The English patient

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Cave painting that László Almásy discovered in October 1933 in Wadi Sura, Egypt. The Swimmer's Cave is a central location in the novel.

The English patient ( English original title: The English Patient ) is a 1992 published novel by the Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje . The book won the Booker Prize in the same year and was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018 as the best book to date to be awarded the Booker Prize .

The novel was filmed in 1996 by Miramax Films and directed by Anthony Minghella .

Main characters and plot

The model for the setting of the novel was the Villa San Girolamo in Fiesole .

The action takes place in a bombed-out villa in Tuscany during the summer of 1944 (the Italian campaign ). The Germans withdrew from the region, but left mines and hidden bombs everywhere.

Hana

The character that the novel opens with is the young Hana, whom Ondaatje had already introduced in his previous novel, In the Skin of a Lion (1987). Hana came to Italy as a nurse and is now almost 21 years old. Her only patient is a man burned beyond recognition who does not quite remember who he is; Hana thinks he's an Englishman. The Villa San Girolamo, originally a monastery, had housed German troops and after their departure a makeshift hospital, which was soon evacuated because it had turned out to be mined by the Germans. Under the pretext of not wanting to leave the Englishman who was unable to be transported, Hana was left there with the patient all alone. Her true motives gradually become apparent: Hana has seen too much suffering and suffered too many losses. Not only have too many patients died - her husband and stepfather also died in the war, and her child had aborted her. Hana seriously fears that there is a curse on her that will cause everyone she loves to die. In caring for the English patient, who against all odds is still alive, she has found a task that will keep her from breaking up. She injects him with morphine, reads to him (which for her is a form of literary therapy) and takes care of the garden that feeds them both.

The English patient

An acacia . Almásy's place of longing is the deserted oasis of Zerzura in Wadi Talh, the "Valley of the Acacias"
Ondaatje creates a connection between Almásy and the ancient Egyptian god Anubis . Dogs are one of the motifs that keeps appearing in the novel.
De Havilland DH.82A Tiger Moth, one of the two aircraft described in the novel

The patient is an old man with thin hair and deaf ears. Its identity is only gradually revealed. He has lost large parts of his memory, and Hana helps him to uncover what has been forgotten through her constant reading. The Herodotus edition, which the patient had with him during his accident, and from which Hana reads to him as well as from Kipling and from the Charterhouse of Parma, plays a key role . The patient is not an Englishman, but a Hungarian: the Sahara researcher and spy Ladislav Almásy . The Herodotus volume served him in Africa not only as a scientific vademecum , but also as a repository for personal letters, drawings, maps and photos. Similar to how a Madeleine unleashes memory in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time , this book helps Almásy to release his buried memories in many steps.

With a small group of colleagues, Almásy had explored the North African desert as a cartographer in the service of the Royal Geographical Society since 1930 . In 1936 he was joined by Geoffrey Clifton, a young man from Oxford, intelligent and charming, an aviation enthusiast. The fact that he brings an airplane with him to Egypt makes him particularly interesting for cartographers. He also brings his young wife, Katharine, an intellectual hungry for inner development who quickly adapts to the harsh living conditions. Almásy is a lone wolf and an obsessed explorer; It is precisely this disposition that drives him into a consuming love for Katharine. The turn from obsessive to sensual takes place precisely when Katharine reads to the group one night from Almásy's Herodotus edition. After both sides initially tried to avoid a catastrophe, the desire finally breaks ground and Almásy and Katharine begin a passionate love affair. Katharine ended the affair in 1938; Almásy does not want to commit herself and she can no longer cope with her feelings of guilt.

When war broke out in 1939, the cartographers' camp was supposed to be closed and Clifton Almásy was to pick up from the desert. Through an indiscretion by Bagnold , Clifton has since learned of the love affair. When he arrives on his plane, he has Katharine on board and plans to kill all three of them. He crashes the plane at the meeting point and dies, knowing full well that Almásy will hardly be able to leave the desert alive without a plane. Katharine is seriously injured. The Swimmers' Cave, which Almásy had discovered a few years earlier, is nearby. Almásy takes Katharine there. The memory reports that he later gives to Caravaggio and Hana are contradictory: once he says that Katharine survived the crash and loved him again in the cave, and that he finally left her there alive; Then there is talk of Katharine's death in Almásy's presence in the cave, and at an even later point he lets it through that he had already pulled her dead from the plane. He cannot use an airplane that is buried in the sand because he has no petrol, so he sets off on foot. When he reaches the next town, El Tag, after 4 days, the British stationed there refuse to help him save a woman whom he describes as his wife. On the contrary, because of his foreign-sounding name, he is arrested as a spy.

