The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading this novel is like a gentle hallucination. A dream of the desert, more myth than image. Firmly grounded, but grounded in unfamiliar spaces. It’s a novel that revolves to show you new faces. Every character starts as a cardboard cutout. Then vibrates. Then some ink drops into water and the character blooms into round space.
Ondaatje tells the story of four dissimilar people who live for a while in a bombed-out monastery. Each is grappling with some deep disconnection from the world. There’s a lot of morphine. Indeed, it’s a novel as soaked in opiates as it is in memory. Like the distilled essence of a time and place that probably never was.
An airplane concealed beneath the sands of the Sahara. A man’s life recorded in the margins of Herodotus. A fugitive wife slowly starves to death in an ornately-tiled cavern. A woman holds a potentially deadly electrical wire perfectly still. A man steals documents from a safe in an Italian villa. They dance to the music of a scratchy gramophone.
He can’t bear that his own side would set off such a bomb.
What a beautiful book!