Exotic and irrational entertainment

Opium addiction, mixed-race parentage, same-sex affection, and anti-imperialism: all feature in what T. S. Eliot called 'the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels,' Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) [1].

Collins' novel isn't actually the first English detective novel; that honor, according to crime writer and critic Julian Symons, belongs to The Notting Hill Mystery (1865) by the pseudonymous 'Charles Felix' [2] (recently discovered to be the publisher Charles Warren Adams, thanks to detective work by Paul Collins [3]). Mention should also be made of Inspector Bucket (in Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853), and the Chevalier Dupin (in American writer Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and other stories) as precursors. But Collins' novel remains compelling, less for the implausible solution of the mystery than for what it reveals about its author's unconventional life and unusual attitudes.

The Moonstone is a huge (and, legend has it, cursed) diamond brought back from India by a British soldier, who looted the jewel and murdered its guardians during the storming of Seringapatam. This is only the latest in a series of thefts of the diamond: it was originally taken from a Hindu temple by a soldier in the army of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb; all of its owners have met untimely ends. Decades later the British soldier bequeathes the sacred diamond to his niece, Rachel Verinder, on her 21st birthday, and at midnight the same night it is stolen from her bedroom.

Three mysterious Indian "conjurors" have been seen in the neighborhood, and at first suspicion falls on them. But when the famous detective Sergeant Cuff is brought in to solve the mystery, he deduces that someone in the house has stolen it. The housemaid Rosanna Spearman and Rachel herself are soon the chief suspects. But after Rosanna's apparent suicide and Rachel's refusal to tell all she knows, Sergeant Cuff's investigation reaches a dead end. A year later, the case is reopened by Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, who had been in the house the night of the theft, aided by the physician's assistant Ezra Jennings.

Mixed-race parentage: Jennings' skin is "of gipsy darkness," his nose "presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West," and his "thick closely-curling" black hair is turning white, but in irregular piebald patches [4]. The description is clearly intended to suggest that Jennings has mixed-race parentage, which indeed he confirms just a bit later in the novel. While some of the other characters view him with suspicion on this account, Blake treats him with sympathy and respect. And as it turns out, it is Jennings who largely solves the mystery of the theft of the Moonstone.

Opium use: We also discover that Jennings is suffering from a debilitating disease, to allay the symptoms of which he regularly uses opium. Jennings complains to Blake about the general "ignorant distrust of opium" [5] and gives him a copy of Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). But Jennings also tells us about the "dreadful night[s]" that are "the vengence of...opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams" [6]. Jennings is caught in a double bind: he needs opium to free himself from the pain of his disease, but it is gradually destroying his ability to function:

"The one effectual palliative in my case, is—opium. To that all-potent and all-merciful drug I am indebted for a respite of many years from my sentence of death. But even the virtues of opium have their limit. The progress of the disease has gradually forced me from the use of opium to the abuse of it. I am feeling the penalty at last. My nervous system is shattered; my nights are nights of horror. The end is not far off now." [7]

Collins knew whereof he wrote. He had begun using laudanum (opium powder dissolved in alcohol) in the mid-1860s to alleviate chronic pain and headaches, and his use of the drug quickly became habitual. Jennings reports that his own "full dose" is 500 drops [8], and he tells Blake that this is "ten times larger" [9] than a typical dose given to an unhabituated adult. Since Collins had been using laudanum regularly for several years by the time he wrote these passages, we can guess that his own levels of use were approaching those of Jennings.

The Koh-i-Noor Diamond

There is a legend, promulgated later on by Collins himself, that he dictated large sections of The Moonstone while under the influence of the drug and virtually unconscious of what he was producing. Editor John Sutherland's recent examinations of the manuscript, though, found that there was only a portion of the "Miss Clack" section (about eight pages in the 1999 Oxford edition) that aren't in Collins' own handwriting, although the twelve pages that follow the dictated section are in pencil, which may indicate that Collins wrote them while laid up in bed [10].

