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None of the things I liked about the English Patient were filmable. Digressions on maps and winds, naming and exteriors. The movie doesn't trouble to make the patient's identity a mystery, but the book is coy and teases the reveal. Ondaatje is my kind of writer - narratologically playful, beloved of a rich verbal surface. There's enough Carver out there for minimalists, give me a Woolfian tapestry plz
― subpoena colada (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, 13 August 2021 14:23 (two years ago) link
two months pass...
_The English Patient_ movie >>>>>> book.
It accepts its foundational schlock.
Awful opinion, sorry, and I love both for different reasons.
The non-linear mastery of the book is incredible. Back and forth and back and forth again we go, as the past slowly pulls into focus. The tense shifts and turns like the wind itself and it’s perfect.
His eyes lock onto the young woman’s face. If she moves her head, his stare will travel alongside her into the wall. She leans forward. How were you burned?
It is late afternoon. His hands play with a piece of sheet, the back of his fingers caressing it.
I fell burning into the desert.
They found my body and made me a boat of sticks and dragged me across the desert. We were in the Sand Sea, now and then crossing dry riverbeds. Nomads, you see. Bedouin. I flew down and the sand itself caught fire. They saw me stand up naked out of it. The leather helmet on my head in flames. They strapped me onto a cradle, a carcass boat, and feet thudded along as they ran with me. I had broken the spareness of the desert.
I fell burning into the desert. What a sentence. It’s so typical of this book, to say so much in so little. If you had to hook someone with a sentence from this book, it would be this one every time. I am not a visual person -I think in words, not images - but Ondaatje’s writing is good enough to overcome that and I could feel the desert live and breathe as the book progressed. There is nothing careless here.
There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The aim, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.
More of that, pulled out more or less at random. The music in Ondaatje’s prose is incredible. Read that out loud, listen to the way
Rome is followed by
aim, how the last sentence is almost a joke about the text itself.
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover’s name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence. A woman in Cairo curves the white length of her body up from the bed and leans out of the window into a rainstorm to allow her nakedness to receive it.
I mean, come ON.
They are in the botanical garden, near the Cathedral of All Saints. She sees one tear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As she has taken the blood from his hand when he cut himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke. All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
Schlock my hole, this man writes like he’s painting and it’s exquisite stuff.
I love the film too, for its attempt to put the evocative desert into something tangible but it never quite manages it the way the book does. The book is special and it’s full of a million quiet little jewels like the above. You are forever reading a page and getting your eyes stuck reading and rereading the same sentence or paragraph again because you know you will continue on and lose it when you come to the next wonder. It’s great.
― suggest bainne (gyac), Monday, 8 November 2021 19:13 (two years ago) link
The music in Ondaatje’s prose is incredible. Yeah, and Coming Through Slaughter is a strong song, his own form of speculative fiction, as it should be, given how little is known about Buddy Bolden: legendary trumpet player who seems never to have recorded, ran a barbershop x gossip sheet, died in an asylum.
― dow, Monday, 8 November 2021 19:50 (two years ago) link
Yeah English Patient remains among my favorite books. Didn't love the movie.
Not in the cliche "WAAAH, THEY CHANGED THINGS" way of prissy book-loving people. But as I said earlier, none of the things I liked about the book were filmable. The filmable story is a different story, and requires a different kind of storytelling. I'm generally okay with that but, yawn. A large percentage of the book only slightly involves the characters and who's doing what to whom. A movie is generally going to be about the stuff that happens. But there are so many cool things in the text that aren't about stuff happening or people saying things.
i would try reading the english patient becauee someone i know was very into ondaatje's poetry but i dont think i could make it through a whole novel of ralph fiennes
― plax (ico), Tuesday, 9 November 2021 21:24 (two years ago) link