THE ENGLISH PATIENT by MICHAEL ONDAATJE (1992)

A few weeks ago I reread Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which took place in wartime in Italy and tells of the love affair between an American volunteer ambulance driver and an English nurse. The English Patient is also set in wartime in Italy and includes a loves affair between an Indian bomb demolition expert and a Canadian nurse. There the similarity ends. This book is so much more than Hemingway's effort, in so many ways. It is so much better that they shouldn't even be included in the same category. I would consider The English Patient as a modern classic. (I am obviously not a Hemingway fan. I believe he is greatly overrated, and I have never understood why he is highly regarded.)

Gathered in a half-ruined convent as World War II is ending are a young Canadian nurse and her patient who is too burned to be moved. He is thought to be English, even though he insists he cannot remember who he is or where he came from. Then an Italian thief who had once been a friend of her father's hears of her plight and joins them. As the armies retreat, bomb and landmine disposal crews arrive, and an Indian Sikh attached to the British army comes to stay at the convent, as well. There each of their stories unfold. As they try to deal with the burdens war has left, they come to an erasure of national and partisan interests and relate to each other as individuals....until events intrude to remind them of their differences.

This author is a poet as well as a novelist, and this reads like a blending of the two. (In contrast, Hemingway's prose, sometimes described as "lean and muscular," sounds like a first-grade reader.) Ondaatje paints pictures with his words, and the entire novel has a dream-like tone, reflecting the surrealism of the time and place. It is a brief pause outside of a harsh reality.

This novel is an adventure, a mystery, a romance, and a philosophical novel all in one. It won England's Booker Prize in 1992, and in 2018 was awarded the Golden Booker Prize as the best winner of the award in 50 years. It is one of the best novels you will ever read.

(If you saw the movie, you got only a small piece of the story, and not the thrust of the book at all. It was a good movie, but it was not reflective of the book's contents.)