Hyperbole and a Half

Hyperbole and a Half

by Allie Brosh

Read November 29, 2015.

If you have not read Allie Brosh's blog, please do. I don't think she posts new content there anymore, but what's there is amazing. This book is a compendium of her blog posts, among other things. Ally does illustrated, comic book-style posts. Some are primarily humorous, but many more, while humorous at the surface, fearlessly explore the problems that come with being human. She tackles depression in a particularly gut-wrenching way. There's also a post on the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, and it even involves a flowchart. It's brilliant! 

Final Call:

Caaaaaaaaaake.

If you like this, try:

Let's Pretend This Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson, because she maintains a similar knife's-edge balance between absolute hilarity and sharp observations on mental illness based on personal experiences. 

When Books Weigh as much as Cats

The Passage

(Originally read on October 24, 2015)

Is this literary fiction?  Genre fiction?  Action? Adventure? Sci Fi? Horror? Don't worry, no one else knows either!

What I do know is that it's a new all-time favorite of mine.  Yes, it probably weighs more than my cat.  Yes, I have a 20-pound cat.  Yes, there are thousands of small details that don't "need" to be there.  Yes, it gets a little heavy handed with religious parallels.  Yes, it's very much in the spirit of Stephen King's The Stand.  It doesn't matter.  None of that stuff matters when you have a knock-out premise, a set of characters who are genuine people, who take actions consistent with what you know about them, and an author who knows how to pace his plot.

I've read a lot of long books recently, but I don't think any of them put their length to this good of a use, i.e., taking the time to create believable back stories and thought processes for all of the characters involved.  Don't get me wrong, there are probably hundreds of characters in this book and some do serve as place holders, more or less.  But to have dozens of people explored in this much detail, well, I don't get that very often.  

The first section describes the military-experiment-gone-wrong that destroys life in North America as as we know it, and those chapters are just beyond gripping.  Then we get to the First Colony one hundred years later, the tiny outpost of 94 souls under dying lights ... and well, I'm always a sucker for humanity on its last legs, and this part blew me away.  Then everything goes to hell, and the tension ratchets consistently to the end.  Well done, well done.

I keep fumbling around at the edges of why I like this book so much and feel like I'm not getting at the heart of it.  But now that I've thought about it for a few days, I think it might be based on how deeply a story draws you in.  How well you can submerge yourself into it.  It's suspense, of course, but also points of beauty and humanity and reflections and moods and settings.  Like, there's a trail (the plot) and the book should make you want to walk along it.  Plenty of times, you take the trail and its flat and boring and you get to the end and all you can say is that you got some exercise.  But the good trails go up to great views (the ending), and the best have points of constant interest along the way: maybe a waterfall, cool rocks, lots of wildflowers, some deer grazing, birdsong.  The Passage makes a fantastic trail.   

Final Call: 

If you like this, try:

The Stand, by Stephen King, because you really just should read this.

A God in Ruins

Let's take a step back.  This book follows Teddy, Ursula's brother, from Life After Life.  In that book, Ursula lives many many versions of her own life, beginning and culminating in an attempt to assassinate Hitler, possibly in hopes of preventing WWII and her brother Teddy's death.  At the end, she accomplishes this but is born yet again.

Teddy doesn't have multiple lives, just the one he thought he wouldn't have.  As a bomber pilot in the war, he had to assume he'd never make it home.

My personal interpretation of both books goes like this:  Ursula was "meant" to die at birth, but rebooted and continued through her iterations to a life where she could try to prevent WWII.  However, despite the Hitler assassination attempt, it was still a world where Teddy died.  Therefore, when she was reborn again, her mother (who was particularly fond of Teddy) was prepared and prevented the infant Ursula's death, which sent her through all the motions again, to make a world where Teddy survived.

What we see in A God in Ruins is that life, the one no one thought Teddy would have.  So, my take is that Life After Life sets up all the sacrifice of war, while A God in Ruins follows a great deal of the aftermath, and makes us wonder if it was worth it.  After all, Teddy doesn't get a cake walk.  His wife dies in a completely terrible manner, his daughter grows up to be a resentful, neglectful, self-righteous sad sack for most of her life, and his relationships with his grandchildren are touch and go sometimes.  You wonder, "Ursula worked so hard, and for this?"  But of course, the answer is YES.  Because what other option was there?

