The Avid Reader: "The heart is an organ of fire..."

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

Published early in the '90s, this beautiful love story centers around fire, identity and war. World War II is ending and three individuals who worked in and around the fighting have met together in an abandoned Villa, surreal and peaceful. There is Hana, a beautiful and young woman, only twenty years old, who works as a kind and competent nurse. She is burdened by the deaths of the many soldiers she has tended to, however, and the loss of her father and her own unborn child weigh heavily on her. When passing through Florence, Hana decides to stay behind with one of her patients, burned and not doing very well. Even though Hana is equipped with energy and great emotional strength, her love for this unrecognizable and dying man is testimony to the damage the war has done her.

The English patient is the victim of a plane crash that left him in flames, in the desert, with no one but the Bedouin tribes to cure him. Though his real nationality and name are originally unknown, the patient's secret and true identity eventually are brought to light through the telling of his own fatal love story. Hana listens to his ceaseless talking and singing, which narratively blends into their present situation, making for a dreamlike reading experience.

Hana might not have been able to handle such an intense lifestyle, curing the English patient and living in a bombed out home by her lonesome, for long but for the arrival of two more men into their life. Caravaggio is a thief, but he is also a family friend of Hana's. (This may sound different to those of you who have only seen the movie, in which Caravaggio has no previous connection with Hana and only is at the Villa to find out about the English Patient). Caravaggio very much cares about Hana and arrives at the Villa after he heard rumors of her situation. He is dealing with his thumbs having been cut off as punishment for thieving but, once there, finds that he has an inkling who the English patient really is. Caravaggio's presence is uplifting, though he is sometimes a trickster.

The third character who comes to enter Hana's world is Kip, a Sikh sapper (someone who clears or lays out mines). After reading the novel and watching the movie back to back, the main criticism I have of the movie is its underplaying Kip's role. Extremely important in the novel, Kip's character is delved into at great length. His job and physical appearance are related in great detail. His past and even his future are told in the book. Overall, the reader gets invested in this character much more than a viewer might in the movie. His love affair with Hana is one of the most beautiful parts of the book, in my opinion even more so than that of Almásy and Katharine. It is through Kip that Hana's grip on the real world slowly returns and vice-versa. As young as they both are, Kip and Hana need to heal after the things they have seen and the people they have lost, and their love for each other certainly gives them the opportunity.

The writing in this book was phenomenal. Ghostly, sometimes obscure in the dreamlike recountings of Almásy and Kip's past, and heavily symbolic. Though I don't want to get into all of it now, the countless references to fires and mirrors would be enough to write a paper on. If I had to pick one line that summed up the book, it would be: "The heart is an organ of fire."
The story is of three individual lives, but these lives meet together in this one point in time and it makes for a beautiful gathering. In some ways, it reminds me of the book Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Though very different, both stories center around the idea of separate people, strangers in many ways, being isolated together in a home and the tenuous but desperate connections that form there.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
I bought this book the other day while I was still engaged in other readings, but I have been super excited to get started on it. I picked it first because it was a Penguin Classic and seemed interesting, and secondly for the amazing, amazing reviews it had. I'm a little confused about those reviews, now, though. The book is definitely beautifully written, but it is pure melancholia. It is literally the ravings of what seems to be a mad-man, gone crazy from isolation and depression. I hardly understand it, to be honest. And by "it," I mean the convoluted writings that sometimes serve only as indications of the narrator's state of mind:

"How little, from the real world, forms the support of the best reflections: the fact of arriving late for lunch, of running out of matches, of personally, individually throwing the matchbox out of the window, of feeling out of sorts for having eaten late, the fact it's Sunday virtually guaranteeing a lousy sunset, the fact I'm nobody in the world, and all metaphysics."

"The flutes of impossible shepherds are no sweeter than the absence of flutes that right now reminds me of them. The distant idylls alongside streams grieve me in this inwardly analogous moment..."

At the same time, the book is filled with some beautiful passages that make it a pleasure (though it is never uplifting) to read:

"Every man of today, unless his mortal stature and intellectual level are that of a pygmy or a churl, loves with romantic love when he loves. Romantic love is a rarefied product of century after century of Christian influence, and everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit fashioned by the soul or the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along.
But every suit, since it isn't eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, under the fraying clothes of the ideal we've formed, the real body of the person we dressed it in shows through.
Romantic love is thus a path to disillusion, unless this disillusion, accepted from the start, decides to vary the ideal constantly, constantly sewing new suits in the soul's workshops so as to constantly renew the appearance of the person they clothe."

Wow! I can't believe it. I've read nineteen books so far this summer, not including the two I'm reading now!
Here are some pictures: