Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

In the early precepts of the morning, before the spherical fire illuminates from the east, there lies a mist resembling a giant white sheet engulfing the plain of Florence when viewed from the vista of Villa San Girolamo. Villa San Girolamo: a resort of renaissance, a nunnery, a fortress, a makeshift hospital, a shelter to four scarred and broken silhouettes in darkness, a testament to the arduous effects of time and the slow decomposition of the past.

How do you pick up the pieces? How do you stop the nightmares? How do you recover from the grip of death? How do you carry on? Can a shadow still be pulled out of darkness?

Four enigmas: a nurse, a thief, a sapper, an English patient. Entities, barely human, all broken by their grim experiences of war, of life. All of them building walls to hide in, exteriors of detachment, distractions of duty, ebbs of morphia, and memories of the past. All living as if in a daze, a mystical dream of false pretenses and unaccepted truths. Blind, burned, deaf, thumb-less, numb. Breathing but not living.

“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.�

“…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.�

They follow this path, this mirage in the dessert of certain death treading in a slow, painful gait. Until one day something draws them out, something awakens them from their deep dream-riddled sleep. What awakens them? I will not divulge this information. I leave you to bask yourself in the painful beauty of this mystifying masterpiece. Michael Ondaatje is a diviner of literature. He manipulates poetic prose and turns it into an engulfing atmosphere of subtle feeling, subtle but never wavering. He creates an oasis of crushed lives and broken dreams. He illustrates darkness and leaves you to feel your way out. It is a painful journey yet it is beautiful through and through.

“How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized�

After their awakening they all live their separate lives. The web of dreams undone. The mist lifted. Three of them survive, one succumbs to darkness, to dreams. Years pass, only to realize that they survive, but they never recover. That they were broken, but never fixed. They woke up, but they never stopped dreaming. What's done cannot be undone. Some wounds never heal.

You smile to mask the pain.