Michael Ondaatje

That's a good transition.

Any last thoughts on T.S. Eliot before we move to the Blood Roses poem, Women Like You by Michael Ondaatje?

All right, goodbye T.S.

Eliot.

Women Like You by Michael Ondaatje, which has a direct reference to Blood Roses or Blood Roses references directly with the last line.

I bring you a flute from the throat of a loon.

So talk to me as you start.

I'd not thought

But Reflection of an Echo? A reflection is visual, and an echo is aural.

It's apparently from a novel by Michael Ondaatje called Divisadero, which I haven't read, but if I did, maybe I would understand more about the title.

Tara Davidson, in her notes, states that the album's title relates to memory formation.

Aha.

As in Mrs. Madrigal's logical family, the line between love and friendship is so blurred as to become meaningless.

Not for her brood the fate of the hapless protagonist in Michael Ondaatje's English Patient, who fell in love only to be disassembled.

Nor need they live like the couple in Rani Manicka's novel The Rice Mother.

We are like the two halves of a pair of garden shears, my man and me, joined at the hip forever sniping at each other.

This is a fascinating case study in prestige filmmaking.

Michael Ondaatje's novel is famously ambitious.

It's a tough read, honestly.

It is intensely poetic, highly nonlinear, jumping back and forth in time, and incredibly complex.

And like I already mentioned, not only does this movie star Ralph Fiennes, but it also stars Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Colin Firth, and Jürgen Prochnow.

The sweeping expanses of the Sahara are the setting for this passionate love affair in this adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel.

A badly burned man, Laszlo de Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, is tended to by Nurse Hana, played by Juliette Binoche, in an Italian monastery near the end of World War II.

His past is revealed through flashbacks involving a married English woman, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, and his work mapping the African landscape.

The memoir is her attempt to map the actual lived truth.

And then, of course, you have Michael Ondaatje's The Distance of a Shout.

An absolute titan of literature.

Truly.

Question [laughs] number nine.

The Hungarian Count, Ladislaus de Almasy, is the title character of which 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje?

Is this a joke? Are you k- are you kidding me, Philip? Does anybody know the answer to this?

You'll be surprised.

Um, question number nine, we're up to.

Down for the Count.

The Hungarian Count, Ladislaus de Almasy, is the title character of which 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje?

No idea, Phil, thanks.

Um, I think there's better picks than this, but for me, this is personal.

So I think that, uh, my most overrated book would be, uh, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.

Okay.

Which won the, which won the Booker Prize, it won the Governor General's Award and the Golden Man Booker Award.

The foundational text for Gothic romance.

And finally, the high water mark of the entire list, the 1996 adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's 1992 novel, The English Patient, directed by Anthony Minghella.

A masterpiece.

It is.