Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names. The places water came to and touched: Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by the winds, never held down by stones … It was a place of faith. When I read the novel many years ago, I loved the poetry in the narrative and I admired the nationlessness and namelessness that the desert represented for Almásy, the explorer: About a month ago I was finally able to let Ondaatje’s lyrical storytelling take me on that walk. Sometimes reading takes us out “on a walk.” For many years I had longed to return to the Egyptian-Lybian desert and to the hills of Tuscany by reading Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (1992).
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