pileofgreybooks: a book ring

Although The English Patient has all the fanfare from the movie, its prequel, In the Skin of a Lion is as if not better than its lovechild. Although one can easily read the Patient without ever touching the Lion, you’d miss all these little insights that you’d only get from reading the Lion first. Patrick, the protagonist in the first novel, doesn’t ever appear in the second one, but he has a palpable presence (through his adopted daughter, Hana, the nurse of the English patient)—like an ink stain that has bled through fifty pages faintly but there nonetheless. Ondaatje whirls around these novels, caressing them and turning them around and sometimes talking to you, the reader, in a slightly postmodern (gasp!) Victorian way. He is a very messy writer, but I’m sure it’s controlled messiness. Although I would be happier if it wasn’t. I like messiness. I like feeling lost. Right now I’m only half way through the Patient, but I have also read it before. I’m liking it a lot more than the last time. Though right now is the romantic/violent parts between the patient and Katharine, which frankly is not my favorite section, though from what I remember of the movie it is the main focus. In the novel it is much more about Hana, and makes very strong anti-war comments. When I heard Ondaatje speak a couple of years ago (this was the time I was sitting in front of Salman Rushdie and didn’t know it), during the Q&A, this young, thin Indian-descent man asked him why the movie was so different from the novel. Ondaatje replied. And I paraphrase: “Well, a movie experience is so different from a book experience. There really cannot be a movie about a burned man lying in a bed for two-and-a-half hours.” Everyone laughed.