Mixed-race parentage and opium use are not the only subjects about which surprisingly positive attitudes are expressed in The Moonstone. Other areas where monolithic assumptions about Victorian points of view are challenged include:

Same-sex affection: In an era where middle- and upper-class men and women occupied virtually separate spheres, feelings of friendship between members of the same sex could be expressed in terms that may strike modern ears as rather heated. Jennings, for example, when writing of Franklin Blake, uses the words "attraction" and "yearning":

"What is the secret of the attraction that there is for me in this man? Does it only mean that I feel the contrast between the frankly kind manner in which he has allowed me to become acquainted with him, and the merciless dislike and distrust with which I am met by other people? Or is there really something in him which answers to the yearning that I have for a little human sympathy—the yearning, which has survived the solitude and persecution of many years; which seems to grow keener and keener, as the time comes nearer and nearer when I shall endure and feel no more?" [11]

Such impassioned declarations also occur between women in the novel. Lucy Yolland, the daughter of a local fisherman, says of the housemaid Rosanna Spearman,

"'I loved her...She was an angel. She might have been happy with me. I had a plan for our going to London together like sisters, and living by our needles. That man [Franklin Blake] came here, and spoilt it all...I meant to take her away from the mortification she was suffering here...Where is he?...Where's this gentleman that I mustn't speak of, except with respect? Ha, Mr. Betteredge, the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him. I pray Heaven they may begin with him.'" [12]

Anti-imperialism:The Moonstone would seem to be full of orientalist exoticism: a cursed Indian diamond pursued across the centuries by mysterious, inscrutable and murderous Hindu holy men. But a closer look reveals something a bit different. In his preface to the first book edition Collins wrote that he based the Moonstone in part on the Koh-i-Noor Diamond, "the subject of a prediction, which prophesied certain misfortune to the persons who should divert it from its ancient uses" [13]. Since the Koh-i-Noor had become part of the British Crown Jewels in 1850, Collins would seem to be issuing a warning to his fellow Britons about imperial plunder.

And on the night of the re-creation of the Moonstone's theft, among Franklin Blake's reading material is Scottish novelist Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), which includes the following sentence: "You tell me of immense territories subject to the English; I cannot think of their possessions, without being led to enquire by what right they possess them" [14].

There is also the ultimate fate of the Moonstone. In the final pages of the novel (spoiler alert!) the English adventurer Murthwaite, in disguise as a Hindu pilgrim, travels to a religious ceremony outside the western Indian city of Somnauth (where there is indeed an ancient temple). He describes the setting and the huge crowd as "the grandest spectacle of Nature and Man, in combination, that I have ever seen" [15]. When the image of the four-armed god Shiva is revealed to the ecstatic celebrants, Murthwaite sees the gem gleaming from the statue's forehead. It's difficult not to feel that Murthwaite, and his creator Collins, think that this is the stone's rightful place.

Film and TV adaptations: The Moonstone has been filmed three times, in 1909, 1915, and 1934, and was adapted for television by the BBC in 1959, 1972, and 1997. The 1997 version stars Keeley Hawes (later of Wives and Daughters (1999) and Tipping the Velvet (2002)) and Greg Wise (of Sense and Sensibility (1995)); the 1972 version features Vivien Heilbron and Robin Ellis (earlier featured in Sense and Sensibility (1971) and Elizabeth R (1971), and later the star of Poldark (1975-77)). If I see any of the BBC Moonstone adaptations I'll update here.

--

1. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: New Edition, Harcourt Brace, 1950, p. 413.
2. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, Faber and Faber, 1972, pp. 53-54.
3. Paul Collins, "The Case of the First Mystery Novelist," New York Times, January 7, 2011.
4. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, edited by John Sutherland, Oxford World's Classics, 1999, p. 319. Mention should be made of Sutherland's excellent introduction and notes to this edition, which raise many of the issues discussed in this post.
5. The Moonstone, p. 381
6. The Moonstone, p. 392.
7. The Moonstone, pp. 375-376.
8. The Moonstone, p. 405.
9. The Moonstone, p. 387
10. John Sutherland, "A Note on the Composition," in The Moonstone, p. xxxvii.
11. The Moonstone, p. 393.
12. The Moonstone, p. 184.
13. The Moonstone, liii.
14. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, Oxford World's Classics, 1987, pp. 102-103.
15. The Moonstone, p. 465.

Cairo, August 16, 2013. Photo: AMR Abdallah Dalsh, Reuters/Landov

What was going on in Cairo?

Cautiously, he began to walk, then beckoned to a man coming toward him. 'What's going on in town?' he asked.

'The last day's come,' was the bewildered reply.

'What do you mean? Protest deomonstrations?'

'Fire and destruction,' the man yelled, moving on...

