I have returned.
Now how about a bit of literature? I recently finished Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. It’s set primarily in Italy against the backdrop of WWII though very little of the story includes battle. The main characters include a nurse who remains nameless for the first 30 pages, a patient who remains nameless nearly the length of the book, an English-trained Indian sapper who defuses bombs, and an ex-intelligence officer and thief … Hana, Almasy, Kip, and Caravaggio. Between these four and a handful of secondary players who enter and exit, Ondaatje weaves interesting tales with language and imagery that is often quite beautiful. It’s not a terribly recent book (the ones I read rarely are…a symptom of the bargain bin) but I remember advertising surrounding the publication and it being well-received by the general public. It might possibly have become a movie…or I might have gotten it mixed up with something else. With this mind, it’s hard to tell. At any rate, it’s a pretty good novel.
Hana is emotionally withdrawn and somewhat shell-shocked from her role in the war when Almasy enters her story, a man burned terribly and without hope of recovery. She vows that he will be her last patient, and they both refuse to leave their makeshift hospital in a ravaged Italian villa when the rest of the staff and patients move on. Caravaggio hears about Hana, an old family friend, while being treated in another hospital and goes to her. Not long thereafter Kip arrives, lured by the notes of a piano and the possibility of clever bombs. And an interesting love…square…develops. Though several years her senior, Caravaggio has always loved her; she loves the mystery and familiarity of the patient; and she loves the quiet presence of the sapper Kip. They are all emotionally and psychologically vulnerable, which manifests itself in different ways at different stages of the story, culminating in Kip’s unexpected explosion (emotionally, not physically; pardon the pun). At times, it’s difficult to follow the storyline, decipher who is speaking, understand how certain pieces fit together, but as a whole it’s interesting, beautiful, and certainly worth a read.
My favorite pieces come from the desert descriptions and stories from the burned patient (the “English” patient). They are really, extraordinarily beautiful.
Some of my favorite passages:
“Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. … The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. … It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. … Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! … Still, some wanted their mark there. On that dry watercourse, on this shingled knoll. Small vanities … But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. … It was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone …”
“… They are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. … The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows.”
“A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant he knows near El Taj, whose heart, if one cuts it out, is replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart. The plant continues to flourish for a year before it dies from some lack or other.”
There are other great passages but these remain among my favorites. If you have a rainy afternoon and hanker for something a bit foreign, this would make a nice read.
Life Obscure 