Pleasure and mystery are the broad title of the novel “The English Patient”, by a Canadian writer of Sri Lankan origins, Michael Ondaatje. The novel was published in 1992, and won the Man Booker Prize in the same year, and the Man Booker Gold Prize in 2018, for the best narrative work among all. The novels that won the Booker Prize over the past fifty years found great resonance in various parts of the world and were translated into dozens of languages, including Arabic. They were quickly embraced by cinema upon their release, as they were turned into a film in 1996.
The novel was published in Arabic by the “Rawayat” house, translated by Osama Esber. The British novelist Kamla Shamsi says in her introduction to the work: “This is a rare novel that scratches your skin and forces you to return to it, over and over again, and every time it causes the reader a surprise, or a new joy.” The hadith indicates the strength of the influence of the novel, as the reader becomes involved with its events and characters. It is one of the works that remain firmly established in the memory, and because it belongs to the worlds of mystery and strangeness in some details, the recipient will need to return to reading some of its passages, in addition to the pleasure resulting from it. The work is based on different tools and style in narration and plot.
The story of the work takes place in the space of World War II, and tells of a completely burned man with a mysterious history, and his relationship with his Canadian nurse. During World War II, the hero confronts his mysterious past, with his body suffering from the effects of burns, in an abandoned house located on a bombed Italian hill, and the battles announce… Near the end of the war, the nurse hardly left the patient, as a remarkable dialogue ensued between them, which allowed this girl to get very close to the hero’s worlds, as she helped him on a journey in which he remembered all the details of his life, including his name. Where he had completely lost his memory.
Perhaps the main irony in the novel is that the hero of the work, the sick man, thought throughout the period he spent under heavy suffering that he was English. He was found in Egypt, during the war, when he fell with his plane and his body was disfigured due to burns to the point that no one could From knowing his identity, and here comes the role of the sophisticated and complex narration in revealing many facts related to the man, the most important of which is that he was not English. He came from Hungary, and he works in drawing maps. The joy of the story and the ingenuity of the author lie in those interwoven threads of the four heroes of the story in That abandoned house; They are: the sick man, and Hanna, the nurse whose soul has been exhausted by death, who in an amazing way cares for her patient out of devotion to her work, and at the same time an escape from her world in which she faces the death of her father in that senseless war. Then the rest of the characters appear who join them. There is Caravaggio, a thief. At the same time, he is a friend of Hannah’s father, and he is trying to rethink his life now, as his hands, which were punished, are of no use to him. He worked during the war for the benefit of the Allies, and was arrested for theft, and was punished by cutting off his two thumbs.
As for the fourth character, he is the Indian Sikh Kirpal Singh, who is related to Hannah. He works in the profession of detecting and researching mines. Singh becomes friends with the English patient, shares some ideas with him, and establishes a relationship with Hannah that ends with her moving away from him. Singh even distances himself from all his white friends because of his feelings… With the gross injustice that Westerners inflict on people in various parts of the world, he has a tense, complex and nervous personality, and he was greatly affected by the incident of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and he is led by the strong and firm belief that this bomb should not have been dropped on a white nation. In any case, he stays with them in this distant house to escape from the outside world.
Each of the story’s heroes is busy in different ways, trying to solve the mystery of the man they know only as the English Patient. He is a victim with no name, who lies in her bandages all the time in a room of the house. The novel deals with these characters in their different dimensions. They are of different ethnicities, living… away from their homelands; Because of the scourges of World War, which made them lose their identities, and from here the ideological and intellectual contradictions and conflicts emerge, but what brings them together is the exploration into the past of the English Patient, and the revelation of his past and his mysterious worlds. With the passage of time, it becomes clear that the name of the main hero of the novel, nicknamed the English Patient, is Count Laszlo. De Almaci, from the Royal Geographical Society of Hungary, had a mistress who was killed in tragic circumstances by her husband, who discovered that she was cheating on him, so he planned to kill her and her lover, De Almaci. The patient also remembers little by little his long travels in many places, his books, his discoveries, and his memories at sea. The great sands, the deserts of Egypt and Libya, his life with the Bedouins, their oases and magic, their traditions and culture – these memories ignite the story, as they have a great impact on the rest of the novel’s characters, fleeing the scourge of war and death, so their lives change forever.
The work is similar to theatrical style, the characters appear one after another, and the dialogues that reveal the psychological dimensions of the heroes lead to dismantling the patient’s mystery and revealing his past. Also, these dialogues and the free association of memories put the reader in front of more than one story, as there are the stories of the rest of the characters to… In addition to the story of the English Patient, the writer also mobilized the novel with different intellectual visions in a way that does not interfere, so that it serves the aesthetics of the work, and does not become an opponent to it. This is evident through the character of the Indian Singh, and his arguments about identity, the ego, and the other. Then comes the role of description in the work. Essentially as a source of power, as well as transitions in space and time and activating the “flashback” feature, or going back in time, the writer provides a hearty meal in which he uses all the spices and spices of the narrative so that it is delicious, enjoyable, and useful at the same time.
Quotations
- I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. This comes from necessity.
- Every night the vessel of my heart is cut off from tragedies, but in the morning it is filled with them again.
- At that time in her life, books became her only way out of her prison cell, they became half of her world.
- She is a woman of honor and intelligence, whose brutal love does not rely on luck, but always takes risks.
- If you take someone else’s poison thinking that you can cure him, if you share that poison with him, then in reality you are storing it inside yourself.
- Some English people love Africa. Part of their brain accurately reflects the desert. And so they become strangers there.
- Love is so small that it might tear itself apart through the eye of a needle.
- He took away everything I loved and valued.
- Betrayals occur in war that are considered childish when compared to human betrayals during peace.