The din was unbearable, as though every atom on earth were yelling at once. Flames were spreading everywhere, dancing in windows, crackling on roofs, licking at walls, and flying up into the smoke that hung where the sky should have been. The burning smelled hellish, a concoction of wood, clothes, and different kinds of oil. Stifled cries could be heard coming out of the smoke. Young men and boys, in frenzied unconcern, were destroying everything, and walls kept collapsing with a rumble like thunder. Concealed anger, suppressed despair, unreleased tension, all the things people had been nursing inside them, had suddenly burst their bottle, exploding like some hurricane of demons...

Men on the street corners urged people on. 'Burn! Destroy! Long live the homeland!' they yelled...

The streets were full of smashed cars; the sky had turned a deep red color as the fires blazed away under their black cloud of smoke.

—Naguib Mahfouz, Al-Summan wal-Kharif (Autumn Quail), 1962.*

* Translated by Roger Allen and John Rodenbeck, Anchor Press, 2000, pp. 292-295.

Novelist Gary Shteyngart wearing Google Glass.
Photo: Emiliano Granado

Another in the occasional series of my favorite recent articles, posts, etc. from around the web:

1. Gary Shteyngart on the seductions and irritations of Google Glass ("O.K., Glass: Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer,"The New Yorker, Aug. 5, 2013):

'Outside, the summer is coming together at last and Manhattan is just on the right side of sweltering. The man jerks his head, and slides his finger against the right temple of the glasses, across the so-called touch pad. A pink rectangle above his field of vision, which looks like a twenty-five-inch television screen floating some eight feet away from him, is replaced by another message: "SVO Hav Su flight 150 225pm delayed." The man has been Googling the N.S.A. leaker Edward Snowden on his computer, and now his glasses, which are synched to his Google Plus account, are informing him of a delay on the next Aeroflot (Su) flight to Havana out of SVO (Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport). Another flick of the index finger, and a different screen clicks into place. Now it would appear that someone named Chris Brown is defending himself on Twitter and that a water bed for cows has been developed. The man has subscribed to all the news sources currently available for his spectacles: the New York Times, CNN, and Elle...

'There is too much traffic on Park Avenue and Second Avenue to take a taxi downtown to the Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The man does not remember telling his glasses about enjoying that restaurant, but somehow they know.'

2. John Lanchester on the implications and consequences of Google Glass ("Short Cuts,"London Review of Books, 23 May 2013):

'Look at the videos and it’s hard not to be impressed by the technologies incorporated in Glass. Think about it for five minutes, though, and it’s hard not to be alarmed by what they might mean. To dispense with one of the subtler consequences first, what does this mean for the user of Glass, in their interactions with other people? We already have an unprecedented range of tools for not-being wherever we are and not-doing whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing. But at least when we take out a phone to check our messages, people can see that we’re doing it. What if we could do that without anybody knowing? The already extensive ecology of Google Glass parodies dwells with some force on this point: we see a first-dater ask his date’s surname then check her page on Facebook. He finds out she likes dogs, looks up some dog jokes, then gets bored and, after photographing her cleavage when she bends over the table, starts watching a football match on his Glass. All of this unbeknownst to her. The user of Glass has the option to be permanently not-there. She can go into internal exile, at will and for ever...

'The cruder and more obvious problem with Glass is less to do with the user’s self-engagement, and self-withdrawal, and self-whatever, and more to do with the effect on the rest of us. Imagine a world in which anyone around you can be recording anything you say, filming anything you do....It’s hard to get one’s head around the disruptive potential of this omnipresent recording. At the end of an hour’s general chat in a newspaper office the other day, the conversation turned to Glass, and we all replayed the talk in our heads, editing out the bits we wouldn’t have said if it had been possible someone present had been recording everything. The conclusion was we’d have managed about five minutes’ small talk about the weather, followed by a 55-minute silence.'

You can see the Google Glass parody Lanchester refers to, "How Guys Will Use Google Glass," along with many others, on YouTube.

3. Google Glass will make designing cheating-proof college assignments and exams even harder. But James M. Lang writes that the high number of college students who cheat do so not because they can, but because they are encouraged to ("How college classes encourage cheating,"The Boston Globe, August 4, 2013):

'College administrators largely seem to have accepted the notion that the blame for cheating lies either at the feet of morally bankrupt students or within the overall campus climate. As a result, their efforts to reduce cheating have focused on creating first-year orientations or seminars on academic integrity, or on instituting deterrent measures like suspensions or expulsions for cheaters who are caught.

'But the stability of cheating rates over the past 50 years suggests that these efforts are not having their desired effect—and an interdisciplinary new line of research in education and psychology may help explain why. Increasingly, these findings point to a radical proposition: that the very nature of the college education we provide to our students, in both its design and delivery, may turn out to be the deepest cause of cheating on campus.

