Michael Ondaatje’s classic book has been voted the one-time prize of best Man Booker in 50 years. 

These days my reading habits have moved on from such sweeping romantics sagas as this book because I have the attention span of a newt (I’ll lay the blame on the www.) but circa 1992 this novel had me in a vice. It was that book that I read while ignoring life going on around me. I didn’t just see myself as Katherine, I also longed to embody her way of life, her doomed attraction to Count Laszlo de Almasy, her quiet, forceful beauty. Ondaatje set up my obsession based on the hero’s name alone. Let's get real - who hasn’t fantasized about being the object of desire of such a personage? Aristocratic, an adventurer, charting the unknown landscape of the desert in Libya while carrying on his affair with the mysterious and sensual (and married) Katherine? 

I would be so far into my imagination that when I had to tear my attention from the book, I would have a moment of confusion as I glanced down to my shorts and bare knees and wonder where the heck the silk tea gown had got to, the melting of chipped ice in my gin and tonic, the slow yet urgent beat of time waiting for Laszlo to appear from another exotic jaunt around the darker haunts of the Levant.  

I started reading it at Chakola—a place that wrote the manual on teenage obsession and angst—and I finished it on the deck of a houseboat on the Hawkesbury River while my family and various friends cavorted about me oblivious to my fixation. It was that book that immediately after reading, you wanted to turn right back around, get yourself a quick lobotomy, and have that experience afresh all over again. Anyone who didn’t share my mania for the book was not to be endured. 

I can’t remember having a fellow reader who shared this particular literary obsession so this bursting desire was nursed alone; I would dip tentatively back into certain chapters and emerge again, relieved that the flame flickered as before for Ondaatje’s masterly teasing out of the doomed tale of the burned pilot and his dead English lover. 

I did re-read it at the time of John’s accident and other details leapt out at me that I hadn’t clocked with the first reading. There was an evocative passage about peacock bones and at the same time, our neighbors strangely had these birds as pets and their cries at dusk would send a shiver of suppressed horror through me knowing that my brother, also badly burned, was infusing my memory of the book with real life dread. I wanted to resist this because it meant that my undiluted delirium for the novel was being tainted by the ongoing suffering of my brother. And there was no romance in what happened to him.  

It’ll be no surprise that the movie version was a major downer. Kristin Scott Thomas didn’t come close to the image I had of Katherine (although to this day I would trade in my looks, my personality, anything for her insouciance in Four Weddings and a Funeral); Ralph Fiennes was too something that I couldn’t put my finger on despite seeing him in a telemovie about Lawrence of Arabia and desperately wanting him to have that same allure. And further, I'm a snob when it comes to my literary obsessions and the minute Hollywood got its mitts into it, even with the talents of Anthony Minghella, I was not going to be a fan. My imagination outstripped anything that Hollywood could dream up.  

I am melancholy for that reading mind. These days I’m too attuned to nonsense and cynicism to fully launch myself back into those stories. But worse is my ennui when it comes to reading. I can plough through a longform article—just—but at the moment if someone throws a book recommendation my way, or if I’m ever browsing in a bookstore, I hesitate about purchasing anything. I don’t have an emotional energy at this point to go full immersion into different worlds. I would’ve expected so much different with the current challenges in my life but that’s not what’s happened. It's as if my psyche refuses to give me solace in anything at the moment. 

My last book purchase was Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel The Female Persuasion a few months back. I haven’t even cracked the spine.