Three men, one woman

The English Patient Michael Ondaatje

I enjoyed this novel for two reasons. The first draw was the setting. Italy, Northern Africa after World War 2. Michael Ondaatje winds his story through a historical context. History is complex, difficult and amazing. I never grow tired of the myriad of interpretations and perceptions of history. While this is a work of fiction, the events and settings, the emotions and the consequences of war, come alive in this story. The second reason I loved this story is that Michael Ondaatje has the incredible ability to weave a spell over me with his descriptions, explanations and dialogue. One of my favourite lines describes Hana reminiscing about her home in Toronto. “What she misses here is slow twilight, the sound of familiar trees” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 49). This passage evoked such emotion in me. Ondaatje captured how I felt when I was living overseas and longed to be in my childhood room, with an open window, listening to the sounds of the summer traffic. Michael Ondaatje made the characters’ stories true and strong through his descriptions and although I wasn’t completely captivated by them, they did evoke sympathy and compassion.

Some of my favourite passages/descriptions include:

1. “She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. When she was now what she herself decided to become” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 222).

2. “I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 259).

3. ” She wished for that. Her inwardness was a sadness of nature. He himself would allow her to enter any of his thirteen gates of character, but she knew that if he were in danger he would never turn to face her” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 272).

4. “When someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colours, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of faces. He’s never sure what an eye reveals. But he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 219).

5. “As they grow intimate the space between them during the day grows larger. She likes the distance he leaves her, the space he assumes is right” (Ondaatje, 1992, 9. 127).

6. “Her hand touched me at the wrist” (Ondaatje, 1992, 0. 145).

7. “When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our ledgend, what our lives will mean to the future” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 141).

8. “He has been disassembled by her.

And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought to her?” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 155).

9. “All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. 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. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 157).

10. “From this point on in our lives she had whispered to him earlier, we will either find or lose our souls” (Ondaatje,1992, p. 158).

11. “Some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You need to grab their hair and clutch it like a drowner so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise, they walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months” (Ondaatje, 1992, p, 48).

12. “Those who weep lose more energy than they lose during any other act” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 44).

I could go on. You should just read it.

 

 

 

 

 

~ by markewin on August 13, 2008.