The English Patient

Friday, August 22, 2008

About The English Patient

The English Patient, published in 1992.*

.The novel won Ondaatje the prestigious Booker McConnell Prize in 1992, making him the only Sri Lankan writer ever to receive the honor. In 1996, Saul Zaentz produced The English Patient as a film, adapted by Anthony Minghella, starring Ralph Fiennes as Almasy and Kristen Scott-Thomas as Katharine Clifton. The film went on to win a slew of Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
*The English Patient. takes place during World War II, during which Ondaatje himself was born. The story involves four people converging on a villa and discovering the secrets of their past in an effort to move towards healing in the future.
.The book, like many of Ondaatje's novels, isn't slavish to plot constructions. Indeed, in several interviews Ondaatje has revealed that the plot didn't really exist until he finished the first draft of the book. He frequently begins with only a generative image.

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Michael Ondaatje (1943-)

.Michael Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1943 in the midst of World War II. He moved with his mother, brother, and sister to England in 1952 before attending Bishop University in Quebec, Canada. He received his BA from the University of Toronto in 1965 and his MA from Queens University in 1967.Ondaatje currently lives in Toronto with his wife, novelist/editor Linda Spalding.
.Ondaatje is best known for The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize upon its publication in 1992 and was adapted into a film by Anthony Minghella that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1997. Ondaatje began by publishing poetry in 1967 with the book Daisy Monsters.
.Ondaatje's poetry became an important part of defining his writing style, allowing him to experiment with fragmented consciousness, juxtaposition of unlike images, and experimental rhythm. He went on to publish the poetry collections The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in 1970 along with several others before publishing his first novel in 1976, Coming Through Slaughter.

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. Hana is an army nurse who take care from a burned man who chose to erase his identity and nationality and named him self ''The English Patient'',while his real name is Almasy.His job was to draw maps of the desert.

. Caravaggio was afriend of Hana's father .He entered the world of spying and bears physical and sychological scars from german forces.

. After Kip,who is asoldier entered Hana villa he and the English Patient become afriends.

. Geoffery Clifton plane made the jop of the patient easier but Almasy fell in love with Katharine Clifton ,Geoffrey wife.

. The members of the exploration team decided to pack up when the world war II broke out.

. Geoffery with Katharine tried to kill each other by crashing plane and leaving Almasy in the ddesert to die immediately was Geoffery .After few days Katherine die too.

. Kip become more close to Hana and forms a romantic relationship.

. years later Kip is happily married with childern ,however,he still often thinks of Hana.

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1-Almásy:

. He is the protagonist of the "English patient" the novel's title.

. Almásy exists as the center and focus of the action.

.Little by little, he reveals his identity, and finally his name, in the end of the novel.

.When Almásy's name is revealed we discover the great irony of the novel: the "English patient" is not even an English, but rather Hungarian by birth.

.The English patient character serves to highlight the great differences between imagination and reality.

. Almásy's is clear-minded and rational thinking, however, he is clouded by the entrance of Katharine Clifton into his life.

2-HANA:

. She is a nurse who cares for the English patient, bringing him morphine and washing his wounds.

. She still clings to vestiges of innocence that allow her to feel like a child—some nights, she goes out in the garden to play hopscotch.

. Hana is a dynamic character, and the novel is in many ways the story of her maturity into adulthood.

. Hana sees her English patient as a "despairing saint. Even as CHRIST.

. Where in reality,Almásy is a mapmaker who has helped German spies and carried on an affair with another man's wife.

. Therefore, by projecting the noble images into the blank identity of the English patient, Hana builds innocent and childlike dreams. As the novel concludes, Hana sees the reality in her situation, and she longs to return home to the safety.

3- Katharine Clifton:

• An Oxford-educated woman and one of the most mysterious characters in the novel.

• She is the wife of Geoffrey Clifton. She married Geoffrey quite young and traveled with him to Northern Africa, after one year from their marriage. They fly to the desert to join Almásy's expedition crew.

• Katharine nevertheless takes what she wants, assertively approaching Almásy and telling him that she wants him to "ravish her".

• Geoffrey is a faithful and kind husband. Although of that Katharine never seems sorry about her affair. She punches and stabs her lover, angry at him for refusing to change and bravely challenging the world to recognize their relationship.