Sooooooo.  I wrote the first four paragraphs of this review before I finished the book.  As it turns out, there is another option.  And in the Afterword, Atkinson herself says that she thinks of the book as another one of Ursula's lives, one that was left unwritten in Life After Life.  The ending of the book, in one fell swoop, managed to both completely crush my interpretation of the book while also validating it.  Because [MAJOR SPOILER ALERT] we find out on the last page that Teddy really did die in the war, and the book is recounting what might have been.  So, I was completely wrong.  But it's also telling us that what might have been - peoples' lives, warts and all - are worth Ursula's sacrifice.  That war imposes a horrific cost by erasing thousands and millions of possibilities.

On another note, I think another reason that I connected to this book is that I identify strongly with Teddy's personality.  A person fascinated with the beauty in nature, even-keeled, not understanding a higher power but, in the face of that, feeling the importance of being kind.

Some people are soured by the ending, but I was not one of them.  The last few pages, when the house of cards starts to fall, are completely disorienting, totally fascinating, and some of the best reading I've had in years.  I am thrilled that I had no idea about the book's ending, or even the fact that there is a (giant) twist at the end.  It's better to get there with no sense of what's coming.

In fact, taking both books together, I think have found one of my new absolute favorites, and paired with other recent readings, have had to install a triumvirate of Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, and Kate Atkinson as my must-read authors these days.

Final call:

This is one of those books that pulls you along, exhausts your emotions, and at the end, changes your life.  I know it won't be the same for everyone, but having that potential alone makes it worth the read.

As you'll see this book sort of shorted me out emotionally, and I've resorted to popular stuff and fluff for my next bunch of books.

Bel Canto

When I read Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett, I told you that there were some authors I knew I would like, long before I actually read their works.  Well, Ann Patchett is another one.  I own almost all of her books, but this is the first I've read.  I think I waited so long because I knew the story would be an emotional rollercoaster from the description on the back.  The set up sounds completely fabricated- an evening party full of international elites is taken hostage, and the ordeal draws out over four months, while the hostages and terrorists find themselves forging relationships they never thought they would or could.  But what floored me is that the set up is based on a true story, and not as loosely as one might assume.  An actual terrorist attack in Lima, Peru, in 1996 very closely mirrors the structure, or frame, of Bel Canto.  This is important, in a book that is often criticized for being over the top in relation to reality.

I do see what the critics mean.  I think the book would have been more meaningful, in a way, if the younger terrorists hadn't turned out to be savants limited only by their lack of education.  I also wonder if the degree of the miraculous talents weren't skewed by the hostages' closeness to the terrorists.  Was Cesar really capable of becoming a world class opera singer, or did Roxane just really, really, really want him to have that capability and project it on to him?  Was Carmen really that intelligent, or did love color Gen's assessments?  We don't know.  But Patchett's style is such that I think she would have told us, if that were true.  So, there are issues.  

I also think that every book has flaws, flaws that might be tiny or might be gigantic.  The trick, or the magic, comes when it manages to make you love it anyway.  Which I do, with Bel Canto.   In a weird way, reading this book reminded me of The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  Now there's a book with legions of fans where the magic did not work for me.  All I could see were the flaws.  

There are so many beautiful moments in Bel Canto, and a focus on the good in human nature.  That's actually rarer than you would think, in the literary world.  Patchett is wordy, but her sentences flow like water and still manage to come across as concise.  She includes so much subtle humor, playing up the irony of hostages enjoying their time with their captors.  She makes a ton of sharp observations, and you learn so much by seeing how each of the main characters view the world and the others.

Final call:


In the very early stages of the book, you learn that the terrorists do not survive, and you think, "Good."  By the end, you think, "What a shame."  And that's nothing short of amazing.

White Teeth

White Teeth by Zadie Smith is, I think, the current holder of the “Least Likely but Most Interesting Book Found in a Chambersburg Thrift Store” title.  (That’s a little misleading, because that town’s second-hand stores are strangely above average in terms of inventory and selection.)  So you know this is a real winner.

I say it’s a pretty unlikely find because it’s a British author, edgy, something of a tough read, and the subjects are Muslim immigrants in London.  Just not a lot in common with your average Central Pennsylvanian, lol.  But I am so glad I found it, and even happier that I put it on this year’s reading list.  One of the better dollars I have ever spent.

When you take the story as one big whole, it does get shaky.  The plot becomes far-fetched, especially at the end.  Extremely, incredibly far-fetched.  But Smith is just such a darned joy to read.  Her sentences have a strong rhythm and she’s very clever.  Plays with words and meanings, and there’s a lot of zip and snap to her style.  Just slightly reminiscent of Arundhati Roy in effect, although the mechanics are completely different.

