Preparing to facilitate the discussion of this book for book club was a methodical and lengthy process. As I came across different references and looked then up, I found an enormous number of connections to other aspects of the book that I had not realized were related until that moment. I felt like Kip, uncovering the logic of the wires in a bomb, and I was impressed by the complexity (and looking for the joke). At such, the book was slow reading, because of the richness of the language and the fact that nothing (or practically nothing) is gratuitous. I took copious notes because there were so many memorable lines and so many references to follow. This note-taking process turned out to be extremely valuable because it allowed me to draw the necessary parallels and contrasts between the characters and their situation. Our book club discussion is only a couple of hours on a Tuesday night, and so obviously we only touched on a few of the issues that the book raises, and it is to Michael Ondaatje's credit that we wanted to keep on exploring his text and characters. My favorite quote from the book was: "We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."
This was a rich and challenging book, and it made for an excellent discussion.
What follows is a summary of the documents I prepared for the discussion:
1. Brief biographical information about author Michael Ondaatje.
2. A summary of the BBC Book Club interview with Michael Ondaatje from November 2007.
3. Notes on characters and themes for discussion.
4. Cross-references to my copy of the text (Vintage Books, 1992. 305 p.)
5. Some background references that I looked up.
1. Biographical Information
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Philip Michael Ondaatje, OC (born 12 September, 1943) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet of Colombo Chetty and Burgher origin. He is perhaps best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel, which was adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film, The English Patient
Life and work
Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and moved to England with his mother in 1954 (11). After relocating to Canada in 1962 (19), Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. He studied for a time at Bishops College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto, where he received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen's in Kingston, Ontario. He then began teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. He is currently teaching at the Glendon College Campus of York University in T.O.
Ondaatje and his wife, novelist and academic Linda Spalding, co-edit Brick, A Literary Journal, with Michael Redhill, Michael Helm, and Esta Spalding.
His style of fiction, introduced in Coming Through Slaughter (1976) and mastered in The English Patient (1992), is non-linear. He creates a narrative by exploring many interconnected snapshots in minute detail.
Although he is best known as an novelist, Ondaatje's work has also encompassed autobiography, poetry and film. A semi-fictional memoir of his Sri Lankan childhood is called Running in the Family (1982). He has published thirteen books of poetry, and won the Governor General's Award for two of them, namely The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1973-1978 (1979).
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter have been adapted for the stage and produced in numerous theatrical productions across North America. Ondaatje's three films include a documentary on fellow poet B.P. Nichol, Sons of Captain Poetry, and The Clinton Special: A Film About The Farm Show, which chronicles a collaborative theatre experience led in 1971 by Paul Thompson of Theatre Passe Muraille. In 2002, Ondaatje published a non-fiction book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, which won special recognition at the 2003 American Cinema Editors Awards, as well as a Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for best book of the year on the moving image.
Ondaatje has also, since the 1960s, been involved with Toronto's influential Coach House Books, supporting the independent small press by working as a poetry editor.
He is also known for five other works of fiction:
Anil's Ghost — winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the 2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Canada's Governor General's Award.
The English Patient — winner of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Canadian Governor General's Award and later made into a motion picture, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. The English Patient can be considered a sequel to In the Skin of a Lion (1987).
In the Skin of a Lion — A fictional story about early immigrant settlers in Toronto, it is the winner of the 1988 City of Toronto Book Award, finalist for the 1987 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for best novel of the year in English, and winner of the first Canada Reads competition in 2002.
Coming Through Slaughter — a fictional story of New Orleans, Louisiana about 1900, very loosely based on the lives of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and photographer E. J. Bellocq. Winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award
Divisadero — Winner of the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.
In 1988, Ondaatje was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) and two years later a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He has two children and is the brother of philanthropist, businessman and author Christopher Ondaatje. His nephew David is a film director and screenwriter who made the 2009 film The Lodger.[1]
2. BBC Book Club interview with Michael Ondaatje
BBC World Service Book Club, hosted by Harriet Gilbert
Nov. 2007
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/133_wbc_archive_new/page4.shtml
Ondaatje born in Sri Lanka, spent teenage years in England, went to Canada for university. Mid-1960s attracted attention for his poetry.
EP most successful of his books.
Promoted to write in part because he saw a lot of English films about war in the 1950s, and we wanted to tell the story of others who were involved in the war.
Idea began as a small moment, an image of a conversation between a patient and a nurse. As he begins the story he has no idea where it is going to lead.
Anthony Minghella who directed the film version of EP comments on the difficulty of adapting a fragmented, mosaic story to film, and asks to what degree the author should lead the reader or whether the reader must go through the book for clues, like a detective.
Only Almásy was allowed flashback. Films follows different rules from books. In the film all scenes between Katharine and Almásy had to be chronological. Book is a freer form. Less linear.
Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring), notes that he is a poet. Poetry as precision of language.
Q. about the real Almásy. Read short book called Cat and Mouse, about Almásy who took a German spy across the desert. Used that incident and the fact that in the 1930 he was part of a group of explorers in the dessert; that was all that he took from the real person. Says that in retrospect should have changed his name.
Hana and Caravaggio appeared in The Skin of a Lion, his first all fictional novel. Ondaatje was missing his characters. He debated whether or not to bring back characters. They have gone through new experiences. Did not know that he was going to use them when he started.
Bomb specialist says that he identifies with a lot of Kip's characteristics and praises the accuracy of the bomb descriptions. Ondaatje says that Kip was not based on anyone in particular. Focus, tunnel vision is what is convincing.
Reading as an activity. Almásy reads the Histories, Katherine reads it, Hana reads it.
Ondaatje wanted the book to have illustrations. Would have like to have had NC Wyeth (died 1945) illustrate his book. Illustrated many classic books.
Race and racism. Ondaatje said was criticized for Caravaggio's line about the bomb would not have been dropped on a white nation. Kip's reaction is more because of his profession than his race.
How did Ondaatje's skill with language evolve? Does not know. Really started reading at 11-12. Not a writing family. Family was oral tradition. Everyone spoke well. Reading is the other source. The excitement of the story, the excitement of language. Met poets in Canada.
3. Discussion Notes on Characters and Themes
I structured my discussion around the themes that spoke to me. There are other themes that we did not address, that could also be used to discuss this book. Plus, these are only the notes that I rook. As the discussion unfolded, everyone contributed their own discoveries and perceptions. It was an excellent discussion.
Characters
What do we know about the characters before we know their names?
Almásy - The English Patient (ah-MAH-she)
Hana, 20 (turns 21) damaged nurse, healer, what she touches she loses, p. 84. Nurse's job: to lead dying men to their death.
She hardened herself to those around her, called everyone Buddy.
p.50 Hana cuts her hair because "as she had leaned forward it had blood in a wound .She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death." p.218 Kip's hair pours over Hana as he bends over her.
Caravaggio, around 45, thief, friend of father's
p.117 Caravaggio had trained spies, lived in a time when everything was a lie.
In the villa: "But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others."
Kip. Kirpal Singh, 26. Sees danger everywhere. Never lets down his guard.
p.110 Sappers have a hardness and clarity in them. Kip recognizes it in other but not in himself
p.52 Hana. Why she stays with the EP "There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult."
p.230 "I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book. I don't believe in permanence, in relationships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected."
Katharine Clifton
Geoffrey Clifton
Themes
Canduales story (Herodotus, Almásy's book, Katharine tells it as a warning/invitation, Caravaggio the naked thief.)
Water, in the desert, Katharine her gardens, her moisture, bath scene in film (Kristin Scott Thomas), swimming pool reference, Cave of swimmers in the desert. Zerzura, the legendary oasis. Kip in the water defusing bomb, temporary bridges, Queen of Sheba p.69
Detail about Clara, she canoes, lives on the edge of .
Rivers and Bridges
p.59 Let go after thumbs removed, Caravaggio suspects that he is being followed so that he will reveal his contact. Thrown into the water by the explosion of the San Trinita Bridge, mined by Germans during their retreat.
Kip took medieval scholar to see Maxentius at the gothic church in Arezzo (Western Roman emperor 306-312. In crossing the bridge fleeing from Constantine, Maxentius fell into the Tiber River and drowned.)
And Piero della Francesca frescoes: The Queen of Sheba conversing with King Solomon, the wise king and the guilty queen.
p.70 "He fell in love with her downcast eye. This woman who would someday know the sacredness of bridges." (Queen of Sheba, consulted Solomon for his great wisdom-- she recognized the wood of the bridge over the Siloam River as having been made from the wood of the tree of good and evil)
p. 295 In his escape Kip's motorbike goes into the Ofanto River.