4- Caravaggio:

• A Canadian thief whose profession is to steal the important documents during the war when he puts his skills to use for the British intelligence effort.

• He is also long-time friend of Hana's father.• Caravaggio arrives in the villa as "the man with bandaged hands". His German captors cut off his thumbs and he is physically and mentally, can no longer steal, because he has "lost his nerve".

• Hana remembers Caravaggio as a very human thief. He would always get distracted by the human element in a job. For instance, if an advent calendar was on the wrong day, he would fix it. She also has deep feelings of love for Caravaggio. It is debated if this love is romantic or simply familial, however Caravaggio does display a romantic love towards Hana.

5- Kip:

• An Indian soldier who had a difficult life at war and at home. He is also trained to be a sapper by Lord Suffolk.

• Kip's emotional withdrawal because when Lord Suffolk and his team are killed while attempting to dismantle a new type of bomb, which detonated. After this event, Kip decides to leave England and work as a sapper in Italy where he meets Hana.

• Kip and Hana become lovers and, through that, Kip begins to regain confidence and a sense of community. He feels welcomed by these westerners, and they all seem to form a group that disregards origins. They get together and celebrate Hana's twenty-first birthday. However, Kip hears news of America's dropping a bomb on Japan and conclude that the West can never reconcile with the East, and that America would never have done something so horrific to a White population. So he leaves and never returns back.

6- Geoffrey Clifton :

. A British explorer and Katharine Clifton's husband. A young, good-natured, affable man, Geoffrey is a new addition to the group of explorers who are mapping the North African desert.

.Geoffrey seems to have everything going for him: an Oxford education, wealthy family connections, and a beautiful young wife. He is a proud and devoted husband, and enjoys praising his wife in front of the other explorers.

.Goeffrey claims to have come to North Africa purely out of an interest in exploration, but Almásy finds out that Geoffrey has been working for British Intelligence as an aerial photographer. Everyone seems to like Geoffrey, but Katharine, who knows him best, knows his capacity to be insanely jealous.

7- Madox :

.Almásy's best friend in the desert. Madox is a rational, level-headed man who, like Almásy, chose to live in the desert to study the features of the land and report back to the Geographical Society.

.Unlike Almásy, Madox includes his own emotional reactions in his writing and reports, and is not shy to describe his amazement at a particular mountain or his wonder at the size of the moon.

.Madox always carries a copy of Anna Karenina, the famous tale of adultery, but remains ever faithful to his wife back home. Madox sees the church as proclaiming a jingoistic pro-war message during World War II. He takes his own life in the church, and Almásy concludes that he 'died because of nations.'

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Themes:

Nationality and Identity

- Nationality and identity are interconnected in The English Patient, functioning together to create a web of inescapable structures that tie the characters to certain places and times despite their best efforts to evade such confinement.

-This reality invades Almásy's life in the desert and Kip's life in the Italian villa.

-National identity is, then, an inescapable part of each of the characters, a larger force over which they have no control.

Love's Ability to Transcend Time and Place

.One theme that emerges in the novel is that love, if it is truly heartfelt, transcends place and time.

-Hana feels love and connection to her father even though he has died.

-Almásy desperately maintains his love for Katharine.

-Kip, despite leaving Italy to marry in India, never loses his connection to Hana.

-Such love transcends even death, as the characters hold onto their emotions even past the grave. This idea implies a larger message—that time and place themselves are irrelevant to human connection.

Motifs :

Bodies

-The frequent recurrence of descriptions of bodies in the novel informs and develops its themes of healing, changing, and renewal. -Almásy's burned body.

- Kip's dark and lithe body.

-Katharine's willowy figure.

-Bodies thus function as a means of physical connections between characters, tying them to a certain times and places.

Dying in a Holy Place

-The characters in the novel frequently mention the idea of "dying in a holy place." -Katharine dies in a cave .

-Hana's father also dies in a holy place, a dove-cot, a ledge above a building where doves can be safe from predatory rats.

-Madox dies in a holy place by taking his life in a church in England.

-the figurative idea of a 'holy place' touches on the connection between actual places and states of emotion in the novel.

Reading

-Reading is recurs throughout the novel in various forms and capacities.

-Hana reads to Almásy to connect with him and try to make him interested in the present life.

-Katharine reads voraciously to learn all she can about Cairo and the desert.