Oddly, the interludes that occur during the Second World War were some of the most appealing to me.  I’m not sure why.  Along with the parts that feature Irie.  Irie steals the show in her own quiet way. 

Final call:

I didn’t mark that many quotes from White Teeth, but that’s because I could easily have found hundreds and became overwhelmed.  Go find some good quotes for yourself J

Alias Grace

Oh, Margaret Atwood.  It's just not fair.  How good of an author you are, I mean.  This is the fourth book of yours I have read now, and you seem to be seriously gunning for the top of my personal 'best of the best' list.  

Actually, this was one of two books on my 2014 Challenge List that I had to hold over to this year, and it is is something of a departure for Atwood - a book based on real events, with a fictionalized account filling in the gaps but not giving us clear answers.

The Grace of the title is Grace Marks, a girl not yet turned 16 when she became involved, to some degree, in the 1843 murder of her employer and his mistress.  All within about 2-3 weeks of starting work there as a maid.  She and a male hired hand named James McDermott were convicted of the crime, and both were sentenced to death.  McDermott was hung, while Grace's death penalty was commuted and she was eventually pardoned.

None of these things are spoilers, they're all facts of the case and a matter of historical record.  What Atwood does so wonderfully is give life to Grace and her peers, and make a case for their motivations.  In Alias Grace, Grace has witnessed the death of her mother, the disintegration of her wastrel father, and the loss of all her family, either to death or distance.  Despite this, Grace's voice is wonderfully practical, and capable, and at 15 she can run a household far better than I can.  And yet she, at the very least, fails to so much as try to prevent the murders, and may have even fully participated.

Atwood creates a few other characters to frame the story, and allow Grace to tell hers.  In doing this, we see that the societal attitudes of the era were truly terrible toward women, but that men were harmed, too, although usually in more subtle ways.  Which, I think, is the point of the book, at the bottom of it all.  Crazy, out-of-whack gender crap is bad for everybody.  

In any case, it's amazing when you can read a book like this, come away with very few solid answers about the level and nature of Grace's involvement, and still think its one of the best books you've ever read.  But that's what happened!  There are eerie and beautiful pieces of imagery, particularly dream sequences (which I usually find awkward and a slight turn off).  Images of sheets, and quilts, and beds and women.  Souls stuck in rooms, unable to ascend.  Wonderful descriptions of the Canadian countryside.  Haunting, just haunting.

Final call:

        

I could quibble with a few things, here and there, but I'd feel like I was complaining that no one plucked the seeds from a big delicious red strawberry.  Highly recommended.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Remember when I said that sometimes I could just tell ahead of time that I am going to like an author?  Kate Atkinson fit that bill for me, and I am happy to say I was right, again.

I am even more impressed that Behind the Scenes at the Museum is her debut novel.  This novel traces Ruby, in her own words, from conception (literally) through her childhood and teenage years.  A coming of age story and one with a double twist - maybe triple twist - I didn't see coming.

Ruby's family is a mess.  We get Ruby's story, but it's interspersed with a troubled family history going back to Ruby's great grandmother.  Ruby's extended family has something of a curse on it, in that many of them die young.  Many of them are also unhappy, and find themselves depressed, considering or vigorously participating in adultery, yelling at their children, ignoring their responsibilities, or otherwise being on the crazy end of human existence.  A few are probably actually psychotic.

The focus is very female here, and the book is full of women who are unsatisfied and unfulfilled by their lives.  Most of the men remain distant figures, although we do get shining glimpses of them in both World Wars.

That Ruby and her surviving sister find their ways through this terrible weight of history is amazing,

Final call:

I am giving this the full complement of stars because I have rarely found an author who can so brilliantly dance the fine line between depicting real life and farce.

I think we have probably all had moments in the lives of our families where we find ourselves thinking, "This cannot possibly actually be happening, this is like something out of a bad movie or a cartoon."  Times where things have gone so far off the rails as to come around the other side and you just have to laugh or else you'll cry.  Atkinson is absolutely brilliant at this.

A Strange Pairing

I recently read two books that are similar on one level but very different on others.  Both of them are on my 2015 Challenge list, but it was more or less chance that I read them back to back.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies is a short story collection.  I understand that the first story and the title story tend to be thought of as the best, but I have to say that I enjoyed the second story very much.  A tale of American children of Indian descent out trick-or-treating, while a visiting Bangladeshi scholar doesn't know if his family is dead or alive because of ongoing political turmoil surrounding the partition of Pakistan and Bangladesh.  That some children are imagining bogeymen and collecting candy, at the same time and on the same earth as children who may be victims of a civil war.  Those images had staying power for me.    

