With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.
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Canadian author Ondaatje offers a poetic novel set in a desolate Italian villa in the final days of WWII--a one-week PW bestseller--and an evocative account of a visit with his family in Sri Lanka. (Dec.)
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In an Italian villa at the end of World War II, a young nurse cares for a soldier so horribly burned that he cannot be identified. Both patients and medical staff have decamped from this makeshift hospital, but Hana perseveres, worn out by the war and yet strangely linked to the dying man. Then a friend of her father arrives--a thief-turned-spy who recalls Hana as a young girl in Canada--and raises questions about ``the English patient,'' claiming that he is instead a Hungarian who spied for the Third Reich. Finally, they are joined by a young Sikh named Kip, a soldier with a nearby English battalion who defuses the bombs left behind by the Germans. The discovery of the patient's identity, Kip's successful defusion of several bombs, and the complex emotional interaction of all four characters creates a tension that is nicely heightened by Ondaatje's stately, luminous prose. The prose is so stately, in fact, that Kip's final outrage at the moral perfidy of the Western world he has served so loyally takes a moment to hit. When it does, the novel moves beyond the poetic to achieve moral stature. Highly recommended for literary collections.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''
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Michael Ondaatje has published several volumes of poetry, including There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, which consists of selections from earlier books, The Dainty Monsters (1967) and Rat Jelly (1973). Much of his poetry addresses the crossing of cultural boundaries. Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and moved to Canada in 1962. He earned a B.A. from the University of Toronto and a M.A. from Queen's University, Kingston, and teaches English at York University.
Ondaatje's fiction and other works that defy classification by genre have also gained widespread attention. A writer quite unconcerned with typical Canadian themes, he focuses on the bizarre, which he renders through surreal, innovative techniques. For example, in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ondaatje toys with various literary genres - drama, interviews, lyrics - to relate the life of that legendary figure. In Coming through Slaughter (1982), supposedly the biography of jazz musician Charles "Buddy" Bolden, Ondaatje uses Bolden's life to illustrate the artistic dichotomy of creativity and destruction. Running in the Family (1982) is a fictionalized account of Ondaatje's Ceylonese ancestors. In the Skin of a Lion (1987) dramatizes the heroic efforts of workers who construct skyscrapers.
(Bowker Author Biography) Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka. He now lives in Toronto.
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