0:02

This is a Headgum Podcast. While

0:06

Andrew and Craig believe the joy

0:08

of discovery is crucial to enjoying

0:10

any well-told tale, they will not

0:12

shy away from spoiling specific story

0:14

beats when necessary. Plus these

0:16

are books you should have read by now. Hey

0:20

everybody, welcome to

0:22

Overdue. It's

0:45

a podcast about the books you've been

0:47

meaning to read. My name is Craig.

0:50

My name is Andrew, isn't it, Governor?

0:53

You really want to get this episode over quickly,

0:55

don't you? You're English

0:57

and you're impatient, aren't you?

1:01

That's right, bruv. Fish

1:06

and chips, bruv. On this podcast,

1:08

one of us reads a book and

1:10

tells the other person about it. And this week,

1:12

Craig read, what'd you read, Craig? I

1:15

read The English Patient

1:18

by Michael N'Daje. Pippa,

1:21

cheerio, The English Patient. There

1:24

is a guy that people refer

1:27

to as English in this book.

1:29

Yeah, yes. It's

1:31

a key part of the book whether or

1:33

not he is English, but

1:36

there's a distinct lack of quizzing

1:38

him about the queen, fish and

1:40

chips, the beetles, things like that. Yeah,

1:43

I mean, the beetles thing makes sense because

1:45

it was like 1940 something. Sure.

1:48

And the beetles were like... You could

1:50

ask him, do you think some lads

1:52

from Liverpool might make some good tunes?

1:54

Do you know a baby named Ringo?

1:58

And like all the British people raised their hands. Yeah.

2:00

Yeah. So

2:02

it is they don't interrogate the

2:05

English patient to discern his Britishness, his

2:07

Englishness. Well, they just he just has

2:09

an accent and they're like, oh, this

2:11

guy must be English, right? That is

2:13

exactly what happens. Yeah. Yes. And he

2:15

is struck with

2:18

soap opera disease and that

2:20

he does not know who he is due to

2:22

a calamity. Or

2:24

does what they need to get a big

2:26

wooden mallet to bonk him over the head

2:28

with. Is that usually usually? I know my

2:30

Gilligan's Island. That's going to clear up amnesia

2:32

right away. Yep. Conk, conk. So

2:35

this is a book I've never read before. That's what we

2:37

do here on this podcast. We cover books, usually

2:39

anyway, books that we've never read before. We tell

2:42

them to the other person. So Andrew didn't read

2:44

it. It's OK. He

2:46

just read about it. I

2:49

read of it. Yes. And I read

2:51

it and read some about

2:53

it. And we'll have a

2:55

discussion today. And you, the listener, can decide if

2:57

you're English by the end of it. Or how

2:59

patient you have been with us. Those are the

3:01

two things you get to decide. Mm hmm. Every

3:04

week, either we read

3:06

the English patient or not. All I

3:09

know about this story, you

3:11

know, I wanted to read it because, you know,

3:13

I periodically check, like, what

3:16

major award winning books haven't we covered?

3:18

You know, it was interesting

3:21

to me that Andaji is

3:23

a Sri Lankan born Canadian novelist.

3:25

Like, I don't know. I can't think

3:27

of another offer. Author we've covered of

3:29

Sri Lankan descent or, you know, I

3:33

think he's to meal and he said

3:35

his family history was a bit of

3:38

a salad. His background

3:40

is a real salad. It's difficult to know who

3:42

I am. To meal

3:44

Dutch and Sinhalese ancestry,

3:46

I believe. And

3:49

so and then being like, oh,

3:51

they did make a movie of that. That

3:53

was a big deal before I was

3:56

going to movies other than like cartoons.

3:59

Yeah. movie in 1996

4:03

that was nominated for 12 Academy

4:05

Awards and won nine. Pretty big

4:07

deal. And made like 200 and like

4:09

230 or 40 million bucks on a budget of like of

4:15

like mid 20s to low 40s

4:17

like there's some dispute as to how much sure

4:19

it costs but you know not

4:21

in the 90s you could still have like a mid-size

4:23

hit like that and people would be like that movie

4:25

did pretty well and not like we

4:28

need to put this franchise in mothballs

4:30

for 10 years until people miss it

4:32

again. It's true. So yeah

4:34

I was just kind of intrigued to dive into it and

4:36

you know find out what this

4:38

story is because I literally had no idea I

4:40

just knew it was at best I maybe knew

4:43

that there was a nurse who cares for a

4:45

patient and that people fall

4:47

in love maybe. What

4:50

did you know or what did

4:52

you find out about

4:54

this book and its author Andrew? Didn't

4:57

really know much of anything except it

4:59

was a like it was

5:01

a name that I knew and I

5:03

think maybe there's a Seinfeld episode with

5:05

like a parody of it I think.

5:07

Yeah I believe so. I didn't

5:10

look into that. It kind of is. It sounded

5:12

familiar to my brain. It's melding with the episode

5:14

where he makes out during Schindler's List with me.

5:16

Like it's like kind of overlapping but yes. But

5:19

yeah Michael Ondaje born 1943 he's like

5:21

you said a

5:24

Canadian poet essayist and novelist who was born

5:26

in Sri Lanka grew up in Sri Lanka

5:29

for the first few years of his life.

5:31

Then according to an interview he

5:33

was doing with the Guardian in 2018 he

5:37

says he was kind of shipped to England

5:39

by himself at age 11 with no other

5:42

family members to like accompany him. Yeah. To

5:44

be with his mother in England where he

5:46

lived for a little while and then moved

5:48

to Montreal around age 19. His

5:51

brother Christopher already lived in Canada

5:54

and he Michael stayed in Canada

5:56

after he is now based in

5:58

Toronto but yeah. Canadian

6:00

after that. He's published 14 poetry

6:03

collection, seven novels, a memoir,

6:06

and multiple other works. He

6:08

helped co-edit Brick a Literary Journal, which is

6:11

the name of it. He helped co-edit

6:14

Brick a Literary Journal with

6:16

his wife and others for

6:19

many years until 2017. In

6:23

2016, he had a new species of Sri Lankan

6:25

spider named after him. I did see that. Sick.

6:28

I think. Did you see

6:30

the interview where he was like, this

6:32

is basically like my greatest accomplishment? I

6:36

mean, definitely it's the one like you

6:40

could, I don't think you can work

6:44

with the intention of having a spider named after

6:46

you. I guess unless your job is like spider

6:48

name or in which case you could get yourself

6:50

in there, but like it's

6:52

just, it would be so unexpected and so different

6:54

from the field that you worked in. I don't

6:56

think you could help but be chuffed by it.

6:59

The goal is just to write a book so

7:01

good that people who love spiders love your book

7:03

also. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

7:06

He had

7:09

been teaching full time and trying to finish this book.

7:11

And he said in that same Guardian interview, quote, I

7:13

thought I was going to lose it and I had

7:15

quit my job. I just needed to finish the book.

7:17

It was a bet. And

7:20

so this book, the English patient, which came out in 1992, kind

7:22

of a turning point in

7:24

his career as a, as an author who was

7:27

like making enough money off of it to live

7:29

on it. So this was published in

7:31

1992. It's a direct sequel to a 1987 book he wrote called the skin

7:35

of a lion, which in the skin of a lion in

7:38

the skin of a lion. Yes. I keep, I

7:40

wrote down in the skin of a lion and

7:42

I made sure to double check it because my

7:44

eyes keep skipping over the in for some reason.

7:47

Now, Andrew's thinking of it as the skin of

7:49

a lion. Do you think it's a novel or

7:51

a literary journal? I'm

7:53

here to think it's what I'm here to tell

7:56

you that the cover assures you that it is a novel.

