All wars are wars of identity. Review on English Patient, The - Michael Ondaatje

There are books that are brilliant, that change the course of literature, that contain displays of literary genius in almost every page. You read these books, and you are amazed at the reach of human imagination. You wonder at the levels of human achievement. Then there are books that you read and you are delighted by, but don't think about in the aforementioned terms. And they surprise you by remaining with you long after you've read them. Little passages from them visit you at odd hours, and don't leave. The English Patient is that kind of book.

I watched the movie before I read the book, and I am grateful that it wasn't the other way around. Don't get me wrong, the movie is brilliant too, nevertheless I'm sure I would have had a whole different perspective on it had I read the book beforehand.

The eponymous character of The English Character is a modern man in the fullest sense of the word. In wartime, when it becomes vital to let your loyalties known to all, his are obvious: to love, and to cartography. And if there was one time in the bloodstained history of the world that cartography became a pernicious thing, it was the World Wars, the first one in particular.

Love, as we all know, is the first casualty of war. It is no different here. First consumed by jealousy, it receives the second, fatal blow at the hands of war(in particular, heightened wartime nationalistic insecurity). The protagonist, an Austrian gets burned in a plane accident, and thereafter, as fate would have it, gains the moniker of The English Patient. A character Carravaggio accuses him of selling maps to the Germans. A good-hearted nurse, who falls in love with an Indian, takes care of him in his last days.

A must read.