Love
p.47 Caravaggio preferred talking to women "and when he began taking to women was soon caught in the nets of relationship."
p.120 "Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are?"
How convincing are the love stories?
p.152 "What do you hate most?" he asks. A lie. And you?" "Ownership."
p.157 "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."
p.158 "How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled."
p.234 "With the help of an anecdote, I fell in love."
Words Caravaggio. They have a power.
p.238 Their mutual fears, mistrust, drive them apart.
"Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honor, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
Almásy-Katharine, Hana-Kip (how are they alike)
Nationlessness
Why does Almásy not want to reveal his identity as the EP?
p. 138 "Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations."
Kip, nationless, invisible, but accepted by Lord Suffolk, befriended by medieval scholar, Hardy was the only one who kept him human. Accepted by the three at the Villa. At first does not come in from his tent in the garden.
p.78 With the troops. Light a flare in the Sistine Chapel, and sees Isaiah (who warns The land will be completely laid waste and totally plundered, foreshadowing atomic bomb.).
p.176 Almásy says "Kip and I are both international bastards…"
Ownership and loss
Caravaggio thief, liberates things, but get involved in what he is doing, cannot remained professionally distanced.
Loss of loved one
Hana, her father, her soldier lover, her child,
Almásy loses Katharine, Madox.
p.152 "What do you hate most?" he asks. A lie. And you?" "Ownership."
Books-reading
p. 5 She reads to him, she lies beside him in bed
p.7 "She fell upon books as the only door out of her cell."
"A scurry in her mind like a mouse in the ceiling."'
She reads to the EP but does not provide continuity
The EP has written a diary in between the lines of The Histories of Herodotus.
It is his commonbook
p.261 "We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."
4. Cross-references to the text
I. The Villa
The nurse
p. 5 She reads to him, she lies beside him in bed
The EP
p. 5 You said you were English
The Bedouin rescued him when they came to salvage what they could of the crash airplane.
Villa San Girlamo had been a war hospital. The other nurses transferred out, the war almost over. 20 min outside Florence, in the hills
p.7 "She fell upon books as the only door out of her cell."
"A scurry in her mind like a mouse in the ceiling."'
She reads to the EP but does not provide continuity
p. 11 Many of the rooms were mined.
p.12 Retraces her footprints in the library "as part of a private game, so it would seem from the steps that she had entered the room and then the corporeal body had disappeared."
p.13 April 1945 She and the Englishman had insisted on remaining behind when the other nurses and patients moved to a safer located in the south.
p.13 "She was twenty years old and mad and unconcerned with safety during this time.
Protected by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin. Plays hopscotch at night.
(Name Hannah means beauty or passion)
The EP has written a diary in between the lines of The Histories of Herodotus.
It is his commonbook
The Bedouin kept him alive for his knowledge of maps, geography, and to translate the guns, explain their mechanics
II. In Near Ruins p.27
Man with bandaged hands at military hospital in Rome, revealing nothing.
Enquiring about the burn patient and the nurse, "That was how he felt safest. Revealing nothing." C.
Caravaggio goes to see Hana.
He was her father's friend in T.O. before the war.
Thumbs chopped off for stealing. Spy/thief. Accidentally photographed at party. Goes to steal the camera, naked a ploy to pose as innocent if caught. (Opposite of story of Canduales)
p.40 Six mo. Earlier Hana was working at hospital in Pisa, shell shocked, broken by news of her father's death.
p.44 Caravaggio finds her crying, naked at the table. She is in love with the EP
p.47 Caravaggio preferred talking to women "and when he began taking to women was soon caught in the nets of relationship."
p.50 Hana cuts her hair because "as she had leaned forward it had blood in a wound .She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death."
She hardened herself to those around her, called everyone Buddy.
p.52 Why she stays with the EP "There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult."
p.59 Let go after thumbs removed, suspects that he is being followed so that he will reveal his contact. Thrown into the water by the explosion of the San Trinita Bridge, mined by Germans during their retreat.
p. 61 Hana writes about Caravaggio in the Last of the Mohicans. C is about 45.
"He is in a time of darkness, has no confidence. For some reason I am cared for by this friend of my father."
p.64 Hana is playing piano, remembering practicing even though they had no piano. Two soldiers from a sapper unit arrive.
III. Sometime a fire p.69
Allied troops 1943-44 English, Americans, Indians, Australians, and Canadians.
