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Zusatztext “A rare and spellbinding web of dreams.” — Time “Sensuous! mysterious! rhapsodic . . . It transports the reader to another world.” —San Francisco Chronicle Informationen zum Autor Michael Ondaatje is the author of eleven books of poetry, a memoir, and six novels, including The Cat’s Table, coming in October 2011. He lives in Toronto. Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and seven works of nonfiction. His new book, The Man Within My Head, comes out in 2012. Klappentext Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning best seller lyrically portrays the convergence of four damaged lives in a bomb-riddled Italian villa in the last days of the war. Hana, the grieving nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the emotionally detached Indian sapper, Kip-each is haunted in different ways by the riddle of the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies swathed in bandages in an upstairs room. It is this man's incandescent memories-of the bleak North African desert, of explorers' caves and Bedouin tribesmen, of forbidden love, and of annihilating anger-that illuminate the story, and the consequences of the mysteries they reveal radiate outward in shock waves that leave all the characters forever changed.I N T R O D U C T I O N by Pico Iyer A Lost Oasis in the Midst of War Much of what I love about The English Patient can be found in a more or less typical paragraph, chosen almost at random, very close to the beginning of the book. In it Michael Ondaatje takes us into a library, between the kitchen and the ‘‘destroyed chapel’’ of the old nunnery in which the novel is set, during the closing days of World War II. The library contains, among its high walls of books, a sofa, a shrouded piano and the head of a stuffed bear. Like the people around it, it has absorbed a ‘‘wound’’ from violent shelling, yet now, partly open to the world, it accepts ‘‘the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.’’ It seems a safe place, ultimately, protective, even as lightning often flashes into it and the rain that comes in through a hole left by mortar attack has ‘‘doubled the weight of the books.’’ The library could not be more ordinary, in short, even though it’s scarred and haunted as the house’s residents are. Yet it’s full of things from everywhere – like the book in which it sits – and when you bring words and wounds and bears together, they create startling and often fresh combinations. The description of the room has a poet’s caressing lyricism, every word attentively chosen, yet each phrase also brings us new information. And even as we take it to be an unusually sensuous and exact evocation of a particular place, we can also note, if we’re so inclined, that the library belongs to both the house and the elements now, that its collection throws old worlds and new together and that the fact it is at once room and symbol ‘‘doubles the weight’’ of the book in our hands. We’re in the middle of a pulsing, concrete, very human story, we realize, but also of a vision, in which each clause holds us with a special vividness – how many other novels in English describe green-black paste of ‘‘ground peacock bone’’ or eighteen different kinds of wind? – even as each detail also stands for something beyond itself. It’s as if Keats and Marshall McLuhan are collaborating in every sentence. Ondaatje’s rare, risk-taking tale of four wounded characters gathering in an abandoned nunnery to put their selves and their stories together as the global war winds down, holds us as the classic novels it invokes ( Anna Karenina and The Charterhouse of Parma ) might: with a gorgeously stirring and universal set of romances set against a complex political backdrop, all delivered in newborn prose that nonetheless pushes us towards a resolution of several mysteries. But at the same time it spi...
