Tab Article

Ratings: ★★★★★ (4.9/5)
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, War Romance

Book Review:
Michael Ondaatje's ''The English Patient'' is a novel of breathtaking beauty and profound emotional depth. It is a book that weaves together history, memory, and desire into a tapestry of words that is almost unbearably moving. It is a masterpiece, and it deserves every word of praise that has been heaped upon it. The novel is set in the final days of World War II, in a ruined Italian villa where four strangers have taken shelter. There is Hana, a young nurse who has become emotionally detached after the horrors she has witnessed. There is Caravaggio, a maimed thief who was once a spy. There is Kip, a Sikh sapper who defuses bombs with a quiet, focused intensity. And there is the English patient, a man burned beyond recognition, lying in a bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, his only possession a well-worn copy of Herodotus's ''The Histories.'' As the patient drifts, he tells his story. He is not English at all, but Count László de Almásy, a Hungarian explorer who mapped the deserts of North Africa. He tells of his passionate, illicit love affair with a married Englishwoman, Katharine Clifton, and of the betrayal that led to her death and his own downfall. His story is one of love and loss, of the consuming power of desire, and of the ways in which the landscape of the desert can become a map of the soul. Ondaatje's prose is simply stunning. It is poetic, sensual, and precise, creating images that will stay with you forever. The novel is a meditation on identity, on the ways in which we are shaped by the stories we tell and the stories we keep hidden. It is a book about the end of empire, about the violence of war, and about the enduring power of love. It is, as Pico Iyer wrote in Time, ''a magic carpet of a novel that soars across worlds and times.'' An unforgettable masterpiece.