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The Heart Is an Organ of Fire |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / FEATURED BOOK: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient |
| Author: Stephen Scobie |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1993 |
| Size: 3,714 Words, 21,454 Characters |
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A man falls, burning, from the sky. This is the image-- arresting, violent, beautiful--that begins Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient. For Ondaatje himself, quite literally, it was this image that began the novel. He has explained in an interview, "I usually begin books in a dreamlike--no, that sounds a little esoteric. But I had this little fragment of a guy who had crashed in the desert. I didn't know who he was, or anything."
It is typical of Ondaatje that the book would begin with an image (rather than a character or a plot), for he is a poet, and all his novels may be described as poetic novels. His early books in Canada--such volumes as Dainty Monsters (1967) and Rat Jelly (1973)--are collections of lyric poems: precise, elegant, beautiful, yet fil...
. . .
...er 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. Left-handed catch. Left-handed poems. A novel that comes from the left hand of history, out of the sinister heart of fire.
(806 of 21,454 characters)
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