#36 - The English Patient

I don't know if I have ever read a book that is so intricately crafted in every way. Fitzgerald edited, sure, and others made deliberate decisions and worked sentences and paragraphs, but never have I seen something that was such a clear display of work as The English Patient. It had short, clipped phrases - Sinners in a holy city. - that, unlike Hemingway's natural quick patter, were used to trip the reader. But it also had long passages and internal monologues, the un-punctuated her hair her shoulder her vaccine scar on her right arm rambling of Kerouac. It leapt between raw and stiff, between flowery and precise, and every one of those changes had a deliberate rationale behind it that I could spend days thinking about. And the writing is good, really - I completely agree with his accolades and everything else that has been bestowed upon him. But midway through the book, I realized I wasn't going to give it 10/10, and I still don't know why. Maybe it's that he felt like more of a craftsman than an artist, or maybe I feel like you need to be subversive in some way, or maybe I just read it while I was near my family. But I just didn't feel like it got there, somehow.

There were many awesome things I wanted to point to. The big "plot" reveal was brilliant - I'll be nice this time, or mean depending on if you came here looking for a synopsis. It is apparently a work of Historical Metafiction, which is just...do the Dear Canada books count for that as well? Speaking of Canada, this is one of the greatest Canadian novels ever written - by a Sri Lankan-born author, featuring an "Englishman" who explored North Africa, a Sikh from India trained in Britain, and is set in a villa in Italy. Which, upon further reflection, probably makes it one of the most Canadian great novels, as well as a great Canadian novel. We can't all be Alice Munro talking about the prairies. The book is mind-blowingly researched, and the fact that the largest influence on the novel was from Herodotus should show just how academic the book can be. But I don't consider that a mark against, either - I'm glad that one of the rules Ondaatje followed was to "write what you know".

There is a phrase that I've heard used to describe loads of books, and I've never quite believed in the comparison, until now. The English Patient truly is a rich tapestry of a book, and yet again, the Oldfield Option scores big.

9/10