Desert Rose

Book #15 this year is The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I'm sure most people have already seen the film or at least heard about it. I saw it about ten years ago but don't remember much, to tell the truth. I bought the book via Bookstation around Christmas and finally the time has come to read it.

To summarize in one sentence, it is a beautiful book. First of all, the characters all have something charming yet painful about them, each coming from different backgrounds, yet all having experienced the war (we are talking about the Second World War here). The story is set in a villa called Villa Girolamo, near Florence, Italy, which served as a nunnery, then was used as headquarters by the Germans, and was later to be used as a hospital by the allied forces until given back to the nuns. When the troops and nurses moved northward, Hana, a young Canadian nurse decided to stay behind with her patient, a badly burnt pilot, referred to as "the English patient" by everyone as he couldn't be identified any further. The patient spends his life lying on a bed in an upstairs room, telling stories and being read to between stages of sleeping, morphinized delirium, and suffering from pain. To this company joins Caravaggio, a friend of Hana's father, who served as a thief and spy in the war, and Kip, a young Indian Sikh sapper. Coping with the day-to-day demands of their life in the abandoned villa they keep having flashbacks of their past, especially the English patient, and form strange relationships.
Even though helpless and as good as dead, the patient becomes the object of the admiration of the other three due to his speech which reveals both an extreme knowledge of the world (from geography to arts) and knowledge of life and love. From his recollections a tragic love story unfolds, which teaches all the characters about the nature of love. I don't want to spoil the book any more, let me just say that it is very emotional and lyrical, and tells a lot about the world, including the nature of wars and what they do to people, as well as the mechanics of human relationships. On the individual level it concerns losing versus finding oneself.
As I said, story telling, books, and words are very important in the book. Somewhere it says that some words cannot  be properly translated to other languages, and the example drawn is the Hungarian félhomály (dusk), which I think is indeed a beautiful word, and I wonder how come the author knows it. Some words important to know in order to understand the story include sapper, tarpaulin, shrapnel, and propinquity (whose meaning I have just checked). The dialogues were also powerful. I found the best quotes on pages 172 to 175, and wrote down some of them for later use. (I don't know why I do it, what on earth would I use these slips of paper for if not for using in a novel or essay or whatever, which is at the moment unlikely to happen.) To illustrate the character of our protagonist and his relationship to Katharine Clifton, let me quote Katharine:

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. (pp. 173-4)

Nothing more to say except that I strongly recommend that you read it. I might lend you my precious copy with Ralph Fiennes on the cover, by arrangement. I'm also planning to re-watch the movie soon.

P.S. Listen to Ondaatje (and director Anthony Minghella) talking about TEP on BBC.