So I just got done reading Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient." And all I can say is, "Wow!"
I don't think I've read a more absorbing and well-composed work of fiction. The peculiar style of the book takes a little getting used to, and doesn't make for easy reading, but completely engrossed me from start to finish. I'm usually a fairly rapid reader and get easily turned off by books that slow me down, but this is one book that, despite my having to re-read paragraphs and, on occasion, whole pages, actually made me thoroughly enjoy the effort I had to put in.
Rules of writing and grammar are often ignored, the writer jumping without warning between different times and juggling present, past continuous, present continuous and past perfect tenses with gay abandon until the result is just that - perfect. Superbly researched yet effortless, languid and measured yet maintaining its thread of intensity throughout, second only to Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" in its gorgeously descriptive narrative style, its characters rich three-dimensional entities, it is no wonder that "The English Patient" won its author the Booker Prize in 1992.
A hard act to follow indeed, and Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake" is probably more of an anticlimax as a consequence.
I never was a big fan of hers, and couldn't really understand how she won the Pulitzer for her first work, a compilation of short stories called "Interpreter of Maladies," but her second attempt is, in my blinkered opinion, even poorer. Her hurried, one-dimensional writing style is best suited for the short story where one has neither the time nor the mandate to build characters or do much other than relate events. Which is probably why her deficiencies went largely unnoticed in her first book, but are glaring in this second work.
The only appeal this book can have is for the Bengali and larger Indian immigrant population in the US, who will relate to the experiences of first and second generation expats she deals with. But at the end of the day, it is a juvenile, strained, slightly supercilious novel that definitely doesn't deserve the reviews it so arrogantly displays on the cover.
