The English Patient

I have not read a book so compelling... so gripping since Crime and punishment... I truly believe that this book has changed the way that I think a little.. this book is a mystical web of dreams. Shocking.. spellbinding.. and at times uncomfortable in its accusations against humanity... the book makes one wish to be- as the main character put it (who I can not tell you the name of because he remains nameless for most of the book... with good purpose)- an international bastard ( I mean that not in the cussing sense of the word but in the actual meaning) I will give you some intro to the book (just a few of my favorite passages) perhaps to invoke the curiosity that struck me upon browsing through it briefly at the library 2 days ago...

she entered a 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 awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams

her father had taught her about hands, About a dog's paws. whenever her father was alone with a dog in the house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of his paw this he would say as if coming away from a brandy snifter is the greatest smell in the world a bouquet great rumours of travel she would pretend disgust but the dog's paw was a wonder the smell of it never suggested dirt it's a cathedral her father had said, so-and-so's garden that Field of grass a walk through the cyclamen a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day
I believe this. when we meet those we fall in love with there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur