Books: “The English Patient” By Michael Ondaatje

In the desert, a man’s fate is left to the winds that bring on a complete change in landscape, either dooming the traveller or not. There, a man has no name, no country…

A quiet book on the aftermath of war: a stark contrast to the simplicities of the desert. Pain, emotion, is subjective and often felt or communicated through silence. Only ‘the patient’ talks of everything, as if his memories were grains of sand that make up the desert. The patient is a student of history, lives through the past, piecing himself together through his readings of Herodotus’s “Histories”. As if to take cue from him, the other characters reveal themselves through books as well: they fall in love through tales, write of their hearts in book sleeves, and attach themselves to the very book that foreshadows their fate or doom. Their silent struggle to find the words is endearing, and real.  But I am left feeling as if I have disturbed them, glancing in through the hole of the roof of the villa a bomb had blown open- the roof of the library – with no right to trespass in on their hearts.

“A man in the desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.”

“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, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. But all parts of the body must be ready for the other. All atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur. I have lived in the desert for years and I have come to believe in such things. It is a place of pockets. The trompe l’oeil of time and water. The jackal with the one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known.”