Michael Ondaatje's _The English Patient_

Saw the movie years ago, but forgot most of the plot. Somehow my chair likes the book very much and referred to it several times during our discussions of my diss. in the past few years, which made me decide to read it. (ft-- why can't i stop following what she said-- already a compulsive reaction to her words?)

Surprisingly, the language isn't quite my type. Guess the multi plot line/non-linear narrative is truly the strong point here. There's something about its colonialism-war-torture-sexuality-psychoanalysis stuff that I don't like--probably the underlying / unconscious pro-British stance (and in this sense, is Kip the Sikh the character that the author identify with the most)?

Different than Eugenides's (or some of Ishiguro's) books, of which just a few pages make me sure about my love for them, this book upsets me and exhausts me and makes it very hard for me to really "like" it. I quickly finished it over the weekend and returned it to the library on Monday, in an extreme hurry as if keeping it one more minute would leave some irreversible damage to me.

So, here's one more kind of "good" books: it is "good" in such a way that you don't like it completely but at the same time you know you will never ever forget it. (Other kinds: that makes you simply love it and want to read it again and again; that makes you want to write too; that makes you forever miss your experience of reading it for the first time...)