Final call:

Lahiri has a straightforward style, and her stories appear much simpler than they are.  I think most people would enjoy this book, be one of them.

____________________________

The second book I read is A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes.  I have read Barnes before, two books actually, but wow.  This one takes the cake.  If I had a graphic for six stars, I would give it that.  

A History of the World is a novel, but you could argue that it's also a collection of short stories.  Ten stories and a personal essay that counts as the half.  At least one of the stories and the essay verges on nonfiction, and the story has a brilliant piece of art criticism.

So, it has a quirky structure and quirky topics for some of the chapters, there are extreme feats of imagination, and plenty of humor, too.  But this is a philosophical novel, at its base.  It seems to read as a deconstruction of religion, but turns into something very different, I think.  His message seems to be that people should seek objective truth, even if it doesn't exist, and be judged by the love they show their fellow humans.  And, that neither history, art, religion, or myth can supply objective truth.  I can't really argue that and have rarely seen it illuminated so creatively.  

I love this book the same way I love Cloud Atlas.  For tackling the big questions, although Barnes does it a lot more directly, even lapsing into his own voice (maybe).  The chapters at first don't seem at all connected, but eventually subtle connections, direct connections, and thematic similarities emerge.  By the end, I realized that the stories are having a philosophical argument among themselves, or at least, demonstrating the principles in the half chapter.

I saw this book compared to Joyce, Calvino, and Mitchell, but you really just have to read it to see what I am talking about.  I also remember thinking this book makes a nice, optimistic pairing to Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, which seemed to say that Western Civilization was bankrupt and heading for moral crisis.

Final call:

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, but I also don't think the average person would like it.  I'm pretty sure this shouldn't be your first foray into books with disjointed narratives written by author/philosophers.  Maybe start with David Mitchell and Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas for a taste of where this kind of book can take you.

     

A Virtuous Woman

This is a very, very short novel.  That said, it's wonderful.  I think what surprised me more than anything is that it gets pretty mixed reviews on Goodreads.

I think the problem is that, like ruraldating.com, "city folks just don't get it."  I'm joking, of course, but I think there might be a kernel of truth in there, somewhere.  Jack and Ruby are what most would call rednecks, although Ruby didn't start out that way.  They might be hard to relate to, for a lot of people.

Anyway, obviously, I'm not one of them - everything here rang true to me, except the very end.

The frame of the book is that Ruby's dying of lung cancer, and Jack's dealing with it, and you learn their history along the way.  Plenty of raw emotion and people making do with what they have.  I amazed at how much good stuff is packed in to such a short book.


Final Call:

This will take you about 3 hours to read, tops.  Please invest the time :)

The Night Watch

Sarah Waters is one of those authors who make tough things look very easy.  I have read all of her works now, except for her very newest novel, and she has pulled off wonderful tricks and effects in each book.

The Night Watch is possibly my favorite of her books.  I think this is likely due to the structure, which starts in 1947 and then follows the end backward through to its start in 1941.  I am thinking the same story, told chronologically, would not have had the same effect, would not have been as poignant.  Which is a little mind-bending in and of itself.

The title is referring to the third shift ambulance work that the main characters engage in during the bombings of London in WWII.  When Waters takes us out with Kay and Micky, the mood and feel is just amazing.  The same for the times we spend with Duncan in prison during the bombing raids.  Supremely eerie.

But the real gem, the passage that just takes the cake, is the 1941 section that gives us Alec.  An action that drives so much of the novel.  Most authors wouldn't have taken us as far along the path as Waters did.  The action would have happened off-stage, probably because another author wouldn't have been able to handle it as well.  This part reminds me so much of Robert Frobisher's character in Cloud Atlas.

I also thought it was a brilliant move to make some typically male faults a part of Kay's character.  

Final call:

If you are going to jump into Waters, I'd probably choose this book first.  It's got all of the Waters hallmarks without too much grinding miserableness.  And I'm still, apparently, a sucker for a non-linear plot.

Cat's Eye

I chipped away at this book for a long time.  It's one that got interrupted by my studying.  And it is fairly melancholy, at a time when I was, too, so sometimes it was hard to pick it back up.

This is the third of Margaret Atwood's books I have read.  Cat's Eye has a lot more in common with The Blind Assassin than The Handmaid's Tale.  Excellent characterizations of women, very nuanced relationships.  Such an accurate depiction of girlhood, and one woman's interior life as she grows.

