These four lost souls co-exist in a ghost house and, with the exception of the English patient himself, become preoccupied with “shedding skins. Ondaatje is a poet with a mythic imagination and this novel unfolds in prose of such breathtaking lyric and muscular beauty that the reading of it becomes almost a physical experience. Two other players enter this strange haven of space and light a former Allied agent who travels to the villa on hearing that Hana is there, and a young Sikh, a sapper nicknamed Kip, who will clear the area of enemy mines. She moves around the empty house in a trance-like state and the most practical chores assume a ritual quality. Hana’s own mind is packed with death and loss. They are living in a deserted villa, itself a victim of the war, and though the Englishman is incapable of movement and has clearly joined the living dead, his intelligence controls the girl who sees her salvation in nursing him: "he is her despairing saint." Set in northern Italy at the end of the second World War, this powerful, lyric narrative tells the story of Hana, a young nurse who tends the blackened body of the English patient. Four damaged people battle to make sense of the past and the present in Michael Ondaatje's magnificent mystery romance The English Patient.
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