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5.0étoiles sur 5
Literature doesn't get better than this, Oct. 26 2000
I read Anthony Minghella's sublime, lyrical novel some time after seeing the Oscar-winning movie and I was struck by the seamless similarities in both genres. The novel has a dream-like quality as it shifts in time back and forth, sifting through the memories of the dying patient and the other inhabitants of the Villa San Girolamo. The cinematography of the movie has the same fluid continuity, no mean feat when one considers how difficult it is to keep a story flowing with constant flashbacks. The film of The English Patient was described by one reviewer as almost film noir. Well, the book is novel noir. This not a romp, it's intricately multi-layered and intended to be savoured.The story is based in the abandoned villa on a hilltop in central Italy. It is 1944 and the Allies are advancing yet the scent of victory is overwhelmed by accumulated shell shock. The central characters in the villa: Hungarian Count Lazlo de Almasy, Canadian nurse Hana, the Indian sapper Kip and the thief Caravaggio are all burned out by war and in de Almasy's case, literally and mortally burned. Hana is nursing her mysterious dying patient who gradually details his life as an explorer in the desert of northern Africa and reveals his doomed, magnificant, obsessive, life-altering love affair with Katherine Clifton, an English rose with the tenaciousness of a lioness. Hana, who has lost everyone she dared to love, tries to insulate herself from the world but in the presence of Kip and the less noble Caravaggio, she reaches out once again. This is a story of love's expectations, and the shifting loyalties of friends, family and nations in times of war, of deadly betrayals and being rescued by strangers, of healing wounds and preparing for death. In short, all the stuff top class literature is made of and, strangely, pretty much what happens around us every day although the settings might not be as exotic. Minghella has constructed a vast canvas of human experience, yet he does not waste a word. He peels away the exterior visage of his characters to reveal their joy and pain with an exquisitely bare, poetic use of language. The consequences of their lives remained with me long after I had put the book down. I pick up The English Patient from time to time and the magic is always there.
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