The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje · 1992
A 1992 Booker Prize winner that uses a burn patient's fractured memory to tell a love story about maps, bodies, and what we carry. Ondaatje writes in prose so beautiful it feels like it shouldn't be allowed. The love story at the center is all the more unbearable for being told in pieces.
The case against
Everyone in the villa speaks in the same incantatory poetry, because they all speak in Ondaatje's. The fragments withhold so much for so long that the love story arrives pre-embalmed, beautiful and inert. And the prose, sentence by gorgeous sentence, keeps stopping to admire itself while four damaged people wait politely for the plot.
Romance · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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