72
PARTISAN REVIEW
pie on a boat whose playful romp is clearly the prelude to sex, and she is
stunned by their public display of desire. Years later, while her husband is
recovering in an English sanitarium from a nervous breakdown, she puz–
zles over her life as she takes lonely walks through the dripping country–
side, and the melancholy that Minot conveys with the sparest of strokes
is unforgettable.
The power of such scenes makes one regret that Minot has chosen
to cage her language so severely within the cadences of the time and
world in which her story takes place, since this to a large extent deprives
Lilian's melancholy destiny of much of its inherent poignancy. And her
heroine is finally too limited in sensibility, if not in sense, too crippled by
reticence to sustain the weight of mature perception she is finally asked
to bear. In binding herself to the idiom and demeanor of a time so dif–
ferent from her own, Minot has stifled too much of her uniquely lumi–
nous lyricism, and the resulting flatness of texture is folly of a different
kind.
Michael Ondaatje, who shared the Booker Prize in London last year
for
The English Patient,
was born in Sri Lanka when it was still called
Ceylon, and at an early age emigrated with his family to Canada, where
he still lives. Several of his previous novels were set in Toronto, where
two of the principal figures in his new novel - the nurse Hana and the
thief Caravaggio - come from. (In fact, the two first appeared in an ear–
lier novel of Ondaatje's,
In the Skin of a Lion.)
In his prize-winning novel, one is immediately captivated by the figu–
rative richness of his prose, which can move from the lapidary to the
quietly measured without missing a beat. Yet the story deals not with
beauty but with war and death and pain and destruction. In his narrative
Ondaatje's seductive imagery serves as the counterpoint to the ruins, hu–
man and architectural, within the shattered Villa Gerolamo, near
Florence. Until a few months before the story begins, in the spring of
1945, the villa had been used as an Allied field hospital. It has now been
abandoned, except for four individuals who remained behind when the
front moved north. They have no electricity or water, a dwindling sup–
ply of morphine, and must forage for food every day.
One is the dying English patient: "a man with no face. An ebony
pool. All identification consumed in a fire. Parts of his burned body had
been sprayed with tannic acid, that hardened into a protective shell over
his raw skin. There was nothing to recognize in him." He is being care
for by the young Canadian nurse Hana, who refused to leave him behind
when the hospital staff departed. She in turn is being watched over by
another Canadian, David Caravaggio, a thief turned Allied spy in Cairo
early in the war, whose thumbs were cut off when he was captured by