'In other words, it may be that cheating rates are so high because too many university curriculums and courses are designed for cheating. And, based on current trends in college education, the problem may be about to get worse.'

4. What about the data that Google collects from Glass wearers? Not only can it be used by Google to bombard you with personalized, geospatially-specific ads (as in this scene from Minority Report (2002)), but as reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill recently revealed, the National Security Agency collects data on users directly from the servers of Google—as well as Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, Apple, and Microsoft—including the content of communications ("NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others,"The Guardian, 6 June 2013):

'The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

'The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

'The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation—classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies—which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.'

The companies have denied that they are cooperating with the NSA, but perhaps we should give their denials the same weight we give to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's testimony before the Senate, as discussed June 10 on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart:

5. Amy Davidson writes about reports in The Washington Post that the NSA broke its own rules on collecting data on U.S. citizens 2776 times in 2012. We know this, by the way, only because the NSA itself has said so. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court that supposedly oversees requests by the NSA and other agencies for data collection within the U.S., according to its chief judge Reggie B. Walton, "does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance" ("Breaking the Rules Thousands of Times at the N.S.A.,"The New Yorker, August 16, 2013):

'As it turns out, there are numbers packed into the numbers. An "incident" can have affected multiple people—even multitudes. In a single one of the two thousand seven hundred and seventy-six cases, someone at the N.S.A. made a mistake in entering a number into a search request. As a result, instead of pulling information on phone calls from Egypt (country code 20) the agency got data on "a large number" of calls from Washington, D.C. (area code 202). How many, and what did they learn?...Another incident involved "the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy…. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records." The Post said that it was not able to tell how many Americans were affected in all. Those two examples suggest that the number could be very, very big—even by the N.S.A.’s standards.'

Be still, my beating heart:
Tabu (Sowmya) and Aishwarya (Meenu) in Kandukondain Kandukondain

I'm not sure why there haven't been more cinematic adaptations of Jane Austen novels in India, unless perhaps it's because Austen has a leading place in the literary canon of the British oppressor. Her books would seem to lend themselves perfectly to filmi treatment. They concern the plight of women in a male-oriented society and the economic, social and emotional barriers to the love of the heroine and the hero. In every Jane Austen novel the key question is whether the correct couple(s) will be united at the end. And even though we know the answer to that question in advance (except, perhaps, in Persuasion), the pleasure of the resolution is undiminished.

I'm aware of only three film adaptations of Austen with Indian settings (so please let me know if I've overlooked any). In reverse chronological order, they are:

Aisha (2010, based on Emma), written by Devika Bhagat and Manu Rishi Chaddha and directed by Rajshree Ojha: In my post "Who cares if Tanu weds Manu?: The new Bollywood romantic comedy," I wrote that as Aisha/Emma, Sonam Kapoor "is pretty enough, but blank: her performance suggests that Aisha really is as shallow as she seems."

Bride & Prejudice (2004, based of course on Pride & Prejudice), written by Paul Mayeda Berges and Gurinder Chadha and directed by Chadha: Yes, Chadha is of Anglo-Indian ancestry, and this film is primarily in English. It's included here because it is set in India, and because it features Indian actors such as Aishwarya Rai, Anupam Kher and Sonali Kulkarni. But, as I wrote in "A Bollywood Persuasion," it is "fatally handicapped by New Zealand actor Martin Henderson's lackluster Darcy and...Chadha's mediocre script."

Perhaps the first time was the charm. The excellent Tamil film Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It, 2000, based on Sense & Sensibility), written and directed by Rajiv Menon, manages to be surprisingly faithful to its source while believably updating the story to the present. If anything, I found Menon's film to be even better on our recent rewatch than I remembered. (And yes, I know it's a Kollywood, and not Bollywood, product, but I don't yet have a "Kollywood Rewatch" series.)

Aishwarya plays the headstrong, romantic Meenakshi/Marianne, with Tabu as her older and wiser sister Sowmya/Elinor. When Meenakshi (Meenu) meets her future husband, she wants lightning, thunder,

and a godlike man stepping forth out of them

Sowmya doesn't have such fanciful expectations; in fact, as the eldest daughter of a wealthy family, she is facing an arranged marriage:

But as it turns out, both sisters fall in love. Meenu is swept away by poetry-quoting investment banker Srikanth (Abbas), whom indeed she meets during a raging storm. Sowmya, mistakenly thinking that he is the groom that has been arranged for her, finds herself being charmed almost against her will by aspiring film director Manohar (Ajith Kumar). Complicating matters for Meenu is Major Bala (Mammootty), who makes no secret of his admiration for her, but who is twice her age and is a physically and emotionally wounded veteran. Complicating matters for Sowmya is that Manohar has a prior commitment—to his career: he wants to direct his first film before he contemplates marriage. Any resemblance of Srikanth to the untrustworthy Willoughby, Manohar to the undecisive Edward Ferrars or Major Bala to the unrequited Colonel Brandon is entirely intentional.