He begins to work for the Germans and leads their spy Eppler through the desert to Cairo. Then he crossed the desert once more on foot - this time with jet fuel - but Katharine has long been dead. He takes her corpse on board the plane, which is defective and catches fire soon after takeoff. Although he parachuted off, he was caught in the flames. Bedouins find him and take him to a British camp in 1944.

Caravaggio

The third main character in the novel is David Caravaggio. With his original job as a thief, he had surprisingly recommended himself to the British secret service, which used him as a spy during the war in North Africa. While trying to steal a camera with evidence, he was caught by the Germans in Italy, tortured and his hands and soul so mutilated that he can no longer carry out his passionate and esprit job as a thief. Caravaggio is an old friend of Hana's father and saw Hana grow up. When he happens to hear that she is not far away with the burned English patient - whom he rightly takes to be the spy Almásy - he travels to the Villa San Girolamo, obsessed with the desire to reveal Almásy's identity.

His original hostility towards Almásy fades to the extent that Almásy tells him his story, especially his love story. Conversely, Caravaggio can fill Almásy's knowledge gaps, such as that Geoffrey Clifton worked for the British secret service and that the secret service knew about Almásy's affair with Katharine Clifton from the start. The British also knew he was supporting the Germans and had planned to kill him in the desert.

Kip

Kip represents Almásy's critical younger alter ego, just like in Caravaggio's double self-portrait David with the head Goliath the younger judges the older.

The fourth main character is Kip, actually Kirpal Singh, a young Indian, a Sikh who studied the art of defusing bombs in the British military. His instructor, Lord Suffolk, a true English gentleman, had welcomed the stranger warmly; Unlike his own suspicious brother, Kip has felt closely connected to the western world .

Kip's job is extremely dangerous. He saw how not only Lord Suffolk but also his comrade Sergeant Hardy were killed. Like the other three main characters in the novel, Kip is a master of his craft; however, the hypervigilance to which he is forced to track down and disarm mines and bombs, which are often hidden in the apparently safest places, has alienated him from everything human. Kip seems aloof. Only Hana, who is warm and childlike, enables him to reconnect with humanity. Kip and Hana become lovers and sleep together for a month. The soft and quiet keynote of their romance forms a sharp contrast to the much more dramatic love between Almásy and Katharine Clifton.

When Kip heard of the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 , however, he was beside himself with indignation at the Western world, which would never have perpetrated such bestiality against a Western country. He threatens to shoot Almásy, whom he sees as a symbol of the West, but then lets go of him and leaves the villa forever. Although Hana will never see him again, she is soothed that the supposed curse that lies upon her has lost its power. Kip returns to India, where he becomes a doctor and starts a family. Although his new life is happy and fulfilled, he often thinks of Hana.

shape

Past and present are continuously interwoven in this novel. The plot is told alternately from the perspectives of all four main characters. Almásy's memory reports are fragmentary and non-chronological, they are repeated many times, but often in contradicting versions. Especially when reading it repeatedly, the reader encounters numerous inconsistencies in Almásy's reports, which are not resolved in the course of the novel. An example is the age difference between Almásy and Katharine; Almásy himself puts this at "15 years", but is characterized as an old man, while he describes Katharine as a boyish young woman who has just finished her college degree. Other points that remain unclear are the exact circumstances of his falling in love, the reasons for their separation, and the timing of his espionage.

background

The figure of the "English patient" is based on the Hungarian desert researcher Ladislaus Almásy (László Ede Almásy, 1895–1951), who explored the Egyptian and Libyan deserts in the 1930s. During the Second World War he actually worked under Erwin Rommel for the German Wehrmacht's Africa Corps . Ontdaatje also relied on the description of the desert crossing by Johannes Eppler when writing the book . In addition, the story told differs from the actual life story of Almásy in large parts.

Ondaatje was also inspired by the "Tatar legend" by the German artist Joseph Beuys . In 1944 Beuys was deployed as a gunner and radio operator in a dive fighter aircraft (Stuka) of the type Ju 87 . He was shot down over the Crimea and seriously injured. According to his own account, Tatars tended him and wrapped him in fat and felt. In Ondaatje's novel, Almásy is rescued by Bedouins who put “large, soft pieces of felt” soaked in oil on him.