-Almásy consistently reads The Histories by Herodotus to guide him in his geographical searches.

- In each of these instances of reading, the characters use books to inform their own lives and to connect to another place or time.

Symbols :

The Atomic Bomb

-The atomic bomb the United States drops on Japan symbolizes the worst fears of western aggression.

The Italian villa

-depiction of the villa is symbolically important to the novel.

-Hana reflects to herself that "there seemed little demarcation between house and landscape."- Such an image mirrors the spiritual death and rebirth of the villa's inhabitants, the way they learn to live again after the emotional destruction of war.

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.The novel, the English patient, by Michael Ondaatje constructs meaning through the use of tropes, images and symbolism, instead of portraying a linear set of event.

. There are many intersexual references, tropes of covering, which serve to create and strengthen meaning, as well as bold imagery, which erects another level of significance.

. Symbolism plays a vital role in the formation of meaning, with fire, religion, the English patient body and the desert being essential to founding concepts of the novel.

. Ondaatje novel is a collage, its narrative structure is not based on chronological events but is constructed largely of numerous non –sequential memories and experiences of the four main characters. This non –linear narrative structure, however, is more than a narrative device.

. Setting the novel during world warII also gives Ondaatje a backdrop through which to examine the effect of the effect of the colonialism of Britain on the world policies of the United States in later years. World warII marked the end.

. Of Britain’s powerful colonial era, and the rise of the United States as the new world power. The emergences of the United State as the world power is metaphorically represented, in the novel, by the bombing of Hiroshima. Through the character of Kip, Ondaatje shows how American rational to bomb Japan with atomic bomb is directly related to the racist colonialist philosophy of western superiority that especially characterized the British Empires rule over its non –western.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

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Quotation 1

" The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East…. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape."

Quotation 2

" A novel is a mirror walking down a road Many books open with an author's assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat. When she begins a book, she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards. "

Quotation 3

" The Villa San Girolamo, built to protect inhabitants from the flesh of the devil, had the look of a besieged fortress, the limbs of most of the statues blown off during the first days of shelling. There seemed little demarcation between house and landscape, between damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth. To Hana the wild gardens were further rooms… In spite of the burned earth, in spite of the lack of water. Someday there would be a bower of limes, rooms of green light."

Quotation 4

" Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet 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. "

. Michael Ondaatje wrote many books like, Coming Through Slaughter, The Skin of a Lion, Anils Ghost and Divisadero.

.The novel is a version of the New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. The novel talks about Bolden's sanity in 1907. Bolden's music becomes more rough and his behavior more devious. The other character in the novel is photographer E.J.Bellocq. Both characters reveals central theme which is the relationship between creativity and self-destruction.

. The other novel is In the Skin of a Lion, published in 1987 by McClelland and Stewart. The novel represents the life of immigrants who contribution to building Toronto in the early of 1900s. The story is about wearing and removing masks, and separating the skin from the body and about transforming of the identity. Michael spent many months in the archives of Toronto city and newspapers of that period to write this novel.

. Anil’s Ghost is the critically acclaimed fourth novel by Michael Ondaatje. It was first published in 2000 by McClelland and Stewart.
Anil’s Ghost follows the life of Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan who left to study in the United States on a scholarship. During her time away she has become a forensic anthropologist and returns to Sri Lanka in the midst of its merciless civil war as part of a Human Rights Investigation by the United Nations. Anil, along with archeologist Sarath Diyasena, discovers the skeleton of a recently burned victim in a government area. With the help of the mysterious Sarath, Anil sets out to identity the skeleton, nicknamed Sailor, and bring about justice the nameless victims of the war.

. Divisadero novel, firs

t published on April 17, 2007 by McClelland and Stewart

. Divisadero won the Governor General's Award for English fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

.The novel centres on a single father and his children: Anna, his natural daughter; Claire, who was adopted as a baby when Anna was born; and Cooper (Coop), adopted later as an orphaned boy. The family live on a farm in Northern California where Anna and Claire are treated almost as twins, but Cooper as something of an outsider. After Anna begins a sexual relationship with Coop, an incident of violence tears the family apart. The book then details each of the characters' separate journeys through life post-incident and how they are all interconnected.Anna is found in France tending to a farmhouse once owned by the French poet Lucien Segura. The second part of the story then details the history of the French farm which has a number of close parallels to the first part of the story.

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