As does Marianne in Austen's novel, Meenu loves music and dancing; at a party she teases Sowmya about her feelings for Manohar in "Kannamoochi Yennada":

The wonderful soundtrack was composed by AR Rahman, with lyrics by Vairamuthu; K. S. Chithra is Aishwarya's playback singer.

The sisters' lives are suddenly upended when a relative inherits their family home and they are forced to leave. Together with their mother, their youngest sister, and a loyal servant, the now-penniless sisters move to Madras/Chennai, where Sowmya struggles to take on the role of breadwinner. And now both sisters face the loss, not only of their social standing, but of their romantic hopes...

If you haven't yet seen Kandukondain Kandukondain or read Sense & Sensibility, I urge you to do so without delay. You can watch the full movie on YouTube, with English subtitles, thanks to Rajshri films. (Unfortunately, on YouTube you don't get the full richness of the colors or the sharpness of the images of Ravi K. Chandran's lovely cinematography, as you do on the Kino International DVD.) Sense & Sensibility is a free download from Project Gutenberg and Open Library.

Opposites Attract
There is one issue that I want to talk about with Kandukondain Kandukondain, and it's impossible to do so without revealing the ending. So be forewarned if you haven't read Austen's novel or seen the movie: spoilers follow.

As sympathetic, as honorable, as steadfast, and as sincere as we and Meenu/Marianne find Major Bala/Colonel Brandon, the question of whether she will be completely happy or fulfilled in their marriage remains naggingly open at the end of the film. In the novel Marianne is 17 and Colonel Brandon is "on the wrong side of five and thirty"; she considers him "an absolute old bachelor" (Ch. 7). In the film, Meenu seems to be in her late teens or early twenties (Aish was in her mid-20s, but looks and plays younger), and Major Bala is clearly well over 40 (Mammootty was in his late 40s at the time of filming).

Excellent advice from Major Bala (Mammootty)

But more significant than the difference in their ages is the difference in their sensibilities. Major Bala is blunt, no-nonsense, practical, and (literally) down-to-earth, although his choice of profession may hint at a emotional side he otherwise doesn't reveal: he's become a commercial flower grower. Meenu is impulsive, headstrong, playful and romantic, a lover of music, dance and song. Bala is clearly dazzled by her and will take care of her with great devotion; but will that be enough to overcome their differences?

I was reminded of the conversation between Lady Laura Kennedy and Violet Effingham in Chapter 10 of Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn, in which Lady Laura lists the reasons Violet should marry her brother:

"Because it would save him. Because you are the only woman for whom he has ever cared, and because he loves you with all his heart..."

Violet responds,

"It seems to me that all your reasons are reasons why he should marry
me;—not reasons why I should marry him."

Should Meenu marry Major Bala? (And come to think of it, is Manohar, who is tied to the glitz, glamour, crassness and shallowness of the film industry, a good match for the the shy, serious Sowmya?)

Perhaps I'm guilty of viewing this movie from an American perspective, where we (so realistically!) expect total compatibility in all areas between husbands and wives. But it seems to me that these couples are likely to experience problems down the road.

Two counter-examples
Or perhaps not. There are (at least) two other Indian films that may have been influenced by Sense & Sensibility that also treat relationships between couples that at first glance don't seem to be well-matched: Parineeta (The Married Woman, 1953) and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (My Heart Belongs to You, 1998). Both movies have endings that, while ambiguous, are distinctly hopeful.

In Parineeta, the reserved Shekar (Ashok Kumar) is twice the age of the irrepressible Lalita (Meena Kumari), and has watched her grow up in the household next door. Nonetheless, or maybe inevitably, love blossoms between the two. Misunderstandings and family feuds separate them, and both receive proposals from kind, sincere people that they don't love. Their connection is severely tested,

but—spoiler alert!—ultimately is made stronger for surviving the trial.

In Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Aishwarya plays Nandini, the vivacious daughter of Pandit Darbar, a musician (see "Bollywood Rewatch 1" for videos of her spectacular dance numbers from HDDCS). Nandini falls in love with the teasing Sameer (Salman Khan), a visiting Italo-Indian student of her father. But when the Pandit finds out about their romance, he banishes Sameer and arranges Nandini's marriage to the wealthy Vanraj (Ajay Devgan in one of his best performances). Vanraj is several years older than Nandini, and is quiet, reserved, and thoughtful to the point of brooding—like, dare I say it, Colonel Brandon to Nandini's Marianne, or Shekar to Lalita.

When Vanraj discovers that his wife loves another man, he decides to try to reunite them. They go on a journey to Italy (or, rather, "Italy"; the locations were shot in Hungary) and—spoiler alert!—after many difficulties and a near-tragedy, track down Sameer. Nandini is faced with the choice of leaving the kind and devoted Vanraj for the object of her first crush, or staying with her husband. Her decision, and the reasons and emotions that inform it, give us (or at least me) hope for the future of the couple—and perhaps for Meenu and Major Bala as well.

For other posts in this series, please see:

Bollywood Rewatch 1: Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam

Bollywood Rewatch 2: Vivah and India's missing daughters

I spend about an hour each day travelling to and from work on BART, the Bay Area's commuter rail system—not to mention the time inevitably spent waiting on platforms when a train is late, or sitting in unmoving trains while another one up ahead is taken out of service (odd that I do this so much even though BART claims to have "95% or better on time performance").

I could use this time productively, I suppose: getting a head start on work e-mail, or keeping up with the latest developments in my field(s). Or, over the roar and screech of the train, I could try to hold a sociable conversation with my seat-mate. Or, like almost everyone else around me, I could become absorbed in a device: play games, text my friends, listen to music or watch video (although BART is so loud I wear earplugs, not earbuds).

But instead I use this time for reading. I don't yet have an e-reader; I still carry books—preferably paperbacks, to save weight (I also have a 10-minute walk on each end of the train trip). So I'm always on the hunt for fresh reading material: no sooner do I start a book than I'm thinking about what can take its place once I've finished. It's a source of constant, low-level anxiety that grows more acute as I get closer to the final page. It's a relief when I discover a compelling series—Trollope's Chronicles of Barchester, Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart mysteries, Nick Hornby's collected "Stuff I've Been Reading"—or a writer intriguing enough that as soon as I finish one of their books, I want to read another—Trollope again, Edith Wharton, Orhan Pamuk, Michael Frayn, Alison Bechdel.

What makes my continual search for material so much worse is that I'm a reader who's too picky for his own good. Vast swathes of contemporary literary fiction, serial-killer thrillers, and almost all bestsellers do little or nothing for me. And yes, I'm aware that a constant, overwhelming need coupled with an inability to be satisfied is the textbook definition of a neurotic—or an addict.

So in order to find books (and movies, and music—it's especially nice when two or more of these are tied together) to feed my insatiable appetite, I'm dependent on either following a recommendation (from a compelling review or from a friend), or following a train of thought. Since right now I'm in the midst of doing the latter, I thought I would describe the process, and along the way write about some of the unexpected pleasures I've encountered.

Tim Kreider
Of course, I'm constantly trolling through various web and print forums devoted to books. One of my regular stops is Page-Turner, the online New Yorker column of "criticism, contention, and conversation about books that matter." And on July 16 Tim Kreider published a Page-Turner column entitled "The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover," in which he complains about an enervating sameness in contemporary book cover design as compared to the visionary, surrealistic covers of paperback science fiction novels in the 1960s and 70s, or the hand-designed title lettering of novels from the 1940s. The essay was funny, pointed, and articulated a bothersome problem in a way that I'd never quite managed to do myself.

Kreider's examination of covers came about because he was designing the cover for his own book, We Learn Nothing (Simon & Schuster, 2012)—which now has two covers (since he designed a different one for the recent paperback issue).*

The essays collected between those covers have all of the virtues of his New Yorker article, and more. He writes about a near-death experience; various romantic misadventures; the struggle to maintain his political outrage without being overwhelmed by it; the toll time takes on friendships; mortality and the knottiness of Tristram Shandy; and the way we experience happiness mainly in retrospect rather than in the moment. But no matter the ostensible subject, each of his insightful (and often darkly hilarious) essays is about how a rueful, observant and reflective single man in early middle age assesses the passage of time, with its gains (experience, an occasional glimmering of wisdom, and a tenuous emotional maturity) and losses (passion, heedlessness, and many loved ones).

