Too lyrical, too sophisticated, too well written. Review on English Patient, The - Michael Ondaatje

The setting of the book is a house on top of a hill in a villa in Florence, during the end of the world war II. In this setting, four people a nurse (Hana), a former thief (Caravaggio), a demolition expert (Kirpal Singh a.k.a. Kip, a Sikh from India) and a burnt man lying on a bed (The English Patient) come together for sometime, experience life through each other and in the end, go their own ways.

This book won the Booker Prize, so I am no one to judge it as bad, but I will express my opinion fully expecting to be alone in it. Here it is:

The author keeps on shifting between settings, people and time-frames for different conversations without much indication. So that left me confused.

The author's command over the language and his research are brilliant. making the delivery of the book a little too good. I found the prose too lyrical, the descriptions too detailed and the writing too sophisticated. I felt a genuiness in the writing otherwise I would be tempted to say that the book is a little pretentious. Instead, the word that would more closely describe the sophistication of the book for me is elitist.

Having said that, I would like summarise my experience below:

(1) The book is too brilliantly delivered. That made it a little difficult for me to follow.

(2) The characters are too vivdly drawn and are a conflicintg mix of the extraordinary and the ordinary.

(3) The setting is too fantastic, and the mix of people too eclectic, yet through them, I experienced only the mundane. That was a little disappointing.

(4) The language is too rich and the imagery too descriptive. This made the book almost overwhelming for me.

(5) The end of the book reflects too closely life's habit of moving on. The impact was that this book forced me to move on and somehow delete it from my memory.

I would still reccommend that you read it because:

(1) It definitely is a very different reading experience.

(2) It won the Booker Prize, so its possible that I missed what the book was about and you might get it.

If interested in a little oblique description of my experience of the book read on...

Imagine the book as walk throush a dense forest.

The Book's Progression

You are walking through the forest, knowing that you will get somewhere. At the same time however, you are constantly looking at the path and thinking that it is too meandering.

The Imagery

You know that the forest is beautiful, you can see it on every step. But the damn thing is so dense that you can't enjoy the beauty of anything in isolation. It is almost an assault on your senses and the simplicity of the experience is lost.

Indirectness and leaving things open to interpretation

The foliage around the narrow path is too thick and there are both dark animals and beautiful creatures hidden in them. Every now and then, you see a movement and look hard to make sense of what you saw, but sometimes, you just can't figure it out. That makes the experience of the walk incomplete. Once in a while, you come to an opening where there is an opening in the foliage and the sun has been permitted to illuminate the ground. Here, you can see the flowers and the creatures and enjoy their beauty . Here you take a much needed rest and look around taking in the scene with a refreshing ease and comfort.

Anti-climax

After a such an impactful walk, one would expect that the forest would remain in your heart for a while and you would be able to draw from it the memories to relive the experience. Unfortunately, at the end of this walk, the forest just ends. You walk onto a parking lot where the regular world is waiting. You start your car, and pick up some groceries on the way back home.

Finally, if ever you do think about the walk, your response is "Hun? The Forest was nice but what was it all about!?!?!"