Sapper takes the medievalist scholar who befriended him to see the Flight of the Emperor Maxentius at the gothic church in Arezzo (Western Roman emperor 306-312. In crossing the bridge fleeing from Constantine, Maxentius fell into the Tiber River and drowned.)
And Piero della Francesca frescoes: The Queen of Sheba conversing with King Solomon, the wise king and the guilty queen.
p.70 "He fell in love with her downcast eye. This woman who would someday know the sacredness of bridges." (Queen of Sheba, consulted Solomon for his great wisdom-- she recognized the wood of the bridge over the Siloam River as having been made from the wood of the tree of good and evil)
p. 72 Sikh sets up tent and at first will not come into the house at all.
Clearing the mines in the town.
p.74 Kip Still very much a youth
Defuses a bomb in the library,
He is noisy
Still in uniform
p.75 Was drawn to the villa by the sound of music, knowing that many instruments were mined.
p.76 Hana: "I'm from Upper America."
p.78 With the troops. Light a flare in the Sistine Chapel, and sees Isaiah (who warns The land will be completely laid waste and totally plundered, foreshadowing atomic bomb.).
p. 79 Marine festival of the Virgin Mary in Rimini, she is their protector, as is he.
p. 82 Hana tells Caravaggio that she was pregnant and decided not to have the child after the father was killed.
p. 84. Nurse's job: to lead dying men to their death.
p. 87 Kirpal Singh get nicknamed Kip, because his first bomb report had a butter stain. "What's this, kipper grease?" officer exclaimed.
p. 88 Kip discovers that the EP is a wealth of information about Allied and enemy weaponry.
p.95 The EP turned over to the British, knows classical art, cave art, gallery art.
p.100 Kip calls for help to take the wires, Hana takes them so that he can free his hands. She thinks she is going to die, and she wants to lie down and curl up with him first.
p. 109 Long introduction "The phrasing so slow, so drawn out, she could sense that the musician did not wish to leave the small parlour of the introduction and enter the song, kept wanting to remain there, where the story had not yet begun…"
p.110 Sappers have a hardness and clarity in them. Kip recognizes it in other but not in himself.
p. 113 Comes back after discovering Hardy's death. Sits by window again, "If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey."
p.117 Caravaggio had trained spies, lived in a time when everything was a lie.
In the villa: "But here they were shedding skins . They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others."
p.120 "Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are?"
IV. South Cairo 1930-1938 p.133
Almásy narrates his life as a desert explorer.
p.135 EP talks about 1930 Libyan desert mapping expeditions, 400 mi W of the Nile
p. 138 "Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations."
p. 139 "But I wanted to erase my name…It was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation."
1936 Meets Geoffrey Clifton (Katharine)
Young, rich, and interested in their search for Zerzura.
V. Katharine p.149
Dreams of lust, violence after meeting Almásy.
p. 150 propinquity - kinship or proximity
p.152 "What do you hate most?" he asks. A lie. And you?" "Ownership."
p.157 "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."
p.158 "How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled."
VI. A Buried Plane p. 161
p.163 Caravaggio tells Hana that Almásy was a guide for German spies in the dessert.
p.165 Almásy went to school in England. In Cairo he was referred to as the English spy.
p.167 Caravaggio gives Almásy alcohol and morphine to get him talking.
p.167 A's story In 1942 he went back into the desert to get Katharine where he had left her in the Cave of Swimmers in Uwienat, where Madox's plane was buried. His truck exploded.
p. 170 She was a woman of gardens and moisture. A tactile line to her ancestors, he had erased the path he had emerged from. "He was amazed she had loved him in spite of such qualities of anonymity in himself."
-suggestion of necrophilia
It has taken him three years to get back to her. Brought petrol for the plane, what he lacked to get her out after Clifton's crash.
p.171 Clifton's plan was suicide-murder, even though the affair was over. Katharine ended it because she was too proud to be a lover, a secret.
p. 175 Madox's plane catches fire as he is bringing her body back. He is exhausted from solitude. Tired of living without her.
p.176 Kip and Almásy "international bastards"
VII. In Situ p. 181
Kirpal Sigh trained as a sapper to defuse undetonated bombs in England in 1940.
p.188 Indian mechanical resourcefulness.
Kip learned to keep emotions repressed as he works, just as Hana learned to do with the soldiers she nursed.