To give you a sense of his style, in "The Referendum" he writes,

"The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers' different choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt...[W]e're all anxiously sizing up how everyone else's decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated—that we are, in some sense, winning...

"Parenthood opens up an even deeper divide. Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. It's as if these people have joined a cult: they claim to be happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a pampered sociopathic monster whose every whim is law. (Note to friends with children: I am referring only to other people's children, not yours.)"
(pp. 123-124, 126)

If I haven't yet made it obvious, I highly recommended We Learn Nothing. But what started my train of thought was a comment Kreider made in his New Yorker essay on book covers. As he was decrying the plague of the "single-object-on-white-background cover" whose index case is Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Kreider mentioned his favorite example of the formula: the cover of a paperback edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, designed by Michael Bierut. Inside a specimen box, a square of semi-transparent paper is pinned over and partially obscures the title, referencing both Nabokov's obsession with butterfly collecting and memory's partial, distorting, and hazy nature:

On seeing this cover, I was reminded of an exhibit I went to decades ago at New York's New Museum which consisted of a room coated with beeswax, embedded in which were hundreds of index cards on which people had written particularly vivid or meaningful memories. As viewers of the exhibit walked into the room and touched the walls, the beeswax became occluded. Over time, it became harder and harder to make out the details of the memories. As I just discovered by Googling the New Museum's website and browsing their archive, the exhibit was "palimpsest," by Ann Hamilton and Kathryn Clark. You can see images of "palimpsest" on the New Museum's website; the aquarium visible at one end of the room contains two heads of cabbage being devoured by snails—a less subtle metaphor for the degradation of memory by time, I thought then and now:

Apart from evoking my own nostalgia, the image of Speak, Memory's cover reminded me that I'd never read Nabokov's autobiography. I'm not sure why I'd avoided it up to now, since I admire Pale Fire and think that Lolita is one of the great novels of the 20th century.** So I decided that after reading We Learn Nothing I would turn to Speak, Memory. (It's not as incongruous a juxtaposition as it sounds, since both feature a writer looking back at his younger self.) And as I was picking up my copy of Speak, Memory, I found next to it on the shelf a copy of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, another title I hadn't yet read. I'll talk about both books in a subsequent post, and about where my train of thought next led me.

Next time: Nabokov to Eugene Onegin

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* Ironically, I suppose, I'm not a big fan of either of Kreider's Don-Martin-meets-The-Roadrunner covers. But the cartoons that he includes in the book itself, which illustrate and comment on his essays, are better. My favorite, I think, is "My Worst Enemy—Past Tim" (p. 24).

** Lolita routinely (and deservedly, in my view) winds up on lists of the best novels, such as the Modern Library Board's 100 Best Novels (judging by the list, novels written in English during the 20th century). The less said about the accompanying (and obviously ballot-box-stuffed) Modern Library "Readers' List," in which novels by Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard take 7 of the top 10 spots, the better.

What can a humble amateur reader—a reader for pleasure, that most suspect and derided of motives—add to the conversation about Vladimir Nabokov, a conversation that has been conducted for decades by obsessive scholars and scholarly obsessives? After all, a cursory web search turns up a website (Zembla), journals (the Nabokov Online Journal, Nabokov Studies, and The Nabokovian), a listserv (NABOKOV-L), and a learned society (the International Vladimir Nabokov Society) devoted to his life and work.

After reading Tim Kreider's Page-Turner article "The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover," I realized that I hadn't yet read Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory (for details, see Following a train of thought: We Learn Nothing to Speak, Memory). In the end I wound up reading both Speak, Memory (1951/1966) and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf, 1995), for the profound reason that they were next to one another on the shelves of one of my favorite used bookstores.

Speak, Memory: Inconclusive evidence
Nabokov is famous for writing novels with unreliable narrators: Despair (1934), Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962). Autobiography, of course, foregrounds the problem of the unreliable narrator: not only the question of whether particular incidents really happened, or (if they happened) whether the writer's memory is true to the event, but also whether what the writer has recorded is even true to his or her own memory. How much editing, embellishment, and elaboration has taken place?

In Speak, Memory (originally published as Conclusive Evidence), sights, sounds, smells, and tastes are reported with a suspiciously detailed clarity. We read of the sun-dappled lanes of the idyllic estate near St. Petersburg on which Nabokov grew up, the variegated butterflies that excited his passion for collecting, his vividly remembered childhood nannies and tutors (one of whom is named Lenski), and his formative first love (age 10, on the beach at Biarritz).

