Michael Ondaatje's three previous novels have each been met with the
highest praise: for their startling narrative inventiveness, the
richness of their imagery and emotion, and the spellbinding quality of
their language. When "In the Skin of a Lion" was published in 1987,
Carolyn Kizer, writing in "The New York Times Book Review," called
Ondaatje "a beautiful writer... brilliantly gifted." And Tom Clark wrote
in the "San Francisco Chronicle" that "Ondaatje handles fiction with the
deceptive touch of a magician." Now, with "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 anddetails of four diverse lives caught and
changed and now inextricably connected by the brutal, improbable
circumstances of war.
