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Aug 26, 2019rlbeekman rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
This book is not the worst English language novel of the last 50 years, but it is probably the most overrated. It is a travesty of literary taste and critical judgement not only that Barry Unsworth's magnificent Sacred Hunger had to share the 1992 Booker Prize with Ondaatje's book, but that this latter won the 2018 "Golden Man Booker" for the best Booker Prize book of the previous 50 years! It takes about a third of the book for the improbable assembly of the characters in the abandoned Italian villa at the end of WWII, much of the time spent in mysterious and moody "poetic" vamping. You begin to wonder if the real English Patient is not the burned man, but the tortured reader of such a slow moving English language novel. When we finally start to get revelations of the burned man's story, it is a romantic melodrama full of wildly incredible inexplicabilities -- psychological, historical, and even physical. However, you may not notice these lapses because of the overwrought "beautiful" writing slathered over the events and laid down in great slabs between the plot episodes. There are also frequent insertions of strange, thinly motivated, portentous "stage business" -- unconvincing actions and events that neither advance the plot nor disclose or develop the characters.