The English Patient: Introduction by Pico Iyer [Hardcover]

Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize–winning best seller lyrically portrays the convergence of four damaged lives in a bomb-riddled Italian villa in the last days of the war. Hana, the grieving nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the emotionally detached Indian sapper, Kip—each is haunted in different ways by the riddle of the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies swathed in bandages in an upstairs room. It is this man’s incandescent memories—of the bleak North African desert, of explorers’ caves and Bedouin tribesmen,
of forbidden love, and of annihilating anger—that illuminate the story, and the consequences of the mysteries they reveal radiate outward in shock waves that leave all the characters forever changed.“A rare and spellbinding web of dreams.” —Time

“Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic . . . It transports the reader to another world.”—San Francisco ChronicleMichael Ondaatje is the author of eleven books of poetry, a memoir, and six novels, includingThe Cat’s Table,coming in October 2011. He lives in Toronto.

Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and seven works of nonfiction. His new book,The Man Within My Head,comes out in 2012.I N T R O D U C T I O N
by Pico Iyer


A Lost Oasis in the Midst of War

Much of what I love aboutThe English Patientcan be found in a more or less typical paragraph, chosen almost at random, very close to the beginning of the book. In it Michael Ondaatje takes us into a library, between the kitchen and the ‘‘destroyed chapel’’ of the old nunnery in which the novel is set, during the closing days of World War II. The library contains, among its high walls of books, a sofa, a shrouded piano and the head of a stuffed bear. Like the people around it, it has absorbed a ‘‘wound’’ from violent shelling,lĂ&