Atwood is just delicious to read.  This is not a happy book, but it doesn't matter.  Elaine, the protagonist, has been damaged by her life but has come to terms with her childhood through art.  She's most haunted by the lost chance at genuine friendship with her childhood best friend.

I felt kinship with Elaine's early years, where she was left to be herself, as she defined it, and lived an unorthodox life chasing insect infestations of forests with her scientist father.  Not that I did that, but the part about the lack of forced gender roles.

Final call:



Read this.  Read all her books.  Authors don't come this consistently good very often.

Number9Dream

So let's talk David Mitchell.  Despite some stiff competition, he is probably my favorite author.  He has six books out (including one just released!), and now I have read three of them.  

The other two under my belt are Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas.  These books read like two facets of one very large story.  And then I read a recent interview with Mitchell where he admitted his works not only share supporting characters - they are probably all telling the same story.

Anyway, Mitchell is known for wacky narrative structures and extreme feats of imagination, and  that absolutely describes Number9Dream, even though the end effect is very different from his usual.  If he has a usual.  

Instead of trotting through space and time in disjointed but connected narratives,  Number9Dream  stays in one person's viewpoint (well, not really, but kind of).  We follow Eiji, a young Japanese man searching Tokyo for a father he's never met and dealing with the death of his twin sister and abandonment by his mother.  Eiji takes a lot of detours and has some definitely imaginary adventures on his journey.  Coincidences and obvious plot devices abound.  He falls in love.  He comes to terms with the trauma in his life.

But one of the questions in the end is, "just how much of the plot actually a happened, versus being imagined by Eiji?"  I believe that it is all in his head.  Really.  Eiji, the name, is explained twice in the text as meaning "incant" and "world."  I think he's making it up, the entire thing.  

A lot of the criticisms people have about the book, I think, don't apply if this is true.  People are seeing a hack plot with too much crazy stuff and a not-quite-right view of Japanese culture.  I say that it's Eiji's voice that is responsible for the plot "problems" and the outsider-looking-in view of Tokyo.  I think Eiji's been in Kagoshima thinking his way out of his problems the entire book, using his manga and video games to fuel his fantasies.

Then there's the 5th part of this book, A Study of Tales.  Who else would juxtapose Eiji's quest with stories about a talking goat, a sentient hen, and a primordial man to frame up questions about authorship, agency, and the meaning of life and death.  You just can't get this stuff anywhere else.

Number9Dream left me feeling many things, but most of all, at a loss.  However, there is at least one point in any David Mitchell book (and often many, many points) where you get a particular feeling, one of being extremely far-sighted.  You start to see the entirety of life and how it works much more clearly than you normally do, and the day-to-day begins to seem very myopic but also the only chance we have to make any kind of difference.

And that is why I love his books.

Final call:

This actually isn't my very favorite work of his, but he's still head and shoulders above the crowd.

The Shipping News

I veered off-challenge for my last read, and stayed off for this one.  As I've said before, I need some lighter reading right now than what a lot of my 2014 Challenge books can offer, so I picked this out of one of my many book piles because it's a self-proclaimed "literary page turner."

  

Really, this is an odd duck.  (Might one say, a gammy bird?!?)  The beginning, set in the northeastern United States, is very different from the remaining 85%, set in Newfoundland.  I enjoyed the conceit of relating the chapters to different kinds of knots, Proulx doesn't seem to take it too seriously and that's good.

The hearts and souls of the story are the tough Newfoundlanders that Quoyle meets - and eventually becomes one of.  The lifestyle is already hard, and economic opportunity is dwindling.  Traditional skills are dying along with the fisheries.  The physical environment is unforgiving, dreary, astoundingly beautiful, and violent in turns.  The setting and atmosphere is a knockout.

Proulx's writing style here is unique.  It's not 100% grounded in realism.  People are named Petal and Bunny and Wavey.  Houses become symbols and highly unlikely things that verge on the supernatural occur.  The sentences are choppy and may be meant to mimic the speech patterns of the locals.  Her way of turning a phrase is fantastic.  There is a lot of out and out humor, but also more than a few heart-breaking tales.

I was a little disenchanted, close to the end, with the way the story was heading.  Nothing seemed to resolve.  Then, in the last 50 pages or so, it won my heart over.  Really, you just want to spend more time with the characters, listen to them talk.  I love books like this, ones that look at a rural or folk culture and see its depth and soul, along with the warts, and ones that look at what people can do when even a smidge of kindness is shown to them.

