English Patient Reading Group Notes

ALLEN&UNWIN READING GROUP NOTES Contents: About the book (2) About Michael Ondaatje(2) Reviews (3) Some suggested points for discussion (4) About the book In brief The final curtain is closing on the Second World War, and Hana, a nurse, stays behind in an abandoned Italian villa to tend to her only remaining patient. Rescued by Bedouins from a burning plane, he is English, anonymous, damaged beyond recognition and haunted by his memories of passion and betrayal. The only clue Hana has to his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes describing a painful and ultimately tragic love affair. In detail With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. It is 1944, and the war in central Italy is over. It has moved north, leaving in its wake a landscape of ruined places and people. In an isolated Tuscan villa that served as a military hospital, two people remain, forgotten by the rest of the world: a young Canadian nurse, Hana, almost destroyed by war and the death of her father, and her last patient, a man burned beyond recognition, who drifts in and out of his own memories and dreams. Into their lives comes Caravaggio, a thief who has been tortured and maimed by wartime inquisitors, and Kip, a young Sikh who has spent the war dismantling bombs. While events taking place in the outside world prove that history has reached a definitive turning point, in the Villa San Girolamo Ondaatje’s four protagonists carry on a remote, intensely personal existence, as they play out their interior drama. About Michael Ondaatje Michael Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in 1943. He was educated in Colombo, London and Quebec before receiving his BA from the University of Toronto in 1965. Ondaatje taught at the University of Western Ontario from 1967 through 1971, and since 1971 has been a member of the English Department at Glendon College, a part of York University in Toronto. A prolific author not only of fiction but of poetry and non-fiction, Ondaatje has been awarded many prizes, including Canada’s Governor General’s Award in 1971 and 1980, and the Canada-Australia Prize in 1980. The English Patient won the Booker Prize, England’s highest honour for fiction. Reading Group Notes The English Patient 2 Reviews Pico Iyer for The Times ‘… The heart of the book is the slow unravelling of the faceless patient’s life, seduced by morphine and haunted by scenes of Cairo nights when it was necessary ‘to proceed into the plot of the evening, while the human constellations whirled and skidded around you.’ That is very much how Ondaatje proceeds. One by one he introduces the characters and slowly he unlocks their secrets, leading us through their lives as through the darkened corridors of a huge and secret house. All four feel their way, by hand and memory, and with all the phantom sensuousness that darkness brings. The effect is a little like Borges on a love-potion. What makes it shine is that Ondaatje alchemises these abstract spaces with a poet’s fluent radiance. Scene after scene shimmers with the jewelled brilliance of Arab poetry. The Indian alone, in the course of his wanderings, walks through cities where corpses are strung from trees and sleeps beside angels in deserted churches. He sees the Virgin Mary emerging from the sea (until her batteries give out) and he finds himself one of 12 defusers alone in a city without lights. Woven through such flights are colourful threads of historical arcana: richly researched evocations of the ‘desert Englishmen’ of the ‘30s, lilting allusions to Herodotus and Kipling, catalogs of the winds that blow across the sands. The result is a realism that could not be more magical. In time, it begins to become clear that the bandaged European, on his sickbed in 1945, stands for many things that are lost and wounded. And in the dying light of Empire, Ondaatje shows us the end of the world and the birth of another, where people must be map-makers in a different kind of desert. Kipling has been eclipsed by Kip. Occasionally, the author’s design becomes a little too insistent, finding in Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only the explosion of the whole world of nation-states, but also the final cruelty of the West upon the East. By then, however, he has thoroughly enveloped the reader in as rare and spellbinding a net of dreams as any that has emerged in recent years.’ The West Australian ‘There is a sudden hollowing in the body when one begins a book that is special. After reading the first three pages of The English Patient (co-winner of the Booker Prize for 1992) it was necessary for me to put it away for a day to prepare myself for what was to come. Surrender to a book such as this demands the heart and the mind…Ondaatje writes with phrases that can leave one breathless with their beauty. Poetry infuses the language. As well, his vision of the world and the way we move within it is revelatory. Each character must find a way to live in a world where things more horrible than hatred flourish. The English Patient is not a book to stay up late reading, rather one to savour over a week so that one can return to it again and again, seduced by peeling layers of a story that hovers in the consciousness for the time one spends away from it, that resides hauntingly in the memory when one finally leaves.’ Reading Group Notes The English Patient 3 Australian Bookseller and Publisher ‘Stunning. There’s excitement in the literary end of the marketplace. This book has to be a hot bet for the Booker. The plot takes a moment just before the end of World War II to bring its four main characters together: the 20-year-old Hana; the Sikh bomb-defusion sapper Kip; a middle-aged Canadian thief turned military spy; and the English patient, burnt beyond recognition. They are isolated in a war-damaged villa in the hills outside Florence. The Germans have just retreated, leaving behind them countless mines and booby traps. The most memorable character is the young Sikh bomb expert. Passages invoking his difficult work are high drama. Against this immediate scenario the English patient himself gradually reveals his even more exotic world of Lybian deserts in the 1930s and an unhealed love affair that casts long shadows. A book full of strangeness and intimacy, beautifully written, full of surprises and recognitions. Magical stuff. It puts Ondaatje at the forefront of his generation of novelists writing in English.’ Who Weekly ‘Too often, much-hyped books are disappointingly pretentious and frustratingly arty. But this isn’t the case here. The English Patient is one of the most stylish, evocative and – in many ways – one of the saddest books you can buy. Ondaatje co-won the Booker Prize for his efforts with this novel. Born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and living in Canada, Ondaatje is best known as a poet, despite having written several highly praised novels. He is now teaching at York University in Toronto, and the receipt of the Booker should provide some hefty capital as well as kudos to enhance his literary career… … Like the author himself, Hana, Kip and the patient are ‘bastard children’ of somewhere else, people without a home- land. Their story is fascinating, beautiful and, thankfully, accessible. It deserves the praise that it has received – read it and weep.’ Some suggested points for discussion ! The English patient ‘whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died’ [p. 4]. Why does the patient consider himself to have ‘died’? Does he undergo any kind of rebirth during the course of the story? ! What can you deduce from the novel about Hana’s relationship with her father? Has her father’s death, and the manner of it, caused her to retreat from the war and devote herself to the English patient? What influence do her feelings for her father have upon her relationship with Caravaggio? ! Why did Hana decide to have an abortion during the war? How has that decision affected her, and how much influence has it had on her life at the villa? Reading Group Notes The English Patient 4 ! How does the landscape of the novel-the Villa San Girolamo, the country around it, and the boundary between the two-reflect the inner lives of its inhabitants? Why do you think that Ondaatje has chosen Tuscany as the setting for his story? What significance do other landscapes, like the desert and the English countryside, hold for the story and its characters? ! The English patient says, ‘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’ [p.

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