7:58

Oh, good, good, good, good. That's this is why it's so

8:00

important to have call it a novel on the cover of

8:02

your novel. This English patient

8:04

continues the storylines of a few of

8:07

the same characters. I'm curious whether this

8:09

comes through in a read of just

8:11

this one. I assume that

8:13

was probably a path a lot of people took because of

8:15

the movie was they just read this one without having

8:17

read the first one. There

8:19

was a review of the book I read that

8:22

made it sound like some of

8:24

the characters that had appeared

8:26

before felt a little more like fully realized

8:29

because they had like already been worked on

8:31

for another book. And the other characters in

8:33

the book felt a little thinner, but I

8:35

don't know if that's true

8:38

to your experience or not. I like to think about that for

8:40

a bit. I have a take. This

8:43

one, the 1992 Booker Prize, which we'll talk

8:45

more about in a sec, the 1992 Governor

8:48

General's Award in the 2018 Golden

8:50

Man Booker Award, which is

8:52

a basically like an all

8:55

star kind of run where they

8:57

take all the book or award

8:59

books and award them again. So

9:03

it be all the other Booker Award

9:05

books to get another book. They picked

9:07

five judges, I think,

9:10

who I don't know if they

9:12

were all winners or the five

9:15

judges had each had a

9:17

decade to choose from, and

9:19

they each had to pick one book

9:21

from their decade of Booker Awards to

9:24

pit like, you know, Smash

9:27

Brothers style against the others. Right.

9:30

And then everybody voted and it

9:32

beat out another book we've

9:34

covered, Wolf Hall, in addition

9:37

to some other books that maybe we'll consider another time,

9:39

like Lincoln and the Mardo. Maybe we'll get there. Who

9:41

knows? But the original Booker Prize

9:43

that he won in 92 was was unique

9:46

because it was the first time since

9:48

the I think like 74 in

9:52

the second time, like to date that the

9:54

prize has been shared by two

9:56

books. So

9:58

The Guardian says by all. accounts, the judges were

10:00

bitterly and passionately divided about the books. The decision

10:03

was made just 30 minutes before the ceremony and

10:05

the chair characterized the awarding

10:07

of the prize as a necessary nonsense.

10:09

Whoa. The

10:11

books involved are the English patient

10:13

and then Barry Unsworth's book, Sacred

10:16

Hunger. Hmm. And

10:18

yeah, they, uh,

10:22

on dot J was on. Daje was talking about a,

10:25

the process of like waiting during this very

10:27

long award ceremony to find out whether his

10:29

book was going to win or not. Cause

10:31

a lot of years the winner would leak

10:34

beforehand and just know, but this year it

10:36

hadn't because they hadn't made the decision. So

10:39

he's just sitting there waiting. It

10:41

is. He was also the first time that a

10:43

Canadian author had received

10:45

the prize. Mm-hmm. For,

10:47

and the Booker is for like English language

10:49

work. He used his money, uh, to

10:52

establish a trust that gives recognition to,

10:54

uh, English language writing

10:56

by Sri Lankan authors. Which is kind of

10:58

cool. Named it after his mom. Um,

11:02

talk about the movie before we go to

11:04

break Andrew. Yeah. Just the 1996 film adaptation.

11:06

It was directed and written by, uh, Anthony

11:09

Minghella. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that

11:11

right, but it, he was, he was working

11:13

quote closely with on Daje. Um,

11:16

he did not write the

11:18

screenplay himself on Daje didn't, but he was

11:20

involved at like multiple points in

11:23

the film's production, most notably with

11:25

the film's editor, a guy named

11:27

Walter Murch, who also edited the

11:29

Godfather trilogy, American graffiti apocalypse. Now

11:31

a bunch of other movies. Um,

11:35

and these conversations that Murch and

11:37

on Daje had with each other

11:39

were later adapted into another book

11:41

by Daje, just about like how

11:44

this guy feels about film editing, which is kind of cool.

11:47

Uh, the movie stars, uh, Ray

11:50

finds Juliette, be no, uh, Willem

11:52

Defoe, Colin Firth and others.

11:54

And as I mentioned, it received nine

11:56

Oscars was nominated for 12. Uh,

11:59

there was another. adaptation of it planned

12:01

for the early 2020s, a BBC

12:03

TV adaptation announced

12:05

in 2021, I think, and

12:08

then like unceremoniously like scrubbed in

12:11

the 2023 for reasons that nobody really talked

12:13

about. The glut of TV

12:15

having money to spend. Yeah,

12:18

I guess there's like a there's a small piece

12:21

of Miramax that just is goes through

12:23

the Miramax archives and is like, what?

12:25

What of these movies can we make

12:27

into a TV show? It's like keep

12:29

making money. I I don't

12:32

think that this would be a

12:34

terrible TV show. I

12:36

don't know that it would sustain more than

12:38

a mini series. I also

12:40

I guess I just also question like what's the other take

12:42

on this? Oh, no. Yeah, you can

12:44

do. You would have to live in a world where

12:47

the movie didn't exist, I think, to

12:50

to justify that project,

12:53

because I also

12:55

read this book going, yeah, this is a movie.

12:57

There's like four people in it. Like you just

12:59

tell their stories. You jump

13:01

cut between the time periods as necessary.

13:04

It does for it's a kind

13:06

of a dreamy book, but

13:09

it does have some time jumping

13:12

in terms of how the narrative is delivered that

13:14

does feel very, you

13:17

know, cinematic cinematic is not I never love just

13:19

throwing that word at a thing that is a

13:21

book because it's like it started as a book.

13:24

Yeah, but it does feel like

13:27

and is like operating in that mode

13:29

a little bit. It

13:32

seems like to make it to stretch it

13:34

even to like eight or ten episodes of

13:36

a modern prestige TV season. You would have

13:38

to get a lot like sillier and wider

13:40

ranging with a lot of the flashbacks in

13:42

a way that might like to loot it

13:44

a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I think some

13:46

of the characters would work

13:48

well in that format. And some

13:50

of the characters, at least as

13:52

described in this story, would

13:55

feel thin. Mm hmm. Maybe

13:58

you would need the other book to be part of it. Maybe

14:00

maybe some lion skin up in

14:02

here. Yeah. Well, let's uh Up

14:06

in here. Take a quick break I guess and then I'll

14:08

tell you about the book Andrew. Okay, it sounds Andrew

14:19

this episode is brought to you by

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with your party. Yeah, that's true Raise them.

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not always sometimes they're too scary and Halloween

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what about those fears Andrew that don't

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me? Maybe they maybe they do that. I mean like

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don't don't tell me what I need to go to

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15:57

Andrew you're a gamer, right? I

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mean, I play video games. Great, wonderful.

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Then this is news for you. I

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want to tell you that our show

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is also brought to you this week

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by Real Quick Reviews. Sounds

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quick. Yeah, one of our Patreon supporters, Tom,

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at RQ Reviews on Instagram. He

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following them. They do a

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RQ. Those are the letters. RQ, because

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it's Real Quick. RQ Reviews

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on Instagram. Hello,

17:21

Governor. You

17:29

ready to tell me about this book-a-dee-boo, then?

17:31

How did

17:34

you know that was in the book? What,

17:36

book-a-dee-boo? Book-a-dee-boo. No,

17:39

no one says that. That's just what they

17:41

call books over across the pond. That's true. That's

17:43

why it's an italics in this. Reading them

17:45

in the lorry. This

17:47

is an interesting book that

17:50

I think I enjoyed. I

17:52

had a good read. It

17:56

is about a

17:58

titular patient. and

18:00

people think he's English. There

18:04

are like three other main characters that we spend

18:06

time with, and the

18:08

book is, it's

18:11

mostly about them coming

18:13

to some sort of personal change, you know,

18:15

it's one of those books people learn, they

18:17

grow, but we also spend a lot of

18:20

time in their past, you

18:22

know, figuring out who they were before

18:24

they came to this particular situation that

18:27

we find them in. Which

18:30

is, of course, I'm so glad you

18:32

asked. They are at

18:34

this villa in

18:36

Tuscany, which sounds

18:38

wonderful until you realize that it is like

18:40

a bombed out monastery at

18:43

the end of World War II. Yeah,

18:45

the context is so important. And

18:50

I'll just read this description. From

18:54

outside the place seemed devastated, an

18:57

outdoor staircase disappeared in midair, it's

18:59

railing hanging off their

19:01

life. The people living there was

19:03

forging, in tentative safety, they used only

19:05

essential candlelight at night because of the

19:07

brigands who annihilated everything they came across.

19:09

They are protected by the simple fact

19:11

that the villa seemed a ruin. And

19:14

so you've got Hannah, who

19:17

is caring for the English patient, she is a

19:19

20 year old nurse from Toronto

19:22

who has been, she's kind of

19:24

shell shocked from the war, and

19:28

everybody else who was caring for patients

19:30

in this monastery converted into a hospital

19:32

fled because after, it

19:38

is after VE day at this

19:40

point. So like the Germans have

19:42

been routed out of Italy and

19:47

they left in their wake all

19:49

sorts of bombs and explosives and

19:52

this town in particular, in addition to

19:54

just being bombed, has like a lot

19:56

of undetenated mines and bombs

19:59

and things around. Very

20:01

dangerous. So it was evacuated. But this

20:03

young girl who has kind of given

20:05

up on being a participant

20:07

in the war proper due

20:09

to how traumatized she is decides

20:12

that she's going to just stay

20:14

and care for this English patient.

20:17

And to just

20:20

for more context, because I talked about how important

20:22

context was just now. Hannah is

20:24

one of the characters from

20:26

In the Skin of a Lion who carries

20:29

over as is somebody

20:31

named Caravaggio. Caravaggio, David, yes.

20:35

The main character of In

20:37

the Skin of a Lion, Patrick Lewis is

20:39

somebody who I guess you find out

20:41

their ultimate fate in this book. Yes. So

20:43

maybe they're not like a central character. No,

20:46

no, no. He is Hannah's dad. Okay.

20:48

And I don't know if that's a spoiler

20:50

for In the Skin of the Lion. I

20:52

believe that he

20:55

slept like it was an affair with

20:57

her mom or something like that. I

20:59

don't think that he raised her necessarily.

21:01

I could be mistaken. But

21:04

her like where she is at

21:07

the beginning of the book, she has learned about

21:09

her dad's passing in the war and

21:13

it's really thrown her as well. And so

21:15

she just kind of rather

21:17

than deal with it. She

21:20

has thrown herself into caring for this English

21:22

patient. Sure. And Caravaggio is going

21:25

to show up and complicate things.

21:29

To your I'll say this up

21:31

top. I found the other

21:34

two characters not

21:36

Hannah and not Caravaggio more

21:38

interesting. Okay. Mostly

21:40

because I found the

21:43

book was I found the book

21:45

to be propelled by their stories

21:47

more than by Hannah and Caravaggio's.

21:49

Okay. And I

21:52

think that could result from the fact

21:54

that he'd written those characters and their

21:57

backstories like already in a different book.

22:00

kind of like move them over

22:02

here into this interesting situation. And

22:05

then he had to fill out the interesting

22:08

situation and background, and it has to do

22:10

with this like new character, this patient he's

22:12

created and this other new character, this bomb

22:14

diffuser, who is a

22:17

a Sikh from India, who

22:20

is a younger guy who kind

22:22

of gets involved in the group as well. And so

22:24

like, OK, I don't know. I

22:26

found I don't find

22:29

myself thinking about Hannah and

22:31

Caravaggio the same

22:33

way after reading the book as I am thinking

22:35

about what happened with Kip

22:38

and the patient. Interesting. You

22:41

know, I don't know. It's interesting. The

22:43

patient has been burned beyond recognition.

22:47

He was in some sort

22:49

of plane disaster and

22:52

was dragged out of Africa, brought

22:54

to Italy by a Bedouin tribe. Who

22:57

was like, he knows all about

22:59

weapons and explosives and stuff. And

23:02

so they kind of kept him with them

23:04

to explain things to

23:07

them, basically. And then when

23:09

they ran out of use for him, they just like

23:11

gave him over to the people in Italy. So

23:13

he's he's been pretty lucid except for

23:16

not remembering who he is. Yeah. I

23:18

mean, he does like pass out a

23:20

lot and he does have a

23:23

dependence on morphine for the pain. And

23:28

but he he can be lucid

23:30

and tell you stories about things.

23:34

We get a lot of this specific

23:36

backstory told to us in the book.

23:39

And I are we ever because, you know,

23:41

he's been grievously injured and is telling this

23:43

under the influence of Morphe and like, is

23:47

Andajé ever trying to build like an

23:49

unreliable narrator thing about him? Are you

23:51

just kind of taking all the stories

23:54

he tells pretty much at face value?

23:56

It is a little it's a little

23:58

in between because. Nuance.

24:00

Nuance. I don't think

24:03

that you're ever supposed to think that

24:05

he is lying per se, as much

24:07

as when you find out what

24:12

really happened with him, it is

24:15

actually, he has been given a lot of

24:17

morphine, and is kind of speaking

24:19

more freely, and then characters

24:21

who know things are kind of filling in

24:23

the blanks after he's

24:25

admitted some stuff. But

24:27

it is not that he is necessarily

24:31

misrepresenting himself as

24:34

much as he doesn't necessarily know

24:36

all the details, or he is

24:39

just alighting over things. So it's

24:42

not a situation where he is, at

24:44

least in my read, maliciously

24:47

or actively being secretive.

24:52

It's a combination

24:54

of amnesia, selective

24:56

amnesia, and maybe I

24:59

just don't want to talk about that. Sure. But

25:04

he is entirely dependent on Hannah

25:06

to care for him and feed him

25:09

and bathe him. Sure,

25:11

yeah. His

25:13

incentives to be

25:17

untruthful to her don't quite come to the fore.

25:20

Tell me about some of the other characters,

25:22

then, because this seems like it's

25:24

very narrowly focused on just a few

25:27

people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've got the patient. We're

25:29

gonna find out more about his deal over the course of

25:31

the book. We'll come back to him. Hannah's

25:34

deal is, again,

25:36

as I said, she's 20. She's from Toronto. She's

25:38

over here in Europe. She's in the war. She

25:43

is kind of spiraling after the death of

25:46

her father, but we also learn her backstory

25:48

was that she was in love with a

25:50

young guy, young soldier, who got killed. She

25:53

was pregnant with his child and

25:56

ended the pregnancy because she couldn't continue

25:58

with it. And she also

26:01

like had to become emotionally distant

26:07

from everyone due to how hard it

26:09

was to care for dying people in

26:11

the war. Sure, yeah.

26:14

We get this, I'll read a passage

26:16

here of her kind

26:18

of yelling about her

26:20

experience as a nurse relative to the war

26:23

effort after we learned. She calls

26:25

all her patients buddy because she doesn't

26:27

want to actually invest in them as people, she

26:30

endeavors to forget who they were. But

26:32

then she says this to Caravaggio later, I

26:34

know all the smells, I know how to

26:37

divert them from agony, when to give the

26:39

quick jolt of morphine in a major vein,

26:41

the saline solution to make them empty their

26:43

bowels before they die. Every damn

26:45

general should have had my job, every

26:48

general. It should have been a prerequisite for

26:50

any river crossing. Who the hell were they,

26:52

who the hell were we to

26:54

be given this responsibility, expected to be wise

26:57

as old priests to

26:59

know how to lead people towards something no one

27:01

wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable. I could

27:03

never believe in all those services they gave for

27:05

the dead, their vulgar rhetoric, how dare they

27:08

talk like that about a human being dying.

27:11

Some real like, how dare you give an

27:13

order to march people to their death if

27:16

you've never even cared for the dying kind

27:18

of stuff. That's where she is. And

27:21

she talks about herself and sees

27:23

herself, I think

27:25

there's a bit where she's like taken anything

27:27

remotely like a mirror in this bombed out

27:30

villa and like stashed it in a room

27:32

so she's not looking in mirrors. But when

27:34

she does catch a glimpse of herself, she

27:36

remarks on how like, you

27:38

know, hard she looks now, how. And

27:43

she thinks it's like she's older and

27:45

more mature, but

27:47

her caring for the English patient is

27:49

depicted as kind of childlike and simple

27:51

in a way that she's like hungry

27:53

for. So it's actually

27:56

that she is like stalling, growing

27:58

up and processing her pain. Um,

28:02

and she, you know,

28:04

has been putting off writing back to

28:07

her stepmother, whom she doesn't care for

28:09

because she doesn't want to confront the

28:12

world that will exist after

28:14

the war is over. Yeah.

28:17

Um, and she got it like she's

28:19

a pretty good encapsulation of like, she

28:23

has some, I don't, I don't want

28:26

to be here. I don't want to

28:28

think about what the world could be.

