THE ENGLISH PATIENT..... MICHAEL ONDAATJE

THE ENGLISH PATIENT.....
 MICHAEL ONDAATJE
“A novel is a mirror walking down a road”
       WINNER OF THE.....
 BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION.
 The English Patient Quotes
 

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape''

 “...the heart is an organ of fire
 “From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.” 

 “Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?"

I didn't say anything''

The English Patient, he gives us his most stunningly original and lyric novel yet. During the final moments of World War II, in a deserted Italian villa, four people come together: a young nurse, her will broken, all her energy focused on her last, dying patient, a man in whom she has seen something "she wanted to learn, to grow into and hide in"... the patient: an unknown Englishman, survivor of a plane crash, his mind awash with a life's worth of secrets and passions ... a thief whose "skills" have made him one of the war's heroes, and one of its casualties ... an Indian soldier in the British army, an expert at bomb disposal whose three years at war have taught him that "the only thing safe is himself." Slowly, they begin to reveal themselves to each other, the stories of their pasts and of the present unfolding in scene after haunting scene, taking us into the Sahara, the English countryside, down the streets of London during the Blitz, into the makeshift army hospitals of Italy, and through the battered gardens and rooms of the villa. And with these stories, Ondaatje weaves a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation: the paths and details of four diverse lives caught and changed and now inextricably connected by the brutal, improbable circumstances of war.

*** "“I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.”***