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    The English Patient
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    The English Patient
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    The English Patient
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    The English Patient

    Written by Michael Ondaatje

    Narrated by Ralph Fiennes

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateNov 7, 2006
    ISBN9780739343951
    Unavailable
    The English Patient
    Author

    Michael Ondaatje

    Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Toronto.  The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into an Oscar-winning film directed by Anthony Minghella.

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    Reviews for The English Patient

    4/5

    2,605 ratings90 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This book is the perfect example of the book being better than the film. Loathed the film but I loved the book. Wonderfully written, and with great characters. Really good read, thoroughly recommended.
    • 2/5
      This book didn't really do it for me. While it attempted to be literary and poignant, I felt that it got lost along the way. There were some nice phrases and poetic passages, but apart from this I ultimately felt let down as a reader. I wouldn't really recommend the book, it did not hold significant value in my eyes.

      2 stars.
    • 1/5
      I strongly recommend reading this if you want a solid sample of how to do a multiple points of view narration style. This is however the only thing I can recommend it for.

      I had to read this for a class. it deals with heavy subject matter including PTSD and war. I found myself really struggling through it.
    • 2/5
      I bought this at a university library in Rome. My holiday had been wonderful but alas I had exhausted my reading cache. I had been deeply in love with the film, had seen twice at the theatres back in States. I even attempted a third viewing in the Eternal City but alas it was dubbed into Italian. Shame. I found the novel somewhat shallow. I wound up borrowing Turgenev's Fathers and Sons for the flight home. I remain sure that the novel isn't as bad as I'm reflecting such.
    • 4/5
      I am rather late coming to this one. I have never seen the film adaptation so I was able to approach this book "sight unseen". A wonderful story and yet, so difficult to review. As with most character-driven stories, the pacing here is languid. Everything seems to happen at half speed, as if moving through liquid. The story is not designed to be rushed through. It is to be slowly savored. Ondaatje's prose is lush and sensual. Our four characters are windows into damaged souls of war-ravaged individuals, with each one seeking, in their own way, release/redemption and the courage to try and pick up the war shattered pieces of their lives.Overall, a beautiful, haunting story set at the tail end of World War II.
    • 5/5
      An amazing book. I'd definately recommend this too people, especially since I finished it in under three days. Parts of it were a little confusing just because of the fact that it jumped back and forth through people's perspectives, but other than that the story was amazing. Sad, happy, and inlightening all in on. Michael Ondaatje puts you into the time period, right after the second World War. The English patient's unknown identity only adds to the drama of a mystery. I loved it. I'm so happy I finished the book, because now I can watch the movie! :)
    • 5/5
      I loved the movie, and have long wanted to read the book, so when Michael Ondaatje won the best book that has ever been awarded the Man Booker Prize in the fifty years since it's been in place, I decided I had better read it. I read a lot of reviews about it over the years and the ratings surprisingly were all over the place from 1 to 5 stars. I went into the book with an open mind, and knowing that the movie was incredible, I was excited to read the book. It blew me away. There is much here for a reader to savour - from a love story, to a mystery, to tragic losses, but the language is so incredibly descriptive, and the characters so well drawn right from beginning to end, that the transition from different points of view to different places and varying chronological times throughout, the book and its storyline were seamless, held together by absolutely beautiful language. The book is set in a bombed out nunnery which had been used for a hospital during the war, and it is located in Italy. The ruined building is abandoned except for a Canadian nurse and the patient