28:31

I would prefer to exist in this

28:33

like liminal state where I'm

28:36

keeping this guy alive to what

28:38

end? No one has any idea. I'm

28:41

not part of a community. Like

28:43

my vocation, I've abandoned my actual vocation

28:45

and I'm just kind of doing this

28:47

work on my own. Uh,

28:50

and like everyone in this book

28:54

is kind of

28:56

like out of the normal hierarchy

28:59

or what you might expect the

29:01

teams to be in the

29:03

conflict of World War II. It's

29:06

not, it's not that any of them are like, you

29:09

know, Nazis are cool. Like it's not,

29:11

it's not that, but

29:14

there is this romanticization

29:17

of spaces

29:20

where like national identity

29:22

don't matter as much. Yeah.

29:24

Um, well, and all that stuff is

29:26

so probably feels so

29:28

like up in the air. Yes. That's

29:31

part of it. For a lot of reasons right now. Anyway.

29:34

Yeah. Um, we do get some

29:36

passages about her dad, uh, and

29:39

just kind of like her thinking

29:41

here. He was probably a, you know,

29:43

overall a pretty good guy on balance

29:45

and, um, was

29:47

not the type of person

29:49

that she had encountered elsewhere in the

29:51

world. And that just

29:54

bookmarked this paragraph because it did make me

29:56

laugh. Um, did he move

29:58

toward his death with the same. a

30:00

casual sense of being there at an

30:02

accident or in fury. He

30:04

was the least furious man she knew,

30:06

hating argument, just walking out of a

30:09

room if someone spoke badly of Roosevelt

30:11

or Timbuk or praised certain Toronto mayors.

30:14

He had never attempted to convert anyone

30:16

in his life, just bandaging or celebrating

30:18

events that occurred near him, that was

30:20

all. Just

30:23

a real go along to get along guy,

30:25

not without convictions, but not here to disrupt

30:28

things. I like

30:30

the visual of him just walking out of the

30:32

room if you talk about a mayor that he

30:34

doesn't like. Yeah, that's pretty good, I'm

30:36

not gonna fight you, but I don't have to be here.

30:39

Yeah, just because I feel like it's a

30:41

statement in and of itself in a way that he wouldn't

30:44

want it to be. And

30:47

then where she winds up

30:49

over the course of the novel is she

30:52

has a relationship with each

30:54

of the men that is

30:56

unique, she's obviously this caregiver

30:59

for the English patient himself, she

31:01

thinks she might be in love with him or is she in

31:04

love with the act of caring for him? When

31:06

Caravaggio shows up, he is a friend of

31:09

her father's from the first novel in this

31:11

two part series, this franchise, right? When

31:17

he first shows up, he knew her as

31:19

a kid, so it's not like he is

31:22

creepily in love with her, but he is

31:24

now encountering her as a woman like she

31:27

had feelings for him as just an older man

31:29

in her life who cared for her sort of

31:31

thing. By

31:33

the end of the book, that has very quickly

31:36

sorted itself out to he is acting as like

31:38

an uncle who is like finding himself, finding

31:41

what that means for him emotionally.

31:43

Yeah, okay. And then we have

31:46

Kip who is Kerple Singh

31:48

who is the Indian Sikh that she's

31:50

gonna have a romantic relationship with. And

31:54

that will complicate things a bit.

31:58

Caravaggio is interesting. Again,

32:00

I didn't latch on to him as much

32:03

as maybe I might have if I had read about

32:05

him in a prior book He's

32:07

a thief It's kind

32:09

of neat that like his profession his

32:11

vocation is thief his class. Yes, he

32:14

rolled a thief He

32:17

knew Hannah's dad. He was recruited

32:19

into the British intelligence because of

32:21

his experience and reputation as a

32:24

thief But

32:26

when we meet him he had been

32:28

caught by the Italians had

32:31

had his thumbs cut off as

32:33

part of an interrogation and Just

32:37

maybe because of that maybe because of the

32:39

war he just has lost his nerve

32:41

as a thief and has

32:44

developed an addiction to morphine himself. Yeah,

32:46

and She

32:48

Hannah does point out to him at

32:51

one point that like

32:54

One of the things that always held him back

32:56

or at least complicated his thievery was that he

32:58

would Be distracted by the

33:00

human element. He might like Fix

33:03

an advent calendar in your house. That was

33:05

a day late like while he's stealing something

33:07

from your kitchen He

33:09

would like conscientious thief have a conversation

33:12

with someone that showed up rather than

33:14

like being violent or just running out

33:16

the window Which

33:18

does lead of it kind of complicates when

33:21

he gets caught He's like a thief with

33:23

high charisma who then rolled bad once well

33:25

And he yes exactly and then and then

33:27

he decides to keep role playing like the

33:29

fact that he rolls bad, right? But

33:33

he is there because he was in

33:35

a hospital. He heard the story about

33:38

Hannah caring for the English patient He

33:40

realizes that sounds like his you

33:42

know late friend's daughter He's gonna go look

33:45

her up and find her And

33:47

then he encounters the English patient and

33:49

he is the first person in our

33:52

main cast list to Go,

33:54

I don't think this guy is English. I

33:56

think sure I think I might know who

33:58

who he is And

34:02

then there's Kip who I really like.

34:04

I think he is like the book for

34:06

me. I

34:09

really liked his chapters. He's a young guy

34:11

from India who his

34:14

family, like as he recounts

34:16

it is like, yeah, you know, the first person's

34:18

supposed to be a doctor. The second son's supposed

34:20

to be a businessman. The third

34:22

son is supposed to do what, you

34:24

know, like they're like prescripted roles for

34:27

the sons in the family. Yeah,

34:29

but he instead wants

34:33

to enlist and like

34:35

he's got like an engineering brain

34:38

and he winds up going to Britain

34:40

to study with this guy who was

34:42

real Lord Suffolk. I

34:46

think that's, you know, the version of him

34:48

that we meet in the book is sort

34:50

of fictionalized, but there was a real guy,

34:52

Charles Jack Henry, George Howard, 20th Earl of

34:54

Suffolk. Yeah, everything I've

34:57

read about this, the real world version

34:59

of this guy is like, yeah, the

35:01

English patient is highly, highly fictionalized version

35:06

of somebody a lot like him. And

35:09

so Kip, he's, you know, he's curple,

35:12

but then somebody makes a reference to

35:14

like Kipper. And

35:16

so they start calling him Kip and

35:19

he adopts kind of this British moniker. And

35:22

he is breaking from his

35:24

family. He has a very like Indian nationalist

35:26

brother who is very skeptical of any Western

35:28

interest. And also

35:31

he's encountering, you know, racism

35:33

from white British people as he's

35:36

moving through their school and enlisting

35:38

under Lord Suffolk. But

35:40

Suffolk likes him and it

35:42

kind of becomes a father figure to him. He's

35:45

very, very good at diffusing bombs

35:47

and thinking about bombs. And

35:50

the way that this book, like, I

35:52

was trying to think, I know I watched

35:54

The Hurt Locker. I

35:57

was trying to think of other like

35:59

bomb diffusal fiction. that isn't just like

36:01

three episodes of every season of 24.

36:04

Like I wasn't, that

36:06

actually really, I guess there's

36:08

a scene in Executive Decision which is

36:11

just like Tom Clancy nonsense. Like I

36:13

don't have a lot of frames of

36:15

reference for thinking

36:17

about bomb defusal in

36:19

a serious character driven way that is just the Hurt

36:21

Locker. That's the only one I can think of. Okay,

36:23

yeah and I mean off the top of my head

36:25

I can't think of anything either. It's just like, usually

36:28

when people are diffusing a bomb, there's

36:30

a lot of yelling about what color

36:32

of wire that you cut or don't cut. And

36:36

that's, yeah, that's what it brings to mind for

36:38

me. And that's part of this book. And what's

36:40

interesting is all, almost

36:42

all of the bomb defusal scenes, all

36:45

of which I found very compelling and

36:47

captivating are in the past. There's only

36:50

one, maybe two that occur like in

36:52

the present of the novel. And

36:55

despite that, I found all of them like

36:57

very tense. Like I know

36:59

this guy's gonna get out of it because

37:01

he's telling me that like this is a

37:04

story he's telling Hannah at some point, right?

37:06

Yeah. But

37:08

the way it's talked about and the

37:10

way that it is explained

37:13

to you, the reader through his

37:15

perspective is just very interesting. And

37:19

you get very invested in his like

37:23

abilities and his story. I can elaborate on that in

37:26

just a second, but I wanna set up how he

37:28

comes into the book. Suffolk

37:31

dies in a tragic bomb

37:34

defusal failure. One of the

37:36

only ways you learn about whether or not you

37:38

know how to defuse bombs correctly is by failing,

37:41

unfortunately. Yeah, and it's not

37:44

conducive to a lot of do overs. No,

37:46

one of the like relationships that's depicted during

37:49

one defusal is that Kip

37:51

is diffusing a bomb inside of a big chasm,

37:54

like a big like pit

37:56

that they've dug around it so

37:59

that if it... explodes like all of the force

38:01

will just go up rather than like out and

38:04

there's a guy outside the pit that Kip is like

38:06

yelling all of his stuff to So

38:09

that he can write it down God forbid Kip

38:11

dies and they don't learn anything from what happened

38:13

Like that's kind of the thing that the book

38:15

sets up sure He

38:18

is after Suffolk dies he moves

38:21

to a to a unit in Italy and As

38:24

I mentioned before so like when he's

38:26

working in Britain It's because of all

38:28

the bombs from the blitz that have

38:30

just not detonated that are just all

38:33

over London or whatever Yeah, yeah in

38:35

Italy it is the retreating

38:37

Germans have left all of these explosives

38:40

Yeah, just to slow the march through

38:43

Italy. So it is

38:45

this interesting like the war in

38:47

this area is over and Yet,

38:49

there's a bunch of violence just sitting

38:51

around waiting. I Found

38:54

it a very potent metaphor for like the

38:56

trauma of all these characters have dealt with

38:58

that like It's just sitting

39:00

there waiting to go off if it gets

39:02

messed with it's also like

39:05

I don't know this this you read about this

39:08

kind of mining of of territory

39:11

just so just

39:13

to create fear and and You

39:17

know down your your enemy like this is

39:19

still happening kind of in like you've been

39:21

and all kinds of other conflicts so like

39:23

oh Very much with

39:25

us like this specific thing does not

39:27

is not like a past memory. Unfortunately.

39:30

Yeah the the Yes,

39:33

the the example that feels very relevant

39:35

to recent current events as we record

39:37

here in September 2024 is the

39:42

story Kip tells of his

39:44

unit Learning

39:46

that like bombs are displaced everywhere

39:49

in abandoned villages like inside homes

39:51

like in a on a bookshelf

39:54

and that the only way to know that

39:57

Something was clear is if a diffuser had

39:59

like left some sort of mark

40:03

that it was like, I think they said like

40:05

it's pointed towards four o'clock or something like that's

40:07

just kind of a code that they used to

40:09

like you would see a pen like spun

40:12

a certain way on a desk to tell

40:14

you that like you don't have to worry

40:16

about this room but it just becomes a

40:18

way that he views the world or just

40:20

interesting because that is

40:22

a pain and a reality that he carries

40:25

with him but when you see Kip in

40:27

the first half of the book like showing

40:29

up to hang out with these

40:31

people for various meal times he does seem

40:34

at least pretty affable and like not

40:38

jovial but not weighed

40:40

down the same way the others are and then

40:42

you you know peel them like an

40:44

onion you know and you find

40:46

the layers Oregon or an ogre or

40:49

no and you find out what he's

40:51

kind of been hiding but he he

40:53

uncovered he doesn't uncover them but he

40:56

stumbles upon this group of people Hannah

40:58

Caravaggio who has shown up by this

41:00

point and the English patient because he

41:03

is coming to this region of Tuscany

41:05

with his unit and he

41:08

hears Hannah playing

41:10

a piano and he and

41:14

one of his buddies like roll up

41:16

there because they know that sometimes they

41:18

left bombs and instruments and stuff yeah

41:20

and instead just is like oh there

41:22

are people here they are

41:24

interesting I will you know stay here

41:26

and just kind of focus my efforts

41:28

in this area and then he befriends

41:30

the English patient who becomes kind of

41:32

another Lord Suffolk figure where they

41:34

can talk bombs and you

41:37

know talk about interesting stuff that's

41:40

like this love people just love to

41:42

come in and emotionally attach themselves to

41:44

this yes like formless dying

41:46

nameless man in a bed

41:48

yep bit of a black

41:50

slate he is huh yeah

41:53

and the the

41:56

relationship between Kip and Hannah starts

41:58

because he is like different fusing

42:00

a bomb one day and get

42:02

stuck holding like two live wires

42:05

and just starts yelling because

42:07

he needs someone to take one of them

42:10

so that he can actually do anything about

42:12

it. Yeah. And she is holding them. He

42:14

solves it. And then afterwards

42:17

she's like kind of wish wouldn't

42:20

it would have been interesting if you hadn't

42:22

solved it. That would have

42:24

been interesting for both. Yes. Interesting.

42:26

Interesting. And then they're like and

42:28

he kind of resents her at first

42:30

for like forging this connection between

42:32

the two of them in this like way

42:34

where he saved her but also she forced

42:37

him to save her. And then they start

42:39

spending time together and develop a relationship that

42:41

is physical and emotional and

42:43

all things that that evolved from there.

42:45

Yeah. So those

42:47

are our four main characters. We meet some

42:50

other people in the various backstories folks like

42:52

Lord Suffolk folks like Hannah's dad but all

42:55

of the other characters who like somewhat

42:57

matter are encapsulated

42:59

in the back story of

43:01

the English patient himself. And

43:04

we've learned you know we the reader and

43:07

Hannah learn bits and pieces of his back

43:09

story through her reading

43:14

snippets of books to him

43:16

particularly this copy of Herodotus's

43:19

histories. Is that a

43:21

book you ever read in your classics time

43:23

Andrew. You know. Yeah I read some read

43:25

some Herodotus in my day a chronicler

43:28

from Rome Greece. Greece

43:32

Rome. I think he's great.

43:34

I think he's Greek. I think he's a Greekan. Yes

43:38

he's a Greek historian and

43:40

geographer. OK. Harley cannot

43:42

Carnassus the thing that connects

43:44

Herodotus the father of history.

43:47

Oh oh sorry. This

43:49

is this is the thing that Cicero

43:51

called him. Well OK. Fair enough. Yeah

43:53

I'm sure there have been some other

43:56

historical fathers since then Cicero. But

44:00

this dude loves Herodotus. He's got a copy

44:02

of the histories that he has written, a

44:04

bunch of notes in himself that he's copied

44:06

and pasted, you know, done some collage work

44:08

inside of it. And

44:11

Hannah reads to him from it sometimes

44:13

and then it causes him to like

44:15

start musing about his backstory

44:17

and spilling tea and whatnot. And

44:22

he talks about how he used to travel

44:24

with this crew of people in the Libyan

44:26

desert, how he was

44:28

like a cartographer and an explorer. You

44:31

know, they would camp in Cairo and then go

44:33

off on adventures and like look for oases and

44:35

things like that. And

44:37

he loved someone and it was

44:40

tragic. Oh no. And

44:43

he starts to tell versions of this story.

44:45

And this is where the book, we're

44:48

like our discussion of it will be spoilery.

44:50

So if you are at all like, I

44:53

don't know, I don't think it's crucial to enjoying the book. And

44:56

the book spins like, well, who is he sort

44:58

of as a mystery? But it's not. I

45:01

don't think it's like a mystery

45:04

mystery. Yeah, my yeah, my

45:06

impression of it is that it's it's got

45:08

the set up of like a thing with

45:10

a mystery and a twist, but

45:13

it's not really how the book operates. No,

45:16

it's not. Especially once

45:18

Caravaggio shows up and is like, I

45:20

don't think this guy's English. I think something else is

45:22

going on. And so you

45:25

know that there's going to be a shoe that

45:27

that drops. So here's a

45:29

version of here's like the version

45:32

of his story from my notes that

45:35

gets more details filled

45:37

in the more morphine that's pumped

45:39

into him as the way the book

45:41

goes. Cool. He's

45:44

out in the desert with his

45:46

crew of guys. This is pre World War Two.

