![]() Was Almasy working for the Nazi war effort as a chance to return to the desert he loved? Or did he in fact believe in Hitler's war aims? The riddle of Almasy's true motivation, Bierman explains, is "the question at the heart of this biography". It is about forgiveness, how people come out of war." My brother responded that the film (directed and scripted by Anthony Minghella) was faithful to his novel and that it was not a documentary or a history lesson. She described Almasy as a committed Nazi collaborator whose knowledge of the desert was crucial to the Germans and might have made a considerable difference in history. ![]() John Bierman, author of this biography of Alm asy, The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy: The Real English Patient, states that Elizabeth Salett, whose father was the Hungarian Consul-General in pre-war Egypt, writing in The Washington Post, also took issue with the film's depiction of Almasy as "an accidental spy responding to personal tragedy". He argued that "the film made of the book portrayed the fictional Almasy as a man who put his personal desires above his higher obligation to combat the evil of Nazism and made a philosophically indefensible choice in striking a Faustian bargain with the Germans by trading his desert expertise for the use of an aircraft, enabling him to keep his promise to his dead lover and return to the cave where he had been forced to leave her." "Philosophy, morality and The English Patient " was written by the philosopher Thomas Hurka. ![]() One of the most uncomfortable articles about the Oscar-winning film of my brother Michael Ondaatje's Booker prizewinning novel, The English Patient, appeared in Canada in 1997 in the Queen's Quarterly, published by Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. ![]()
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