she refuses to leave. The patient is so badly burned that he is not recognizable, and he needs a lot of care as well as morphine regularly to relieve the pain. Hana thinks the man is English because of his accent. Two other people join them at the nunnery - an East Indian sapper and a man from Hana's past who was renowned as a successful thief before the war. All four had served in various positions during WWII which has just has come to an end in Europe. All four are suffering from some form of PTSD, and all four are trying to find a place of peace after the horrendous things that they have either done or witnessed during that war. Ondaatje shows the true horror of war even as he maintains his beautiful and lyrical language throughout. Even though the English patient never leaves his sickroom, he drives the plot in this book. His secrets and thoughts come out bit by bit throughout the book, mostly in conversations between him and one or more of the three others in the house. His story is tragic, gut-wrenching and surprising, but in some way, helps to heal the three other residents. This book is a definite literary masterpiece. A tour de force.
    • 2/5
      The language is spare and glorious, and I can see how many people fell in love with this book, but I cannot say I enjoyed it. How characters were brought together on whim and scattered like leaves, as if humans can only be impressions on one another. Is that really life? It makes me want to end it.
    • 4/5
      Nice book. Awful film.
    • 3/5
      If you are looking for a book with a great plot and action of any kind look elsewhere. With that said, I didn't love this book, but I also didn't hate it. Ondaatje is clearly talented and his writing reflects that talent. However, this seemed to be more than "a. . . web of dreams." It seems to me to reveal a weakness in the author. After reading, I feel like he just sat down and wrote whatever came to his mind and in the beginning that was great. He established a beautiful yet tragic setting that ultimately reflected the characters interacting within. He also built characters that seemed very complex and for awhile everything seemed to be running smoothly. Then somewhere in the middle of the book everything became stagnant for quite a while, until the end where I felt like everything went crazy and the ending was ultimately rushed.
    • 2/5
      I feel Sareene on this, but gave 2 stars less. I've read a lot of books but I've never done almost two months on a book, just because I didn't want to read it because I found it so boring. Never seen the movie and just like Dreesie, I'm doubting if I want to see it. So why did I even finish the book? I just always do...
    • 5/5
      I really don't know how to categorise this novel. I found the language beautiful and the approach to the world and the characters very romantic/sensual. The four characters being impacted by the language of the story and the use of nationality. I will be thinking on this one for a while and thoroughly enjoyed the reading.As an aside, I have never seen the movie though caught previews at the time and from that had assumed a very different novel (basically a by the numbers romance).
    • 2/5
      I found this too slow-moving for my tastes -- it bored me so much that by the time anything interesting started to happen, I no longer cared.This book had been on my shelf so long that I thought I had already read it, so I started it the other day thinking it would be a reread. By the time I reached Chap. 2 I realized that I never read this, just watched the movie.
    • 3/5
      I have never seen the movie that was made from this book, and I am not sure if I'm going to. I really really struggled with the first 100 pages or so of this novel. They are soooo overly descriptive. And entire page associated with 1 person drawing a hopscotch game on the ground and hopping through once. Just so much description for nothing happening.Once the character of Kip comes into the story, it gets more interesting. Now there are actual relationships, and some chapters go back in time to explain how the characters got to this point in their lives.Still a struggle (it took me 10 days to get through 300 pages!). But it's done. I do want to find the Seinfeld episode where Elaine complains about the movie--I think I will get it now.
    • 5/5
      A most loved book!
    • 3/5
      I was not as impressed as I had hoped to be.
    • 5/5
      How can I word a review that's anywhere near as exquisite as this book? I can't, so I won't try - I'll stumble along in my own clumsy style and try to hint at how magical an experience reading it was.

