Ralph Fiennes Books

How fortunate I was years ago when the film, The English Patient, was two weeks from release and a friend said, 'Oh, the movie is based on the novel. I think you'd like it....' I bought the book the next night and stayed up late reading it. Ondaatje sees the world through a poet's eyes, and he gives us artistic renderings of people and places in a rich time in history. This novel would definitely be included in my list of Top 20 favorites. Ondaatje is a writer's writer....

Ondaatje's prose is lyrical and poetic. More than anything, Ondaatje creates an atmoshpere that is as much a presence in this book than any single character. The story delves into the lives of four people living in a war-damaged Italian monastery as World War II ends. Hana, a nurse, attempts to nurse the English patient back to life. Caravaggio, Hana's childhood friend, and Kip, a skillful bomb difuser, make up the rest of the cast of characters. Beautifully and evocatively written but slow at times.

To Hana the nurse, English patient is `a white lion'. I've come to expect movie characters to bear a marginal resemblance to those of the novel from which they are extracted. Seldom do the people in the novel voice anything resembling the clever lines from the film. Ondaatje describes brilliantly his story settings and the psychoanalytical introspections of his characters like an omniscient Nanny narrator.
Some of this book's visceral content presents itself as juvenile voyeuristic, not to be confused with the sort of obligatory 'adult content' that's required to provoke a publisher to finish reading a manuscript submission.

While the main storyline describes some heroic coping mechanisms adopted by it's characters to survive their various war-induced neurosis', the English patient suffers physical and emotional wounds which will kill him. maybe it should have been called 'The Great Escape'. Except that the author seems to have wanted a title that would be hemorrhaging irony. The critics called Ondaatje, 'poetic'. And his skill with words may be described as accomplished. he has been researching the writings to the Royal Geographic Society by explorers of the Libyan Desert. We have a glimpse into "the tact of [Ondaatje's] words." "In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth."
"Here nuance took you a hundred miles." AND
"A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water."

I know the feeling of being enveloped in the 'emptiness' of the Mojave Desert, which sometimes can belie the impression that there maybe is nothing, maybe never was nor ever will be anything to come back to.

In reviewing Michael Ondaatje's recent novel DIVISADERO, I remarked that his narrative technique involved writing short fragments, loosely connected in theme but jumping around in subject and time, and leaving it to the reader to connect them. Such an appeal to the imagination is rare and gratifying, and the results are complex and evocative. If I try to forget the movie, the same could be true of the earlier ENGLISH PATIENT, although here Ondaatje is dealing with a subject of greater historical resonance -- the Second World War in Egypt and Italy -- and the interplay of personal narrative and hard fact is more difficult to bring off than the largely private scale of DIVISADERO.

Both books are about people recovering from trauma. In DIVISADERO, the scarring was psychological; here, it is physical as well. The setting is a ruined Italian villa north of Florence, just after the German retreat. It had been used as a temporary hospital, but now only one patient remains, the supposed Englishman of the title. He is attended by Hana, a young Canadian nurse, who has seen so many men die that she can no longer weep the recent death of her own father. She is joined by David Caravaggio, an old friend of the family, a professional thief recruited to work in intelligence, who has had his thumbs cut off during an interrogation. And camping in the garden is Kirpal Singh (Kip), a Sikh bomb-disposal expert, who has only his rigid self-discipline and skills to protect him from disaster. The English Patient himself is an unrecognizable figure, burned all over his body, brought out of the North African desert by Bedouin tribesmen. It later becomes clear that he is not English at all, but a British-educated Hungarian count, Ladislaus de Almásy, an explorer of some renown.

Each of the characters is gradually opened out. Caravaggio is the least fully realized emotionally, but he becomes increasingly significant in the back-story. Conversely, Hana's history needs little filling-in, since we see life in the villa mainly through her eyes and feel through her skin. Her relationship with Kip is one of the loveliest things about this rich book, and the Sikh's character is developed in considerable depth, especially as he finds a purpose to his life during his training in England. His work as a bomb-disposal expert is described in always fascinating and sometimes breath-stopping detail.

But the most space is devoted to Almásy's time in the desert, his years of patient exploration of the Great Sand Sea and the Gilf Kebir in the 1930s, his passionate but intermittent affair with the wife of a colleague, and his activities during the war itself. These things are dug up gradually, as shards of memory, some relatively objectively, some under the influence of morphia, some that might even be hallucinations. The events of the thirties emerge most clearly, but more recent happenings must sometimes be pieced together from the briefest of references. I am not sure that a fully coherent scenario would ever emerge from reading the book alone, or that it was intended to.

