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Introduction: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient
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10389 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1993 |
426 Words |
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Michael Ondaatje established his reputation as a poet some twenty years ago; winning the Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. His most recent novel, The English Patient, the 1992 cowinner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, assures Ondaatje a solid place in contemporary literature. It masterfully weaves lyrical prose with dreamlike images to create an exotic, mesmerizing tale of four fugitives traumatized by war.
Set in a bombed out Italian villa in the final months of World War II, The English Patient is a haunting portrait of four people "caught in the cross-fire of history, a subtle commentary on western civilization in ruins." Their histories and prejudices are different; each has been betrayed and brutalized by the war. In a style reminiscent of that used by Herodotus in his Histories, Ondaatje sifts through the destroyed lives and hopes of the four fugitives a nurse, a thief, a sapper, and a burn victim--"piecing together a mirage." Fragments are missing, though, "gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms," making a grasp of reality and true identities nearly impossible. The question is whether Ondaatje is concerned at all with truth and plot, or more with style and technique.
The excerpt highlights Ondaatje approach: His emphasis on images fire, bombs, books mutilated bodies, and healing is fused with a compelling story, gripping in its depiction of the horrors of war. It also shows how each survivor, isolated and traumatized at first, gradually reveals his attachments, love, and, to a certain extent, identity.
Poet and critic Stephen Scobie has observed Ondaatje's evolution from poet to novelist and comments on his ability to interweave an interesting mixture of genres (prose narratives, lyric poems, collaged texts) with arresting images and metaphors to tell his illusory stories. Literary scholar and poet Tom Clark looks at the unconventional way Ondaatje exercises his poetic powers to give greater depth and resonance to his themes of identity, loyalty, and betrayal. Ondaatje has been quoted as saying that he considers The English Patient a "totally political novel." Michael Marshall, executive editor of THE WORLD & I, is critical of the book's "political correctness," which he believes leaves this novel seriously flawed. Editor and publisher Morton Kaplan, in his editorial, takes issue with Ondaatje's oversimplified and possibly distorted views of character and society as portrayed in the novel. The concluding commentary by poet novelist Cyril Dabydeen describes how Ondaatje's "eccentric lineage" and multicultural childhood have left a profound
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