Final Call:

This is probably actually a four and a half, but what the hey.  The book's spirit and style tips it up to five.

The God of Small Things

So here's a Booker prize winner.  I had a copy at one point, I know I did.  But it wandered away, and I only recently found another copy at a really awesome used bookstore in Dayton, OH.  I said I'd read this for my 2014 challenge if I could find it, and well, here's my review.

This is quite a counterpoint to A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.  Written about the same time but set 10 years earlier in a different part of India.  A wildly different form of writing - playful, experimental, toying with the sounds of words, and injecting the rhythm of Malayalam into English.

Where Mistry's story lets the characters' humanity shine through, Roy uses artistry.

The plot is a fairly hackneyed set-up - an affair between castes - but the resulting consequences dwell on big questions.  How responsible are children for the results of their actions?  Even when they've been manipulated?  How do unbending social constructs protect and destroy individuals?  What motivates people either to fall in line or rebel against their given roles?  How have modern political systems grafted themselves on to cultures that greatly predate them?  

She also provides an almost incidental but damning critique of Western-driven cultural tourism.

Many parts of the book seem trippy or dream-like, but this is because much of it is told from the viewpoint of children.  Not precisely in their words, but in their style of perception.


Final Call:


In the end, this one ended up being one of my all-time favorites, much in the same way The English Patient  has.  One of the few books I would gladly reread.

A Fine Balance

I picked another hefty Booker contender for my next read.  A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

It took a while for the cover picture to resolve itself into its separate parts.  That's the whole book in so many ways - the balance between hope and despair, between protecting one's self and sheltering others.  The balance between protection and exploitation.  I'm intentionally not going into detail here, because it's better to read it not knowing much going in.  

One of the best parts of this book is the writing.  It's a very well-written book, but it's not arty or overdone.  The story is the point, and that's the focus.

We follow four people, each with painful histories, who slowly forge a family in horrific circumstances.  You hope that their lives will get better, or at least less precarious, as the book moves forward, but that doesn't happen in any kind of way that makes you feel better for them.

One of the four has a very different fate than the others, and the reason for it is one of the big questions the book asks.  This story also shows how a breakdown in the protection of basic human rights victimizes nearly everyone.  Character A steps on the back of Character B to avoid being crushed by Character C.  And then there's the appalling but very human Beggarmaster.  One of the most complex characters I have come across in a long time.

I'll be honest, I nearly stopped reading several times. I empathized to such a degree that I could hardly bear to keep going.

The extreme fragility of living in poverty will stay with you long after you put the book down.

But.  I finished it, and it's beyond rewarding.

Final call:

You need a good dose of emotional fortitude to make it through A Fine Balance, but please do.

The English Patient

And the catch up continues ...

What I knew about this book before I read it:

• I saw at least some of the movie when I was younger.  I remember a lot of sand and a very dead woman.  Pretty sure Voldemort was in it.
• It's the centerpiece of a funny Seinfeld episode.  Elaine just doesn't get the appeal of the movie and hilarity ensues.

What I know about the book now that I have read it.

• It's apparently not very similar to the movie, although both have the same spirit and feel.
• Michael Ondaatje is a poet and it shows in his novels.
• It's really hard to praise it highly enough.

Seriously.  This isn't a long book, but it has layers upon layers, and the symbolism runs deep.  A lot of reviewers will tell you the book is about identity, and how people define themselves in relation to nationality, their environment, and each other.  

And I think that's correct, but that it's also about bombs.  There's a lot of detail about the mechanics of explosive devices, and I think that is a reflection of the "bombs" in the story.  Situations and combinations of personalities that are inevitably going to to blow up.

The four primary characters are in a place and time where any part of the physical world could explode at the whim of an IED.  They're near the end of WWII in a near-destroyed villa, following the German retreat from Italy, and they themselves are mentally and physically bombed out from their various and numerous wartime traumas.  Their stories crisscross with each other and explosive characters from their pasts.

At the center is of course, the English Patient, who has no physical identity any longer and who isn't really English, either.  Who connects all of the characters, past and present, and who has been responsible for more than one explosion of his own.

And then, of course, the atomic bombs that effectively end WWII also bring the book to its end.

This book, moreso than many others, reminds you that stories are art.

Final call:

Read this, please.  Not if you want a plot burner.  You are going to feel like Elaine if that's what you're after.  But if you want to be reminded of why you read ALL of the books, then read this one, now.