-Had to keep Lord Suffolk, Miss Morden, the driver Harts, alive in his mind while he worked.
p.195 Kip reenlists and is sent to Italy.
Escape from the responsibility of having been entrusted with Lord Suffolk's knowledge.
p.196 Invisibility of being an anonymous members of another race.
p.197 Revealing his past or qualities of his character would have been too loud a gesture. Just as her could never turn and inquire of her what deepest motive caused this relationship.
VIII. The Holy Forest p.207
Defusing: Kip figures out the intricacies, the variations, the joke.
p.218 Kip's hair pours over Hana as he bends over her.
p.222 Caravaggio loves (Hana) "What she was now than he had loved her when he had understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become."
p.223 Hana playing hide and go seek with Kip, used Caravaggio as bait in the library.
IX. The Cave of Swimmers p.229
"I promised to tell you how one falls in love."
Almásy continues to talk to Caravaggio about how he met Katharine and fell in love with her.
Upon returning from Cairo, Katharine was discovering herself, she read constantly.
p.230 "I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book. I don't believe in permanence, in relationships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected."
Falls in love with Katharine because of her growth and because husband Clifton is always singing her praises. She reads the story of King Candaules, the Queen, and Gyges.
p.234 "With the help of an anecdote, I fell in love."
Words Caravaggio. They have a power.
He began to be doubly formal around her.
p.236 Katharine tells Almásy "I want you to ravish me."
p.238 Their mutual fears, mistrust, drive them apart.
"Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honor, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
p. 246 Trek into the desert, losing touch with civilization.
"he was alone, his own invention." Inside the mirage
After leaving Katharine, walks three days and is picked up by the English at El Taj. They don't listen to him (and he was a suspicious character) because he gives his own name and not Katharine's or Geoffrey's.
p.254 Almásy volunteered to take German Eppler, the Rebecca spy, across the desert, in order to get back to Uweinat.
Caravaggio explains that he had been considered the enemy ever since he began his affair with Katharine. Almásy surprised to have been in the sights.
p.258 Almásy had seen Katharine for the first time years earlier at the Oxford Union Library… (or perhaps not). Langella uses this as a visual convention between Kip-Hana.
In the cave, paints, anoints her with color from the cave paintings, Wepawat jackal as spirit guide the "opener of the ways."
The importance of dying in a holy place.
p.261 "We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."
X. August p.265
Kip has sought and found acceptance in a foreign country, but he rejects them after hearing the news about the atomic bomb.
p. 282 Hana in the future
Aware of the movement of the line of movement Kip's body followed out of her life.
p.300 Kip sees Hana, her serious face… that was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character.
5. Supplementary References
Herodotus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Greek: Ἡρόδοτος Ἁλικαρνᾱσσεύς Hēródotos Halikarnāsseús) was a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC (c. 484 BC–c. 425 BC) and is regarded as the "Father of History" in Western culture. He was the first historian to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative.[1] He is almost exclusively known for writing The Histories, a record of his "inquiries" (or ἱστορίαι, a word that passed into Latin and took on its modern meaning of history) into the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars which occurred in 490 and 480-479 BC—especially since he includes a narrative account of that period, which would otherwise be poorly documented, and many long digressions concerning the various places and peoples he encountered during wide-ranging travels around the lands of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Although some of his stories are not completely accurate, he states that he is only reporting what has been told to him.
Bonfire of the Vanities - 1497 Florence, burned objects believed to be the occasions of sin.
David Caravaggio, dramatic naturalism. Mainly religious themes, but painted naturalistically with flaws and defects, not idealistically.
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The story takes place in 1757 during the Seven Years' War (known in America as the French and Indian War), when France and the United Kingdom battled for control of the American and Canadian colonies. During this war, the French often allied themselves with Native American tribes in order to gain an advantage over the British, with unpredictable and often tragic results. The story concerns--in part--a Huron massacre (with passive French acquiescence) of from 500 to 1,500 Anglo-American troops, who had honorably surrendered at Fort William Henry, plus some women and servants; the kidnapping of two sisters, daughters of the British commander; and their rescue by the last two Mohicans, and others
Sapper - a sapper/combat engineer may perform any of a variety of combat engineering duties. Such tasks typically include bridge-building, laying or clearing minefields, demolitions, field defences as well as building, road and airfield construction and repair.
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