Product Description

From the novel by Michael Ondaatje Anthony Minghella's screenplay is a gripping adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning story of love, betrayal and loss set against a background of war, spies and intrigue."Here is a work of art to break your heart" (Time); "The current movie versions of books are well-meaning, but none comes close to The English Patient in their ability to turn literary prose into cinematic gems" (New York Times)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #561726 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Lost in Translation!
In my opinion, the movie did not do justice to this Booker prize winning novel although Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas were beautifully cast. Author Michael Ondaatie's tale of the rememberance of an adulterous romance juxtaposed with the horrors of WWII loses some of its magic in the transition to film. Sadly, the author's arcane knowledge about the Great Silk Road, the Florentine Madonnas, various desert winds and the great Django Reinhardt have been severely compressed or omitted.

Told from the P-O-V of a dying protagonist under the influence of morphine, the story is revealed in numerous flashbacks. The locations alternate between a ruined villa in war torn Italy, glamourous Cairo, Egypt at Christmastime, 1938 and archaeological ruins in the uncharted North African desert. The Oscar nominated screenplay actually begins three-quarters through the book with aristocratic Hungarian explorer Lazlo Almaszy falling aflame from a burning plane into the Saharian desert. His rescue by Beoudins who save his life is both haunting and original.

The tragically disfigured Almasy is dubbed the English Patient when he ends up in a British field hospital where he refuses to reveal his identity. A skilled linguist, they think he is one of them, however, he has good reason to conceal his true identity. There the shell-shocked nurse Hana starts caring for him and they end up in a villa where they are slowly joined by a few other characters.

There the brilliant, anti-social Count recounts the story of his doomed love affair with Katharine Clifton, a collegue's charming wife. Poor Almasy is a man who "fasted until he found what he wanted" and when he finally finds her, he is obsessed. For the love of Catherine, he ultimately betrays his friends, his country and is forever haunted by their tragic destiny.

The screenplay does do an excellent job of making coherent the duel plot lines and numerous flashbacks. It is all here-adultery, homosexuality, necrophilia, drug addiction, treason and murder in a story so compelling and so tragic one actually pities these fictional characters.

Literature doesn't get better than this
I read Anthony Minghella's sublime, lyrical novel some time after seeing the Oscar-winning movie and I was struck by the seamless similarities in both genres. The novel has a dream-like quality as it shifts in time back and forth, sifting through the memories of the dying patient and the other inhabitants of the Villa San Girolamo. The cinematography of the movie has the same fluid continuity, no mean feat when one considers how difficult it is to keep a story flowing with constant flashbacks. The film of The English Patient was described by one reviewer as almost film noir. Well, the book is novel noir. This not a romp, it's intricately multi-layered and intended to be savoured.

The story is based in the abandoned villa on a hilltop in central Italy. It is 1944 and the Allies are advancing yet the scent of victory is overwhelmed by accumulated shell shock. The central characters in the villa: Hungarian Count Lazlo de Almasy, Canadian nurse Hana, the Indian sapper Kip and the thief Caravaggio are all burned out by war and in de Almasy's case, literally and mortally burned. Hana is nursing her mysterious dying patient who gradually details his life as an explorer in the desert of northern Africa and reveals his doomed, magnificant, obsessive, life-altering love affair with Katherine Clifton, an English rose with the tenaciousness of a lioness. Hana, who has lost everyone she dared to love, tries to insulate herself from the world but in the presence of Kip and the less noble Caravaggio, she reaches out once again. This is a story of love's expectations, and the shifting loyalties of friends, family and nations in times of war, of deadly betrayals and being rescued by strangers, of healing wounds and preparing for death. In short, all the stuff top class literature is made of and, strangely, pretty much what happens around us every day although the settings might not be as exotic.

Minghella has constructed a vast canvas of human experience, yet he does not waste a word. He peels away the exterior visage of his characters to reveal their joy and pain with an exquisitely bare, poetic use of language. The consequences of their lives remained with me long after I had put the book down. I pick up The English Patient from time to time and the magic is always there.

Brilliantly moving and dynamic
This is the first screeenplay i've read and i understood it clearly. In regards to the books content i was in tears by the end and it pushed me to buy the film after i read it. A must for any shelf.