The English Patient.

This movie broke my heart into two.And i've made up my mind to read the book.Most of the book is so well written that you can see, feel, hear, taste scenes, I was particularly thunderstruck by the description of the desert, I was there in the desert, I could feel the winds and taste the feeling of water on my lips. I was there when Kip came storming in when Hana played the piano in the ruined villa with beautiful frescoes on the wall. I was there wherever and whenever Kip defuses bombs in odd places such as the piano, the trees in the orchard, when he defuses a huge bomb immersed in a huge crater with mud and a freezing mixture all round him.

The novel is poetic and engaging, and I like the way Ondaatje handles time, as though painting in layers, going back to a point and elaborating on it, coming back to a "present" and then going back again and again, and then finally moving forward to the end, although I don't think the last parts of the book live up to the promise at the beginning.

Here are some paragraph that i cant help myself falling for.To see the movie then read the book are different experience.I did both.I read it in English andn ow i'me reading it in Vietnamese.It was pretty well translated.

"She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams."


"Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils."


"To rest...more "She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams."


"Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils."


"To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a soldier who never knew your name. Tenderness towards the unknown and anonymous, which was a tederness to the self."


"When sunlight enters a room where there is a fire, the fire will go out."


"If you are in a room with a problem don't talk to it."


"Quite early on I had discovered the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life. I didn't argue with the policeman who said I couldn't cycle over a certain bridge or through a specific gale in the fort--I just stood there, still, until I was invisible, and then I went through."


"I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man's room. And he, if he were wise would demand that she turn around because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you."