the English Patient

Just plain beautiful!

 

 

It is very rare that the one-pot mix of love, adultery(wink wink), revenge, more love, war, spies, plane crash and deserts, miles and miles of deserts can amount to such a spectacular ride. Definitively the best book I have read since a very long time. The Libyan deserts are more tantalizing than ever, now that they have names and histories attached.

To encounter a truly great writer is to meet them all. Engaged in some sort of underground society, they give out hints that lead to each other. If I did not hear about Michael Ondaatje from A, I would never have picked up a copy of this novel. The 1996 movie was too well-known for my love of the obscure... I checked out them both. An exquisite book and a fine rendition of the book. Nothing to be complained.

Hhmmm...It is words like this that make the darkness of my long nights more bearable.

Now, please welcome the quotes, or THE quote.
Dadahhhhhhhh:

"When I turned her around, her whole body was covered in bright pigment. Herbs and stones and light and the ash of acacia to make her eternal. The body pressed against sacred colour. Only the eye blue removed, made anonymous, a naked map where nothing is depicted, no signature of lake, no dark cluster of mountain as there is north of the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti, no lime-green fan where the Nile rivers enter the open palm of Alexandria, the edge of Africa.

And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdoms, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells, In the palace of winds."

p.260-261
Ondaatje, Michael. The English patient.Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, c1992.