![]() ![]() Ondaatje’s novel was once an instant classic and is possibly now a bit dated (though the British public disagrees). The demotic thud of “a lot” in an otherwise imperious injunction suggests the limits of a style more concerned to sound poetic than to be precise, but the patient/count, despite his protestations, no doubt loves Kim more for its themes than for Kipling’s journalistic exactness, for he shares the boy hero’s longing to be without essential identity in a world bounded by religion, caste, language, race, and nation: “All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.” ![]() Your eye is too quick and North American. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. “Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. This “English” patient is a devotee of Kim he instructs his Canadian nurse how best to read the novel aloud: Ondaatje’s warmly lyrical and fragmentary narrative concerns three figures-a Canadian nurse, a Canadian thief, and a Sikh sapper-gathered in a ruined Italian monastery at the end of World War II around the bed of the eponymous burned man, putatively an Englishman but really a Hungarian count who bears the literal and fatal scars of a romance doomed by political geography. ![]() ![]() Many readers of my generation were introduced to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) by a later novel, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992). ![]()
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