45:49

The 30s are this hop, you

45:51

know, hopping time for exploring the desert

45:54

and then selling your maps back to

45:56

people in Europe. It's just a

45:58

cool time for. late

46:00

colonialism, I guess, late

46:03

British colonialism. And

46:05

this couple, the Clifton's, who

46:08

just recently got married after they left

46:10

Oxford and are gonna go on their

46:13

honeymoon of sorts, they

46:16

have a plane and Jeffrey Clifton

46:18

is like, I'm gonna go to Northern

46:20

Africa with my wife, with my new

46:22

wife, Catherine, and we're gonna join

46:24

up with these guys. And

46:27

to me, it just kind of reminds me of the

46:29

trick that William H. Macy and Taylor Leone play at

46:31

the beginning of Jurassic Park 3. Go

46:33

watch that film. You'll understand what I'm talking about. I

46:36

do not know what you're talking about. They make a

46:39

preposition to Dr. Grant that later turns out to be

46:41

a ruse as

46:43

they bring him back to an island of dinosaurs. Oh

46:45

boy. Well, I'm glad that

46:47

we picked a relatable, widely

46:49

understood reference. If

46:53

sometimes this podcast is about the experience of reading a book, and

46:55

I'm just here to tell you that if you see Jurassic Park

46:57

3 and you read the beginning of this chapter, it'll be hard

46:59

not to think of Jurassic Park 3. Sure,

47:01

yeah, yeah. They

47:04

are newlyweds, as I said, and Catherine,

47:07

like this some early encounter

47:11

reads some of the Herodotus, and

47:14

it is very moving to our

47:16

English patient. She has read a

47:18

section that he used to skip

47:20

over himself, has to do

47:22

with love. She's doing a wonderful

47:24

job. He can't help falling for her. Their

47:27

relationship is very messy. They

47:30

do embark on an affair together,

47:33

and he is

47:35

interested in her, but he doesn't really know how to actually

47:39

be intimate. Yeah. Emotionally.

47:43

And Jeffrey,

47:45

the husband, like goes away on his

47:47

plane at one point, and so

47:50

they're spending time together. She wants him

47:52

to change and kind of escalate in her

47:54

relationship, but he won't. She is kind of a violent

47:56

person and likes dabbing and punching him at one point,

47:58

and he has to, he can't really explain. explain his

48:00

injuries. They cut it off and

48:03

the war is breaking out so this

48:05

whole operation is kind of coming to

48:07

a close anyway. Like, there's

48:10

this, some of the

48:12

people in this explorer group are from

48:14

different backgrounds in Europe and like battle

48:16

lines are getting drawn unclear

48:18

how this is gonna go. But this is in like the late

48:21

30s. And

48:25

the husband learns

48:28

about the affair and

48:32

kills himself and tries to kill her in a

48:34

plane crash with

48:38

his plane. You later find

48:40

out that he also was trying to

48:42

like use the plane to land on

48:44

the English patient and kill him, did

48:46

not work. Oh wow, that's okay.

48:50

Did not work and also she did not die.

48:53

And so later when the morphine is really

48:55

hitting him and you're getting

48:57

the truest version of the story

48:59

quote unquote, he talks about, he

49:02

saves her sort of, he

49:04

takes her to this place called the Cave of

49:06

Swimmers which is this real

49:09

cave that's like very impactful in

49:11

our discovery of neolithic art where

49:14

a bunch of people have bent elbows and they're stick

49:16

figures so we think they're swimming but we don't know

49:18

if there was a lake there. It's all kind of

49:20

interesting. And

49:23

he goes to go get help but

49:26

he gives them his last name. He gives

49:28

them a name that was not her British

49:31

name and so they

49:33

think he's a spy of some sort or

49:35

working for a different country and so they

49:37

lock him up and take him away and

49:39

it's years before he gets back to her

49:42

doing something else and

49:46

she has passed away. He tries

49:48

to take her body with

49:51

him in some plane that was buried

49:53

in the sand for like later I

49:55

guess. Okay, what

49:57

final fantasy game is this from? Yeah, well the

49:59

thing. is is like it doesn't work now like

50:01

it gets up into the air and then oil

50:04

starts falling out of it because it's buried in

50:06

the ground and So

50:08

it bursts into flames and that's you know

50:10

he falls and that's why he is the

50:12

English patient man that he is Mm-hmm

50:15

and Caravaggio is ha ha ha

50:18

I know who you are You

50:20

are count Dalmasi

50:23

Lynett lattice loss Dalmasi a

50:25

Hungarian count and yeah,

50:27

I know of the desert. I'd figure that

50:29

out like Back in

50:31

the beginning of the it's not synopsis like

50:34

he was really obvious to me Caravaggio does

50:36

say this to Hannah before he starts loading up

50:39

the patient with morphine like in a previous scene

50:41

He's like I think he might be this guy

50:44

And hands like I don't know what you're talking about doesn't matter

50:46

I love caring for this man, and also I love sleeping with

50:48

Kip like what are you doing? I Have

50:52

a great life I'm

50:56

totally fine Hospital I'm 20 my life is

50:58

I have nothing but good things ahead of

51:00

me with all the decisions. I've made and

51:03

the Caravaggio reveals that

51:08

British intelligence knew about Almasi

51:12

Knew about his relationship with

51:14

the Clifton's who were also

51:16

British intelligence at least George

51:18

Elise Jeffrey was sure and

51:21

that he knew that they knew after

51:24

That plane went down and the guy died

51:26

and the next time he went through the

51:29

desert Almasi did he was

51:31

doing it he was guiding German spies

51:33

through the desert Under

51:35

the direction of Rommel and the Nazi or

51:37

man. Yeah, not cool and

51:42

That like all this kind of stuff is like

51:44

known This is based on a

51:47

real guy Laszlo Almasi

51:49

who did not get burned and and did not die until 1951,

51:51

but he was a real Explorer

51:55

of the desert and did find this

51:58

cave and did write about that this

52:00

cave and did help Nazis navigate the

52:02

desert. And

52:04

I found an article about a

52:07

biography of him that was published

52:09

and sometime the 2000 to 2010. It's like, yeah, I found

52:12

all this evidence that like, yes, he

52:14

definitely did do those things. There's also

52:16

hard evidence that like, he'd

52:19

helped some Hungarian Jews escape to safety

52:21

or like, you know, hid them from

52:23

prosecution and things like that. When

52:26

some you lose some, you can

52:28

say what the morally Yeah. So

52:32

standing thing is to do the thing

52:34

that is like depicted here as a

52:36

character of the of the

52:38

English patient is that he he does

52:41

love the desert and he loves it

52:43

as a symbol for a place without

52:48

nationhood or

52:50

the the baggage that comes with

52:52

it. So for

52:54

him, morally, it

52:56

is okay to guide that Nazi

52:59

through the desert because he needs because

53:01

everybody going in the desert needs a

53:04

guide sort of thing. Yeah. But also,

53:06

he participated

53:09

in this affair that drove this

53:11

guy bonkers and he tried, you

53:14

know, crashed his plane because of

53:16

it. And so

53:18

he's he's this like, romantic

53:20

tragic figure. I don't know. I read like one

53:23

or two articles. They're like, he's the protagonist. I

53:25

don't think he's the protagonist of the story. I

53:27

think he's just the guy who the most story

53:29

happened to, you know,

53:32

sure. And

53:35

then so we've learned who

53:38

he is. It's kind

53:41

of doesn't really changed

53:43

too many relationships, though

53:45

it does make Kip feel

53:48

differently about him. And Hannah's kind of

53:50

a little like, I don't know what

53:52

to do now, but

53:54

the big like

53:58

the change that happens at the end the book

54:00

is Kip who

54:03

has already had one or two very dramatic bomb

54:06

defusals in the present tense. Yeah.

