[book] the english patient

Thursday, 20 October 2022 11:11 pm
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What can I say about the English Patient? I had borrowed it from the library and left it so dog-eared that my notes took weeks to write out. My loan got renewed twice and was about to expire for real and I still haven’t finished thinking through what I liked and was already 3 pages deep. So I bought it on kindle :) and just :) highlighted my heart out :)

(Goodreads: would you like to make your 165 notes and highlights visible?; hwa: no I would not)

Four people in a villa in Italy at the end of World War 2. The war lives on in all of them. You have the English Patient upstairs who is obsessed with the past. Then there’s Hana, the young nurse who is obsessed with the English Patient and Caravaggio, the reformed thief who is obsessed with her sanity. And there’s Kip, the Indian sapper obsessed with defusing bombs for the English. And then there’s the past.

“Death means you are in the third person.”



Briefly, English Patient is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje and the book that won him the Man Booker (and then the Golden Man Booker in 2019, the best out of the last 51 years). So full disclosure I read it for the clout.

Hah, it’s also because I tend to love Booker winners and also wanted to trust Ondaatje who has been 2.5 hits and 0.5 miss for me so far. And there’s a wealth of academia on him that I want to unlock with this. (Colonialism, memory, mortality, moral debts, institutional debt, relationships that make you worse, relationships that heal, relationships that cannot exist but were so beautiful when it did —)



I didn’t like reading the first 20% for similar reasons to Ondaatje’s first novel Coming Through Slaughter. He started off as a poet and so the writing is gorgeous, but also too fragmented and selfish, characters spilling themselves into the stage as they please and without care of where the reader was. It was hard to understand who I’m reading and why should I care. However, once I knew the cast and knew their histories, the rest was just banger. And when I reread from the beginning it was all bangers.

Every interaction was fraught because everyone is so imperfect and scarred from the war. I kept rereading and noticing their neurosis and their complexes seeping into their desires and jealousies. Like when characters do something and I think: OH. YOU’RE LIKE /THIS/ BECAUSE OF /THIS/. Example — Hana caring for the English patient because of a chronic guilt about her father’s death. Kip, at his most vulnerable craved a touch that was beyond "blood love or sexual love", because the person who raised him was his ayah, and the first people who made him feel like he belonged was the team who taught him how to defuse a bomb.

(And then Hana, rejecting Caravaggio but accepting Kip - “Don’t touch me if you’re going to try and fuck me.” oh. OH)

Kip was my favourite character by far. I’m sure post-colonial lit academics already had a field day analysing his character to shreds (Edward Said taking a shot in his grave every time "otherness" is typed) — I don't have anything to say on that front, the front of Hana looking at Kip and loving him because he was unfamiliar. For me it was the fragile afternoon and the celebratory evening, that scene drawn out over half a novel across 3 perspectives. The first turn casual, the second tender and agonising, the third time jealous and petulant and vulnerable.

Ondaatje is the opposite of Vuong. With Vuong phrases are more beautiful on their own, cut out from the text. I was trying to find English Patient quotes to copy here it was so difficult. I chose something and realised I needed the paragraph before, and the page before that, and the chapter before. Oh Ondaatje, you’re such a powerful author.

It's because these bare words are empowered by all the history that came before. For example, I can't just drop this -

Tonight, gazing at the scene of the mine blast, he had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him each time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her.

— without screaming into a paper bag and unscrambling my thoughts about Kip's personal history as a sapper, the contrast of being alone when dismantling mines vs that scene where she risks her life and holds the wire for him and now he loves her in this uncertain but solid way that he must carry with him. Yet it compromises his career because he needs to be alone and his career was the thing that let him live, that gave him respect in an England that ostracised him (scream scream scream).

AND YET. At that moment Hana was not doing it for Kip —

“I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died.”

I love how that afternoon is equally as intense for the two of them, but in very different ways because of what they’ve been through. Kip is afraid of becoming closer to Hana, of owing that moral debt to her because she stepped him and saved his life, of their fates being tied. He’s afraid because so many of his mentors and comrades have died. For Hana it’s like she’s seen so much death that she wants the relief of facing death in first person, at a moment of her own choosing, with someone she loved. Yet before that love could be tested.

English Patient is always about the war. And the war lives on in all of them.



We could talk about Almasy and Katharine, the other half of the novel and the beautiful, cinematic couple of the movie adaption. But I won’t :) I’ve taken my own notes on this because it’s a very dramatised, extroverted relationship where its extramarital and they hurt each other and make each other jealous and you get these amazing quotes that I’ll probably steal for when I write toxic relationships.

(I’ll just say its a beautiful contrast when you see is as a comparison of love before and after the war bruises you. Almasy/Katharine are physically older than Kip/Hana, but emotionally the war have destroyed Kip/Hana and they are actually the more mature relationship in this novel).

‘If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?’

From this point on in our lives, she had whispered to him earlier, we will either find or lose our souls.

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

The minute she turns away from him in the lobby of Groppi’s bar after he greets her, he is insane. He knows the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her.

What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world.

You think you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you. How many women did you have? I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, so wordless sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.



I always love keeping my Ondaatjes in some form because I love how built and specific his details are. The image of morphine as toothpaste tubes for dolls, sucking condensed milk out of a can in candlelight, a lover being able to recognise the camouflage of other others.



I realise that all the things I love about the English Patient are probably not the common points people raise. I just love human relationships because that’s what I watch out for in my own writing. But to tie things off:

  • Yes, the aesthetic of dying about having nothing on you except an annotated copy of Herodotus that carries your memories when you have forgotten who you are
  • Yes, the whole Caravaggio and Hana dynamic (the movie does it so well)

Caravaggio: You're in love with him, aren't you? Your poor patient. You think he's a saint because of the way he looks? I don't think he is.

Hana: I'm not in love with him. I'm in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

  • The absolute bonkers reveal of who the English Patient is and how he was basically retelling his story in third person so your brain does this seismic shift of wrangling everything you know about Almasy and all the snide comments and fitting it onto the English patient. And mein gott the parallels with Herodotus as a /historian/ and the themes of memory as a rereading your bruises on other people.
  • This very pointed part where Ondaatje just reveals his hand in constructing character foils and deconstructing themes:

‘There’s a painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s own mortality. I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David.’

  • Yes, choosing to end the novel with Hiroshima is (hypersonic scream) especially as Kip and the English Patient were friends and now fate has sliced that possibility and Caravaggio just going:

He knows the young soldier is right. They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.

  • Yes, necrophilia



Whooosh. Now that this is done there's no more high-risk titles in my list and I can focus on finishing my 2022 half year book summary (in October!!)