Through the Membrane: In Praise of Ondaatje

I'm really getting a kick out of this temping gig.

Having just finished Italo Calvino's If On A Winter Night A Traveler (which is the book I marginalized for S., and which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who likes a good postmodern, wickedly recursive narrative), I am now two-thirds through The English Patient.

S. bought me this book during the NYC trip, as an introduction to Ondaatje, whom I had never read. We saw it first sitting on the sidewalk as part of a street book sale, but he didn't buy that copy; he wanted my first taste of Ondaatje to be hardbound, solid, permanent. So we wandered through a few used bookstores until we found one that was worthy of reading.

Anyway. The novel surprised me. Not by its clarity or detail or poetry -- I was expecting all of that -- but by the way it drew me into the story.

Some books, like the Calvino, one has to read with a half-detached mind, one side reading while the other working busily to put together the puzzles the author has set forward. Some books, like The Sari Shop, are entertaining but constantly invite the awareness that one is reading "a story." Some books, like our friend Suitable Boy (and Equal Music, for that matter -- I would guess Golden Gate as well though I've not yet read it) require parsing, rereading, pondering, savoring.

And some books seem to push you through a membrane where you find yourself not reading, really; not being aware of putting one word in front of the other but instead experiencing the book as a series of images coming at you as fast as life. Sometimes reading is an experience akin to dreaming.

And The English Patient is like that, which surprised me, because I hadn't "fallen into" a book quite like that for a few years. It reminds me of how I used to read as a child, which perhaps is because this temp experience (and the experience of finishing a task quickly so that one can return, breathlessly, to a group of characters held underneath one's desk) is so reminiscent of being in elementary school.

To my readers: which books have pushed you "through the membrane?" Which made you forget that there was any other world besides the one in the pages?