The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The Master of Adams House during my years at Harvard was Professor Robert Kiely. He and his wife lived in Apthorp House, a charming colonial mini-mansion in the middle of the Adams House courtyard, next to the squash courts. Every second Friday, the Kiely’s, a most warm and welcoming couple, hosted an afternoon tea. We house members loved the teas not just for the free food, but for a fleeting chance to feel more grown up, more British, and more aristocratic. In our jeans, flannel shirts and duck boots, we undergraduates balanced teacups and saucers in one hand with cucumber sandwiches in another. We sat in parlor chairs and discussed Plato and Scorsese. We relished these afternoons because we knew that unless we pursued a career in academia, these teas would be but a memory of our finer days.

Professor Kiely taught literature. In the final semester of our senior year, my roommate and I had some electives to spare, so we slid into his course on post-1950’s English and American literature. This class changed my literary life. Discovering postwar literature was like tasting chocolate for the first time. I breathed it, delighted in its quirky eccentricities. Freed from the constraints of the past, it felt like reading itself had been liberated. That semester, my friends and I reveled in this new landscape. The word “postmodern” was batted airily around our dining hall conversations nightly.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje was the last novel we studied that semester. Its multithreaded weaving of characters, times, and places changed the way I read, and what I read. Each character was so beautifully rendered and the setting so provocative, but most of all, it was the multiple story threads that entranced me. Ten years later, I still can’t keep myself away from novels or movies with non-traditional narratives.

One of my favorite images from of all the books I have read in my short life comes at the close of this novel, a taking us from Hana to the Kirpal of the future:

"And so Hana moves and her face turns and in regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles."

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

tags: books book reviews postmodern literature Harvard Adams House Michael Ondaatje