique writing style.

I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys taking time to digest everything as they read; to take time to think about and try to fully understand a character. If read slowly, one can get so much out of this novel. Read slow, just like in the novel where time is standing still.

I own the paperback, and recently downloaded the kindle version so I could travel with it and read it again on peaceful sea days. I have now read it twice, the first time about five years ago. The kindle version ends with some discussion questions, and upon mulling them over I have realized I still have much more to understand from this novel. It is a novel to keep on your bookshelf and treasure, a novel to discuss in groups, book clubs, or on on-line forums.

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.

It's hard to believe Ondaatje wasn't inspired, above all else, by "Wuthering Heights," especially in his characterization of a Katherine and Almasy whose obsession with love as possession is a latter-day equivalent of the undifferentiated passion of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. And Ondaatje's related but contrasting pair of lovers, Hana and Kip, appear to occupy a place comparable with Bronte's Cathy Linton and Hareton, whose recognition of each other's separateness at least holds forth the promise of a relationship between two individuals.

But Ondaatje surprises us. His Kip and Hana finally retreat to the boundaries of nationality, race, and past traditions, reclaiming for themselves as much identity as such markers are capable of offering. In "The English Patient" Almasy plays both the roles of Heathcliff and Hareton. It is the latter who is redeemed from the primitive through the books Cathy finally shares with him, teaching him to separate himself from the primeval natural principle and to love. Almasy learns much the same from his Kathy, who shows him the true meaning of Herodotus, of history, of words themselves. He learns he cannot remain a free agent, avoiding responsibility and "ownership," because without incurring debts to another person, agency is pointless and freedom is an illusion. Almasy must lose his fabricated identity--symbolized by the "features," or mere markers, of history, the desert, and the physical body--in order to gain his soul, which turns out to be Kathy.

When Almasy makes good on his promise and returns to the cave, the necrophilia scene (as subtle as any in all literature--compare its obvious counterpart in "Wuthering Heights") is an electric and electrifying intercourse of tongues, an exchange of lying words for a shared language. Kathy's sacrifice in taking into herself the old words of Almasy is her answer to his own sacrifice, an exorcism of the qualified, secretive language Almasy had formerly insisted on calling love. With that act Almasy is transformed from "demon lover" to lover, from a desert nomad and recorder of landmarks to co-author of and mutual participant in a new "text," an authentic discourse of love between two independent people who ultimately relate as one.

To those who distrust the story's representations of history, remember that the story itself questions all such representations. Which is not to say it's a "romance." It's a love story--above all, a love "history," and as such it rings as true as any history since Emily Bronte's.

I was delightfully introduced to the world of The English Patient gradually, over an extended period, first in 1996 by being drawn into the story’s richness by Anthony Minghella’s beautiful film and screenplay in the theaters and then again in 2004 when I listened to the author's mellow voice, reading selections of his novel for the Collector’s Series DVD Bonus Material; the sound of his prose simply mesmerized me. I had read ‘The English Patient’ and other Ondaatje stories previously and I'd seen the film several times but Pico Iyer’s vivid Introduction in this Everyman’s Library Edition of 2011 boldly welcomed me back into the depth and the beauty of the author’s words.

I have never read a book that has captivated me in the way that ‘The English Patient’ has. It focuses the reader on the story of five key people from different origins, four of whom the fates of war were sheltering at the end of the Second World War in a ravaged Italian villa with a personality of its own. The tales began early enough to clearly define the origins of these characters and the formation of their values and beliefs. While our period of experience covers no more than a few years, Ondaatje’s introduction to these people is simultaneously both continuous and instantaneous. I could fully feel the hearts and souls of each of these characters at every moment as they lived, felt, loved and evolved around each other. The depth and richness that he infused in each of these characters pulled them together while he shaped them to stand alone on their own merits. While mystery and love surrounded the English patient’s origins, I completely understood his complexities along with those of Hana, Kip and Caravaggio. While Katharine created the source for Almásy’s ferocious passion, Ondaatje’s beautiful style let me feel every moment and emotion of their love, making it both a wonderful and a most enriching experience.

Nature, humanity, war and sensation were also characters that we learned to understand through the precise palate of Ondaatje's prose; you burn with their passion, you smell the villa breathing, the desert vastness overwhelms you, the undetonated bomb is alive, it's Africa, it's antiquity, it's timeless Europe, it's the 1940s, you are living in war, you are there.

Bob Magnant is the author of The Last Transition..., a fact-based novel about Iran. He writes about politics, globalization, the Internet and US policy in the Middle East...

Read a quarter of it maybe then deleted from my Kindle. Had not the patience to continue- stiff way of writing, slow slow

The author excels in telling a good story.

Mi ha sorpreso. Il libro è decisamente meglio del film, ho apprezzato la capacitá dell’autore di impersonarsi in così tante personalitá e storie.

Prose you can lose yourself in. Ondatjie is a master storyteller.

The print quality is really poor. The letters are not sharp and the paper is stark white -- it looks like a photocopy not a printed book.