Here, of course, I have to mention the 1997 movie. Anthony Minghella, the director, has in fact written such a scenario, connecting the fragments into one persuasive interpretation of the novel. Largely focusing on Almásy's story, he has tidied the narrative and greatly compressed the time-frame to create a combination of war story and grand romance with the epic sweep of Tolstoy or Pasternak. The movie is filled with such unforgettable imagery and such strongly-acted characters that his version cannot easily be put aside. But the fact that Ondaatje approved this adaptation does not make it the only possible one, and it is now much harder to enjoy the open-ended quality of his story-telling in its own terms.

For those who have seen the movie, the greatest pleasure in the book may come from the elements that Minghella played down: the stories of Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio, and Ondaatje's quiet portrayal of life in the ruined villa. Consider his description of a bonfire of weeds that Hana would gather and burn "...during the late afternoon's pivot into dusk. The damp fires steam and burn, and the plant-odoured smoke sidles into the bushes, up into the trees, then withers on the terrace in front of the house. It reaches the window of the English patient, who can hear the drift of voices, now and then a laugh from the smoky garden. He translates the smell, evolving it backward to what had been burned. Rosemary, he thinks, milkweed, wormwood...". It is simple writing, but a passage that excites the imagination, involving all the senses, creating its own images in the mind. The whole book will do the same, if you are lucky enough to be able to come to it without preconception.

Few books are felt as much as read, but "The English Patient" falls into this category. Like the film, it is hauntingly beautiful, but for different reasons. The story of people haunted by love and war, their damaged souls converging at a villa in Italy, remains, but the focus and method in which the story is told on paper is spellbinding and stunning.

The passages are like water moving to and fro over rocks, shifting back and forth in time so that the beauty beneath can still be seen, but as a shimmering mirage in the desert. It is a strange instance where it is almost recommended that you see the film first in order to see more clearly in your mind the characters as their stories unfold.

Whereas the film focused more on the burned Almasy and his memories of the unending African desert, where he would meet the enigmatic and beautiful Katherine Clifton, sealing the fate which would leave him a charred and hollow shell of his former self, Hanah is the centerpoint of Ondaatje's lovely poetic prose in the novel. You can almost feel the ghosts hovering over each character as Ondaatje paints a masterpiece with words.

Deeply romantic and lyrical, it is the same story, but a more impressionistic and less linear portrait of love and loss. The book is like a delicate flower just beneath the waters, its beauty evident but achingly kept just out of reach. The film brought the flower into the sun so we could enjoy its texture and fragrance in a more real fashion. Both are magnificent, just a different picture of the same flower.

If you love the film, you must read the book. It is a hauntingly beautiful novel different from anything else you'll ever read. A masterwork of rich and evocative prose that will touch the heart, an organ of fire.

As a Fiennes fan I think this book offers a glimpse of life of a very private actor. Fiennes is a fine and accomplished actor regardless his moody and intense personality viewed by many. His private life may not be the ideal for everyone, but it is his personal life. York Membery's writing is just fine, but should Membery always makes deep comparison of Fiennes's widely-viewed personality with the characters in Fiennes's works such as Ivanov and Hamlet?

Ralph Fiennes: the biography is a great book to read. It has tons upon tons of facts about his life! Some parts are really funny to read! There is also some great pictures of him and his "significant others" but you just have to find out who I am talking about by buying the book! You will have a great time reading it. I know I did!

York Membrey's book is a fun, insightful and joyous read to all those of us who can't get enough of this actor we adore, yet even Membrey's painstaking research into the life of the man only scratches the surface of the soul of the great actor. This is not the fault of the author. In the personal research I have done on this man, I find that Ralph Fiennes has lived his entire life almost as an enigma. Not only do we distanced fans feel detached from his life, but, as this book shows, so do his friends, acquaintances, and even his biographer. While incomplete, however, this book is still a must for any Ralph fan. It's documentation of his professional career will read as mere review, but it's insight into his childhood is truly fascinating and touching. I hope York Membrey will continue the research begun in this book, and provide us with updates as we get to further know the greatest actor of our time.

Too many mistakes for my taste :( There were so many obvious mistakes in this book. If York's simple research on scenes from The English Patient was so inaccurate, it makes me wonder how inaccurate the rest of his research for the book was. (How difficult is it to watch a film and get the quotes/senarios right?) Does have some nice photos.

It's an excellent book, I must say, although it can be updated. The authors however is yet to prowl further into his private life... if he wants to make this a must-have for all Ralph Fiennes fans, that is. Another prob. is that it tends to lack good pictures, pictures of his childhood days and his family. But since this is the only Ralph Fiennes autobiography available, it is worth a read if you're into his works though.