I was going to post about the Clementine Cake I made a couple weeks ago but...it's almost 3am! Uhoh. It's not going to be a good day tomorrow...I mean, later today. I will post about the cake (which was delicious, by the way) later on then.
In the meantime, here's another book review...on The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. It was lovely...here we go:
I’ve heard many glowing reviews about The English Patient, online and from teachers. There’s also a movie starring Ralph Fiennes. That’s Voldemort, for all you Harry Potter fans out there. But I digress. I’m here to talk about the book.
Let’s begin with a basic outline: the present-day plot meanders along in the period right after the end of WWII, in a bomb-stricken villa in Tuscany. The main characters are the ‘English’ patient, whose face and skin are burnt beyond recognition; Hana, the Canadian nurse who throws herself into taking care of him; Caravaggio, an old family friend of Hana’s who lost his thumbs as punishment for stealing; and Kip, a Sikh sapper who stumbles upon the trio as he roams the countryside looking for and defusing dormant bombs (he’s my favourite). The English patient is only assumed to be so because of his speech and mannerisms, but his injuries make it hard to tell; Caravaggio is determined to find out his true identity, and administers large doses of morphine so he will talk, lost in his memories. The patient’s mysterious past is riddled with the tragedy of an affair with a married woman, Katharine, and of the vengeful suicide-crash of her husband, from which both he and Katharine survive; they wander the desert, but he eventually seeks help, leaving her in a cave. The rest of it, I’ll leave for you to find out. If you need help understanding the book in the first half, do as I did and cheat a little: that is, utilize the power of the Internet.
To be honest, until at least the fourth chapter, it was dry and lacking of a specific plot. Maybe it’s because I read it in little snippets, but I kept getting confused, mostly due to the numerous flashback scenes. Naturally, because the main story is in the patient’s (and others’) past, there are many of them. I frequently got lost, and when I found some crevice in the story where I understood everything, I wanted to stay in that place for a while; except the setting and viewpoints tend to jump around quickly. The countless foreign words didn’t help my understanding. I had to resort, admittedly, to Wikipedia; it convinced me to finish the book, because, by the looks of it, the story was about to improve. It did, but it was also because I got used to the confusion enough to make some sense of it.
Another reason I chose to keep reading was the poetic pulse of Ondaatje’s writing. His phrasing is gorgeous and I looked forward to the surprise and delight in finding yet another splendid array of words as I wandered through the pasts of each character. It’s even better read aloud. Here is one of my favourites:
“…let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slow word, you can’t rush it.” (p103)
I was utterly unable to stop saying the word “curl” after reading that. And you know, it really is an incredibly slow word. You can’t say it any faster than it is.
This next excerpt made me rethink the saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Is that really true? I’ve never thought much about it before, just accepted it:
“When someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colours, which… always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He’s never sure what an eye reveals.”
The tale is one of rediscovery, of oneself and of others, in the aftermath of the war, a difficult time for those who had experienced the horrors of war. Ondaatje structured the book so that it truly is one of (re)discovery; it feels like you are meeting these people and going to these foreign places, and becoming accustomed to them. It took me until several chapters in to recognize the character’s distinct personalities and create my own image of them, taking much longer than with other novels. Because the stories were so broken up by time and place, it felt like bumping into the characters in the darkness of the ruined villa, searching for them and getting to know them little by little through the flashbacks and then the in-betweens.
I give The English Patient 8/10. If I reread it though, I think I would like it even more, since then, it really would be a tale of rediscovery.
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I'm going to bed now...
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