3. The English Patient

3. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (4/7/2011 - 4/18/2011)

While a little dense and not always particularly interesting, The English Patient wasn't a bad book.  Some chapters were fascinating, as the burned-beyond-recognition English patient tried to recount his past and Hana and Kip developed their relationship.  But others were just too long; there is only so much about sandstorm-types and torture and de-arming bombs I can read before I start to get bored. 

The blurb on the back of the book said that the English patient's "memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning."  I found the opposite to be true -- the more I read, the more I looked forward to learning about Hana's life, to watching Kip fall in love, to quietly observe as Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip lived their lives in this abandoned Italian villa.  The English patient was an ever-present persona for me, much like he is for the characters of the novel, but I couldn't focus on him. It's not his fault, I suppose, but his plight simply did not move me the way the rest of the novel did.  I think that's why this book took me so long to finish -- I wasn't compelled to open it constantly the way I have been with other books.

The ending may have been the best part of the book.  It's set in the last year of World War II, and the final chapter shows the four of them receiving the news of the nuclear bomb being dropped on Japan.  The sudden rift that this creates in their group is amazing, and I wonder if perhaps that's what it would have really been like to be alive to witness the bombs being dropped -- if people turned on each other, if the news ripped apart relationships and families, if life was truly never the same afterwards in ways that I as a child born in the eighties and raised in the nineties can never truly understand. 
Both of my grandfathers were in World War II, but they are gone -- one passed almost ten years ago and the other is dying and doesn't know who I am thanks to Alzheimer's.  My grandmothers are still alive, and I can always ask them what those days were like, but it's not the same.  I miss my grandfathers, and now, suddenly, I regret being a child with them, regret not being older (though there's nothing I can do about that) and able/willing to talk to them about their lives as soldiers.  I will never get that opportunity now. 
One quote from the English patient's narrative of his life in the desert stood out to me:
"A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing -- not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past."