The characters of Geoffrey and Katharine Clifton are based on Sir Robert Clayton East Clayton and his wife Lady Dorothy (1906–1933). The Englishman was a supporter of László Almásys and died in 1932 at the age of only 24 from the bite of a desert fly in Gilf el-Kebir , not, as shown in the novel, in a plane crash. The young widow Lady Dorothy then traveled to the Egyptian desert to finish her husband's work. She was killed on September 15, 1933 in an unusual plane crash in Brooklands , Surrey , England .

Publication and reception

Prices

In Great Britain, the novel was awarded the Booker Prize in October 1992 . In Canada, too, he won the country's highest literary prize that year, the Governor General's Award for Fiction .

In 2018 the book received the Golden Man Booker Prize .

filming

The novel "The English Patient" was filmed in 1996 by Anthony Minghella with Ralph Fiennes , Juliette Binoche , Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas in the leading roles and was awarded nine Oscars (12 nominations), see The English Patient (film) .

expenditure

Original English editions

  • The English Patient . McClelland and Stewart, 1992, ISBN 0-7710-6886-7 (Hardcover, first Canadian edition, published September 1992).
  • The English Patient . Knopf Doubleday, 1992, ISBN 0-679-41678-1 (Hardcover, published September 29, 1992).
  • The English Patient . Vintage, 1993, ISBN 0-679-74520-3 . Paperback edition
  • The English Patient . Vintage, 1996, ISBN 0-679-74520-3 . Paperback edition
  • The English Patient . Everyman, 2011, ISBN 1-84159-339-7 . Hardback edition
  • The English Patient . Random House Audio, 2007, ISBN 1-4159-3958-6 . Audiobook, unabridged, read by Christopher Cazenove
  • The English Patient . Random House Audio, 2008. Audiobook (3 CDs), abridged version, read by Ralph Fiennes

German translations

  • The English patient . Hanser, 1993, ISBN 3-446-17339-0 . Translated by Adelheit Dormagen, hardcover
  • The English patient . Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2004, ISBN 3-937793-22-4 . Translated by Adelheit Dormagen, hardcover
  • The English patient . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007, ISBN 3-423-19112-0 . Translated by Adelheit Dormagen, paperback edition
  • The English patient . Tacheles, 2006 (audio book (4 CDs), abridged version, read by Ulrich Matthes ).

literature

  • Don Meredith: Varieties of Darkness: The World of The English Patient . Hamilton Books, Lanham, Maryland 2012, ISBN 978-0-7618-5722-8 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • John Bolland: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient . A reader's guide. Bloomsbury Academic, 2002, ISBN 0-8264-5243-4 .
  • The English Patient. In: SparkNotes. Accessed December 31, 2017 (interpretation aid).
  • Melanie Leah Bussi: Reconstructing identities and escaping trauma in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient . 2007 ( Online [PDF] Thesis [Master] University of North Carolina Wilmington).

Reviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 'The English Patient' Wins Best of Man Booker Prize , nytimes.com, July 8, 2018, accessed July 9, 2018
  2. ^ Janis Haswell, Elaine Edwards: The English Patient and His Narrator: "Opener of the Ways". In: Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 29, No. 2, 2004. Retrieved February 19, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Rufus Cook: Being and Representation in Michael Ondaatje's “The English Patient” , in: ARIEL, A Review of International English Literature, October 1999 ISSN  1920-1222
  4. ^ John W. Eppler: Rommel calls Cairo: From the diary of a spy. Designed by Heinz Görz. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1959.
  5. ^ Carlos Ramet: Ken Follett: The Transformation of a Writer. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, Bowling Green 1999, p. 68, ISBN 0-87972-798-5
  6. ↑ Sven Siebert: The fate of the aviator, fat and felt . In: Leipziger Volkszeitung . December 31, 1999.
  7. ↑ cf. Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven: The English Patient: "truth is stranger than fiction" . In: Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994), June, pp. 141-153
  8. ^ Ondaatje, Unsworth Split Britain's Booker Prize. Retrieved July 24, 2014 .
  9. ^ 'The English Patient' Wins Best of Man Booker Prize . July 8, 2018 ( nytimes.com [accessed July 9, 2018]).