54:08

He whenever he does bomb defusals now

54:10

he listens to his like radio

54:13

headset that will give

54:15

him sometimes it gives him like pop

54:17

music from whatever like nearby station is

54:19

playing it like you know whatever swing

54:21

is playing over the over the airwaves

54:23

these days and sometimes he's getting reports

54:25

just back on you know the home

54:28

front and whatever and there's

54:30

this really cool scene cool in the sense that

54:32

it is like well written where

54:35

he they just hear him screaming out there

54:37

and they're like that's weird like if a

54:39

bomb went off we'd hear the bomb like

54:41

what what is he yelling about sure and

54:44

he's holding his headphones to his ears and

54:46

just screaming and he runs in with his gun

54:48

and he runs up and he

54:50

looks like he's gonna shoot the English patient and

54:54

he has learned about Nagasaki

54:56

and Hiroshima and

54:59

he is you know in he's an Indian

55:01

guy in a room with three white people and

55:04

he is like I can't forgive

55:07

any of you this is

55:10

unbelievable I basically like disconnected

55:12

myself from my entire heritage to be

55:14

here to work for you kind of

55:17

a sense of like moral good making

55:20

bombs not exist and

55:23

his art like his feeling in that

55:26

moment is that they

55:28

would never have done this to a white nation

55:30

like that's what he says yeah

55:34

they would have done it already if they wanted

55:36

to he thinks yeah and

55:40

that that payoff of the radio is one

55:42

of the reasons I think it's like very

55:44

well written because it is a character trait

55:46

that doesn't really serve up a

55:48

plot purpose at all until the exact

55:50

moment that it does at the end of the book

55:52

sure so he just like

55:55

he has this big freak out where he's almost

55:57

gonna shoot the English patient doesn't he and

56:00

Hannah split, he, you know, abandons

56:02

Caravaggio. He gets on a motorcycle

56:04

and just rides away and just like completely leaves

56:06

them behind. And then

56:09

you get this like Animal House style

56:11

ending where you get little snippets. That's

56:14

very reductive of me. Yeah. But it

56:16

kind of is. But in the

56:19

sense that like there's not a lot

56:21

of book left after like each person maybe gets like

56:23

two pages at most like that. That's what struck me

56:25

about it. And maybe I'm thinking

56:27

Jurassic Park three. This book is given Big

56:29

Animal House. You know, thinking about Jurassic Park.

56:33

Hannah finally decides to send letters home

56:35

and is going to maybe we would

56:37

believe make her way back to either

56:39

Toronto or maybe she's going to go

56:41

to England. Caravaggio

56:44

builds a little like rope bridge

56:46

to a neighboring villa. Like that's

56:48

all we get of him in

56:50

the last image. Very

56:52

poetic metaphor of like connection

56:55

to another community after someone who

56:57

has, you know, been

57:00

living a life completely cut

57:02

off from other people. The

57:04

English patient is alone in his room, being

57:07

visited by some sort of specter or

57:09

figure in the night. I

57:11

don't think it's real. I think it's like

57:13

an emotional truth that is him thinking about

57:16

what he's done to Kip. And

57:19

then you get Kip married living back

57:21

in India. He's a doctor and

57:23

he is thinking of Hannah sometimes.

57:25

And the interesting

57:28

thing that Andaji likes to

57:30

do in scenes like

57:32

that and in some scenes where the

57:34

English patient talks about falling in love

57:37

is he gives it this kind of metaphysical quality

57:39

where like the characters can kind

57:42

of see

57:44

across time, like see versions of

57:46

other people they love, like across

57:48

time. And it's not a thing

57:50

that it's like you're

57:52

like the book isn't clearly telling

57:55

you whether it's

57:58

an imagination of what could. be or if

58:00

it's just like because he cares about this

58:02

person enough he can just kind of see

58:04

what's happening to them or something. So

58:08

Kip is kind of seeing a version of

58:10

Hannah's life at the end of the book

58:12

and when Almasi does it, the English patient,

58:14

he talks about like when he fell in

58:16

love with Catherine, a version

58:19

of himself could like picture their

58:22

like like he'd known them as

58:24

children or something like their whole life like and

58:27

he talks about it like there's like a ghost

58:29

version of himself that came into existence that's been

58:31

here for years. Just kind of like some interesting

58:35

poetic stuff. There's

58:38

two things I wanted to ask about

58:40

like yeah, but before we're done. So

58:42

there's one critique

58:46

that I read a couple times that was always phrased

58:48

in a like if I had to say something bad

58:50

about this. Oh sure. Kind of way it would be

58:52

this. People feel generally

58:55

and this is true across the 92

58:57

New York Times review of the book.

58:59

So you're going to say the 92

59:01

reviews that you. The

59:05

19 the the review

59:07

that the New York Times published in the year 1992.

59:09

OK. Yes. And also the Guardian thing from 2011 where

59:15

somebody was just reading through all the Booker Prize

59:18

books and reviewing them. The

59:20

ending especially specifically

59:23

the bomb dropping bit

59:26

seemed to people to be

59:28

a little pat or even

59:30

I think tacked on with

59:32

something. Oh, you said it's

59:34

just like very it's just very different from the rest

59:36

of the book and it exists kind

59:38

of to put a button on things. So that was

59:40

the first thing I wanted to ask about. Then the

59:42

second thing I wanted to ask about so you can

59:45

think about it while you're answering the first question is

59:47

just like the pros the language like what was it.

59:49

People talk about the way this book

59:51

is written as being a big like point

59:54

in favor of it. And I'm curious if you felt

59:57

that way. Sure.

59:59

I'll Take the

1:00:01

one of those you feel more comfortable answering first,

1:00:03

I guess. I'll try to answer the first one

1:00:05

first. I think

1:00:07

the reason that the bomb-dropping stuff stands

1:00:09

out is because this is not a

1:00:12

book where a lot of things in

1:00:14

the present tense happen. Yeah,

1:00:17

it seems like the only reason it can

1:00:19

be as quiet as it is is because

1:00:21

most of the actual war has moved on

1:00:23

to elsewhere. And so the most

1:00:25

dramatic events that happen in the book are,

1:00:27

as I said, Kip's

1:00:30

various bomb-diffusal scenes, the

1:00:33

planes crashing in the English

1:00:35

patients, recounting of what happened

1:00:38

to him. But

1:00:41

the thing with Kip is happening in the

1:00:43

present tense. He hears it on the radio.

1:00:45

He picks up a gun. He runs into

1:00:48

a room. It does feel a bit more

1:00:51

like the climactic scene in

1:00:53

a play, I guess, where all

1:00:56

of the you've heard everybody's

1:00:58

character revealing monologues. And now

1:01:00

the thing happens that is

1:01:02

going to end the play

1:01:04

in whatever way it's going to end.

1:01:07

Is someone going to shoot someone? Is

1:01:09

someone going to act on love in a way

1:01:11

that they haven't before? So

1:01:15

I do think by its

1:01:17

very nature of being a much

1:01:19

more active scene,

1:01:22

I think that could probably rub

1:01:25

people the wrong way or just feel out of place. I

1:01:28

thought the it is

1:01:31

also a book where you don't get a

1:01:33

lot about the outside world.

1:01:35

The point is all these characters are in

1:01:38

this kind of hermetic memory

1:01:40

space. And so the

1:01:43

intrusion of the atom

1:01:45

bomb feels

1:01:48

appropriately very disruptive.

1:01:51

To me, it was a real wonderfully

1:01:53

written payoff of the whole

1:01:55

bomb metaphor and motif. So

1:01:57

I didn't find it like.

1:02:01

I didn't find it, Pat. I

1:02:05

found it like an escalation

1:02:08

of what the book was like. Everyone

1:02:10

was kind of not talking about the

1:02:14

active horrors of the ongoing war. And

1:02:16

also this book never talks about the

1:02:18

Holocaust. Like in

1:02:20

any frank terms whatsoever. So like that

1:02:23

was another interesting,

1:02:26

we're talking about, it's

1:02:28

a book from the 90s about World War II, like I

1:02:30

kind of expected it to hit on

1:02:33

that at all somehow. Yeah, like I guess I

1:02:36

don't, I don't know enough to

1:02:38

say. Nope, I don't,

1:02:40

yeah. Yeah, like how, like if he's

1:02:42

trying for a verisimilitude thing and maybe

1:02:44

the like full extent of the atrocities

1:02:46

was not yet known to these characters

1:02:49

or they're just like so concerned

1:02:51

with their own immediate like traumas and

1:02:53

horrors that they just don't have the

1:02:55

space to contemplate anything else yet. Like

1:02:57

maybe that's the. That's

1:03:00

the reasoning for it. Or maybe it's just

1:03:02

like, this isn't what the

1:03:04

book is about and I don't wanna like do

1:03:06

a bad job

1:03:08

with something that. Yes, also

1:03:10

possible. Yeah, that would kind of

1:03:13

buy the, buy dint of

1:03:15

how huge and horrible it is like

1:03:18

take focus from the

1:03:20

story that I am telling. So yeah, I

1:03:22

don't know. And I think I just, I

1:03:24

hungered for some more like, in

1:03:27

the first half of the book I was like, where is

1:03:29

this going? When is it gonna get there? And so then

1:03:31

to get a scene at the end that is like, boom,

1:03:33

boom, boom, like stuff is moving

1:03:35

was kind of refreshing to the

1:03:38

style and language of the book.