      I started with a little wariness at the, shall we say, gentle pace. Can I really put up with this all the way through? I wondered. Not more than 2 or 3 pages in, I felt the first tug of its deep-flowing current. The very visual text moves at the pace of a human resting heartbeat. The "English patient" himself explains, about a third of the way in, how to approach the text, when instructing Hana on how to read Kim aloud: "Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. [...] Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen." Once I had this concept in my mind, I was really able to revel in the beauty of the fine-crafted text.

      The characters' lives intertwine, create eddies and backwaters and draw the reader slowly deeper (I'm trying to continue with the water metaphor... and failing miserably.) The timeline and locations shift like the sands of the desert (mixed metaphors, anyone?) as the story gently, quietly, peacefully and somewhat sadly unfolds.

      I'm strongly tempted to return to the beginning and start all over again, to luxuriate in the very human beauty of this story. It is simply a lovely, lovely book.
    • 4/5
      A couple things caught me off guard:

      * Some lengthy passages were free verse poetry, not prose.
      * The book's focus is on the nurse and the bomb defusing expert, unlike the film's focus on the English patient.
    • 5/5
      One of the most thought provoking books I've read. Lyrical and intense.
    • 2/5
      Some nice imagery, but largely unbearable.
    • 2/5
      I am not sure why, but this story just didn't click with me. I tried hard and there were some parts that I did like (Carravagio's story, Kip's musings about the work of a sapper), but the novel as a whole did not work for me. Beautiful language though.
    • 4/5
      Lyrical language, layers of story and complicated characters helped considerably by watching the movie first. If I had picked this up without watching the movie, I'm not sure I would have continued past the first few chapters. This is the type of literary novel that a reader has to persevere and stitch the pieces of story together as the author seems to throw them randomly at you. In fact, the author carefully crafts the story, but the reader needs to do more work than straight forward fiction...one of the reasons I don't read much literary stuff. Call me lazy, but I work at work and read for entertainment. Those literary books that I do read, I usually enjoy for the language and craft rather than the story, but this one satisfied both needs...once I got past the first couple of layers.
    • 5/5
      I have actually never seen the movie and came to read this book years after it came out. It does not diappoint. Lyrical, slightly hallucinatory story of a series of refugees brought together in a crumbling Italian villa during the second world war. Told with flashbacks that explain the identity of the English patient.
    • 5/5
      I come late to reading award-winning author, Michael Ondaatje, and decided to discover his story-telling ability through a familiar tale, that of the award-winning film made from his novel, The English Patient. I have been captivated by the film for years. I can now say I have been captivated by Ondaatje's novel. Unlike the film, the novel examines the lives and relationships of Hana, Caravaggio and Kip, rather than the love story between Almasy and Katherine. Ondaatje's research and presentation of the final days of the Italian Campaign of WWII is impeccable and beautifully presented. There is very much a sense of suspension in the story, of lives on hold, of the last breath before the long exhale of release. There is also a remarkable sense of ambiguity in the story, of the search for meaning when in fact there is none. There is only survival and moments of beauty in between. This is a deceptively powerful novel, deceptively powerfully written.
    • 1/5
      This book was crap! I only kept reading because I thought it would get better. WRONG!
    • 4/5
      I remember reading this circa '95 by the red dimmer light of a tank interior inbetween manoeuvres in the desert. Very diverting reading. I think I left my copy under the seat....
    • 3/5
      I disliked this book so much that I kept misplacing it "accidentally." My 10-year pointed out the fact that it seemed I was losing it and not trying very hard to find it, and maybe I was doing it on purpose. I am not sure why I responded to it the way I did. It had a real emotional void that left me weary, and ultimately uninterested. I am not one to find books dull, but this one was for me.It is well written from a stylistic standpoint, but it was so blinking dull from an emotional level. The three stars are representative of my appreciation of his craft, not my liking of the book. It wasn't it; it was me. We were a bad match.
    • 5/5
      Set in an Italian villa near the end of World War II that has been deserted since the war is moving northward. The nurse, Hana, refuses to leave with the rest of her comrades as they evacuate the villa stating that she will stay with the English patient insisting that he will die if moved. The English patient has an unknown name and identification but has been burned severely from a plane crash. Hana is left to care for the patient and as she does two others come into the story. Caravaggio, a friend of her father's who seeks her out and remains with her. An Indian soldier, Kip, working with the British army to disarm bombs. Together the three of them try to unravel the English patients hidden identity by dosing him with morphine and untangling his stories told in his delirium. Stories of all begin to unfold past and present giving a haunting tale of the aspects of war. The book skips from character to character from past to present which can be confusing if not paying close attention but overall well done.
    • 4/5
      This is the last of the texts I read with my students this semester. When I first read The English Patient in my late teens (and fresh from having seen the movie), I loved it. I was completely wrapped up in the poetry of the language and the romanticism of the desert and of the villa in Italy. So I was surprised to find myself growing impatient with the prose and annoyed by the novel's refusal to make the characters real rather than like ethereal dream figures. Maybe this just isn't a book I was meant to reread, or maybe I just read it at exactly the right time the first time.
    • 5/5
      This is a book to be read and treasured over a long weekend; it's filled with graceful heart-rending language and utterly believable characters who are as beautiful and full as they are broken. The more slowly you read this, and the more closely you read this, the more you'll gain from and appreciate it. Ondaatje's language is poetic and masterful, and nothing I could say here can do it justice. This is a book worth reading and rereading.