The English Patient (2 Cassettes)

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Overview

The Booker Prize-winning novel, now a critically acclaimed major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas. 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.

In a brilliantly original novel, four people come together in a deserted Italian villa during the final moments of World War II: a young American nurse and her horribly burned English patient, an American soldier of fortune, and an Indian soldier in the British army. Their stories of the past and of the present weave a spellbinding tapestry of how lives are caught and changed by the circumstances of war.

Editorial Reviews

Gale Research

The English Patient, published in 1992 as Ondaatje's fifth novel, tells the story of a Canadian nurse who stays behind in the bombed remains of a villa near the World War II battlefields of northern Italy to tend to an English soldier Ranking the author among such contemporary novelists as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, Cressida Connolly of the Spectator, praises the poetic quality of Ondaatje's fiction. "The writing is so heady that you have to keep putting the book down between passages so as not to reel from the sheer force and beauty of it," the reviewer exclaims, adding that "when I finished the book I felt as dazed as if I'd just awoken from a powerful dream."

Publishers Weekly

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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Library Journal

Who is this wounded soldier living at an abandoned Italian villa near the end of World War II? He does not remember his name, only that he is British, but pieces of his conversation betray his knowledge. For the woman nursing him, his past does not matter. But as their twosome is invaded by two others, all focus shifts to his ``true'' identity. Ondaatje deals with the culture he knows best: the British family, living in Canada, relocated during the war. Poet that he is, he replaces narrative with vivid, lyric snapshots. Listeners may have to periodically rewind the tape to recall who is who, since the four ruminating voices, narrated by actor Michael York, are seldom identified by name, and flashbacks add to the confusion. But this book is best appreciated if listeners suspend a focus on the immediate narrative line, picking up bits of the story here and there, retaining enough imagery that eventually they understand a much greater whole. As such, it's a masterpiece. For most collections.-- Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, ``Soho Weekly News,'' New York

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780679429241
Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group
Publication date: 11/9/1993
Format: Cassette
Edition description: Abridged, 2 Cassettes, 3 hrs.
Product dimensions: 4.50 (w) x 7.05 (h) x 0.86 (d)

Meet the Author

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje is a novelist and poet who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of In The Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family. He received the Booker Prize and the Governor General's Award in Canada for The English Patient.

Reader Bio

Michael York has performed with Britain's National Theater as well as on Broadway in Someone to Watch Over Me. His film credits include Cabaret and The Three Musketeers. His television work includes "Jesus of Nazareth" and "Space".

Read an Excerpt

She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill toward the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house.

In the kitchen she doesn't pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.

She turns into the room which is another garden—this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls and ceiling. The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, and he turns his head slowly towards her as she enters.

Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding it above his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he murmurs, seeing his smile. Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone.

She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky.

She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reaching his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, and he mutters.

What? she asks, coming out of herconcentration.

He turns his dark face with its gray eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.

From the Audio Cassette edition.

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The English Patient (2 Cassettes)

Overview

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

Gale Research

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Product Details

Meet the Author

Michael Ondaatje

Read an Excerpt

Customer Reviews

Rating Distribution

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3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

Your Rating:

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