1:03:40

Yeah, and it's, he's, there's, I'll just read

1:03:42

you a couple of things from the NYC

1:03:45

Review to give you a sense of what

1:03:47

he's talking about. This is of

1:03:49

Ondaje. He has a genuine affinity for

1:03:51

the romantic temperament of the 1940s

1:03:54

inside his theater of war. The drama that

1:03:56

plays is one of glorious but impossible loves

1:03:58

evoking at times the nostalgic appeal of Casa.

1:04:00

Blanca or South Pacific. But

1:04:03

when the characters talk together, they have a

1:04:05

tendency toward melodramatic statements in very formal language.

1:04:07

But then one things was there once a

1:04:09

time when people finished all their sentences in

1:04:11

good order. So so just maybe

1:04:14

a sense that people speak to each

1:04:16

other in a way that is a little too like

1:04:18

Florida or writerly. Yeah,

1:04:20

I don't I don't know

1:04:22

that I have a an

1:04:25

easy. Pull

1:04:28

for that. OK, but

1:04:31

I do think

1:04:33

I have some other. I

1:04:36

have stuff that I like. I really liked

1:04:38

about the language. That's I'm I'm not. Yeah,

1:04:40

I'm just trying to I'm trying to push

1:04:42

you to have a reaction.

1:04:44

Oh, yeah, I can

1:04:46

see that. I can I can see what

1:04:49

that is saying, because yes, this is

1:04:52

not a book that

1:04:54

is like overly concerned about styles

1:04:57

of speech or

1:04:59

like conveying. I

1:05:02

don't know. It does feel like

1:05:04

it is comfortable being melodramatic. OK,

1:05:07

some of the stuff. I

1:05:09

will continue actually a passage from from

1:05:12

what I said earlier. This is about

1:05:14

the apocalyptic kind of scene of the

1:05:16

space. Hannah is saying, you

1:05:18

know, they were protected by the simple fact that

1:05:20

the villa seemed to ruin, but she felt safe

1:05:22

here half adult and half child coming out of

1:05:25

what had happened to her during the war. She

1:05:27

drew her own few rules to herself. She would

1:05:29

not be ordered again or carry out duties for

1:05:31

the greater good. She would care only for the

1:05:33

burned patient. She would read to him and bathe

1:05:36

him and give him his doses of morphine. Her

1:05:38

only communication was with him. And it's like an

1:05:40

introduction to her as a character. OK,

1:05:43

Kip, the stuff from

1:05:45

Kip that I liked was like how it talked

1:05:47

about bombs and

1:05:49

how it talked about engineering. You

1:05:54

talk about when you're like learning how

1:05:56

to diffuse bombs, they

1:05:58

he compares it to bridge sometimes. for my

1:06:00

exam I make them play bridge. People think

1:06:02

a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical

1:06:04

enemy, but you have to consider that somebody

1:06:06

made it. He talks about it being like

1:06:08

a two-player game of bridge where you have

1:06:10

no partners, but you do

1:06:13

have to like figure out what the

1:06:15

other person is doing. Yeah. And then

1:06:17

there's this other passage about why

1:06:19

he was a good engineer and it

1:06:22

being coming from an engineering culture out

1:06:24

of scarcity rather than

1:06:26

like British like

1:06:29

surfeit of resources. Most

1:06:32

people in his village were more likely

1:06:34

to carry a spanner or screwdriver than

1:06:36

a pencil. A car's irrelevant parts thus

1:06:38

entered a grandfather clock or irrigation pulley

1:06:40

or the spinning mechanism of an office

1:06:42

chair. Antidotes to mechanized

1:06:44

disaster were easily found. One

1:06:46

cooled an overheating car engine not with new

1:06:49

rubber hoses but by scooping up cow and

1:06:52

putting it around the condenser. What

1:06:54

he saw in England was a surfeit of

1:06:57

parts that would keep the continent of India

1:06:59

going for 200 years. Yeah. No,

1:07:02

I think I can't

1:07:04

quite respond to the overly romantic stuff. I don't

1:07:06

have a good quote for that pulled but I

1:07:09

do I did find the

1:07:11

book at its most compelling kind

1:07:14

of those little moments of

1:07:16

insight from mostly

1:07:19

Kip and the English patient around. Sure. You

1:07:22

know what? And as a poet

1:07:24

by yeah, that seems like

1:07:26

poetry is maybe his first love

1:07:28

and the thing he's most prolific in. Yes.

1:07:31

So if his prose has a certain you

1:07:33

know lyricism to it then you know

1:07:36

we can forgive that. I think

1:07:38

so. I'm glad you enjoyed

1:07:40

it. I did. I did. I'm just looking

1:07:42

at a line. In one world soil rich

1:07:44

area beside the house she began a garden

1:07:47

with a furious passion that could only

1:07:49

come to someone who had grown up in

1:07:51

a city. Someone who loves

1:07:53

the garden because they did not

1:07:55

have whatever. Yeah. It's

1:07:58

a dreamy book. I found the first half of it a little bit. difficult

1:08:00

to kind of make headway through and then as

1:08:02

I got to know the characters I was pulled

1:08:05

forward by it. Yeah

1:08:07

sounds like just there are

1:08:09

a couple different interesting comparison points with this and

1:08:11

Clockwork Orange and one one thing they have in

1:08:14

common is that for very different reasons it's hard

1:08:16

to get started with them and

1:08:18

then the other one is the

1:08:20

authors had very different relationships with

1:08:22

the the movie adaptations. Yeah fair

1:08:26

fair yeah um well that's our

1:08:28

coverage of The English Patient. Hope

1:08:30

that you have been patient with

1:08:32

us. Yeah we're here covering it. It's

1:08:34

a I don't know our ongoing coverage

1:08:37

of The English Patient. If

1:08:39

you have read the book or seen the

1:08:41

film you want to tell us what we

1:08:44

missed what we didn't talk about your favorite

1:08:46

part send us an email overduepod@gmail.com hit us

1:08:48

up on social media at Overdue Pod on

1:08:50

Blue Sky and or Instagram

1:08:52

we welcome you to follow us there.

1:08:55

Our theme song is composed by Nick Lurangis.

1:08:57

Andrew if folks want to know more about

1:08:59

the show where do they go? overduepodguest.com is

1:09:01

the website we have the lists of books

1:09:03

that we have read and the ones we

1:09:05

are going to read. You

1:09:07

can look through the old episodes on there

1:09:10

too. Craig

1:09:12

will tell us about our Spooktober 2024 schedule

1:09:15

just in just a second. First I

1:09:17

want to tell you about our Patreon

1:09:19

page patreon.com/Overduepod. Support the show financially get

1:09:21

some bonus things hang out our discord

1:09:25

that kind of stuff. Yeah that's

1:09:28

it. Craig what's Spooktober? Next

1:09:30

week Tender is the Flesh by

1:09:32

Augustina Basterica then

1:09:34

Nothing but Blackened Teeth by

1:09:36

Cassandra Kaugh. Then I

1:09:38

am Legend by Richard Matheson and closing

1:09:41

out the month with Silence of the

1:09:43

Lambs by

1:09:45

Thomas Harris. Okay sorry

1:09:48

lambs. Okay

1:09:53

everybody we good we out? We're out. Okay

1:09:55

thanks for listening to our podcast for another week everyone

1:09:58

and until we talk to you next time. I'm

1:10:00

Governor, please try to be

1:10:02

happy. Isn't it? That

1:10:35

was a Headgum Podcast.