And as I read Speak, Memory, it became clear that the clever cover design by Michael Bierut that had inspired me to pick up the book—a piece of semi-transparent paper pinned over the title like a butterfly specimen, and partially obscuring it—doesn't reflect the way memory (or, at least, Nabokov's memory) works. In the first chapter Nabokov writes "I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed" (p. 21). Certain scenes and impressions are related with superhuman specificity, but the periods in between those scenes tend to be partially or fully elided. A better visual metaphor might be a piece of completely opaque paper in which multiple holes have been punched. What is revealed is seen with perfect clarity and often expressed with great beauty, but much remains hidden. In a famous passage Nabokov presents his own metaphor for memories, and his method of relating them: "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip" (p. 139).

With a writer of fictions, particularly fictions as carefully composed as Nabokov's, the reader is tempted to search the autobiography for hints and clues to the origins of the work. And Nabokov is fully aware of this temptation; while he decries it (along with vulgar Freudianism), he also seeds the text with sly references to his novels. I picked up overt and covert allusions to Bend Sinister, The Defense, The Gift, Lolita, and Pale Fire, and there must be many more. Such allusions only add to the sense that we're being presented with a set of artfully constructed scenes that function as screen memories (an idea that Nabokov himself would have rejected vehemently). And, indeed, some of the chapters were published separately as stories, though Nabokov states that they are, "(except for a change of names) true in every detail to the author's remembered life" (Stories, p. 662).

But as Janet Malcom writes (in her essay "Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography," included in Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), "If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer...must not be afraid to invent. Above all, he must invent himself" (p. 297).

One chapter of Speak, Memory raised the issue of invention versus memory with special acuteness, at least for me. In Chapter 9, Nabokov embarks on "a short biography of my father" (p. 173). Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov was a jurist, parliamentarian, and briefly a minister in the revolutionary Kerenski government (later overthrown by the Bolsheviks). The final section of this chapter relates the story of a duel: his father challenges the "disreputable editor" (p. 188) of a paper that has printed lies about him. In a semicomic turn, after mysterious comings and goings and much anxiety, the editor backs down and the duel doesn't take place.

It seems too perfect an incident to be real; after all, in Speak, Memory Nabokov writes that "No Russian writer of any repute had failed to describe une recontre, a hostile meeting, always of course of the classical duel à volonté type" (p. 191). But apparently it did actually happen; in his definitive two-volume biography of Nabokov, Brian Boyd traces the newspaper articles that Nabokov's father and the disreputable editor wrote afterwards about the incident.

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov: "Bottom of the Barrel"
Which leads me to The Stories, which brings together the four 13-story collections published in Nabokov's lifetime, plus (for symmetry's sake, I presume) another 13 stories chosen by his son and literary executor Dmitri. Vladimir Nabokov himself had listed a majority of the previously uncollected stories under the heading "Bottom of the Barrel" (p. xvii); Dmitri assures us that his father told him that the label referred "not to their quality, but to the fact that, among the materials available for consultation at the moment, they were the final ones worthy of publication" (p. xiii). Be that as it may (although Dmitri includes a lot of qualifiers in that sentence); but Nabokov was a good judge of his own work, and gathered the best of his stories, in my view, in his first collection, Nabokov's Dozen (1958).

One of the stories excluded from Nabokov's Dozen is "An Affair of Honor" (it was later published in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (1973)), and as the title suggests, it centers on a duel. Anton Petrovich, a plump, dandyish banker, learns the unwelcome news that his wife is having an affair when, on returning unexpectedly to his apartment one night, he discovers her lover getting dressed. The lover, a business associate of Anton Petrovich, is named Berg; as his name (which means "mountain" in German) suggests, Berg is a "broad shouldered, well-built...athletic" man. Anton Petrovich challenges Berg to a duel, but quickly begins to lose his nerve.

Although the foolish Anton Petrovich is made to endure a series of darkly comic incidents that highlight his absurdity, the awkward incidents and the bleak ending also create in us a sneaking empathy for him. Did Nabokov feel even the slightest sense of identification with the disreputable editor who quailed when faced with fighting a duel with Nabokov's broad-shouldered, athletic father?

Anton Petrovich works himself up into a state of paralyzing fear by imagining his own death:

"How will it all be?....Now, there was a question: does one salute one's opponent? What does Onegin do in the opera? Perhaps a discreet tip of the hat from a distance would be just right...What does one feel with a bullet hits one between the ribs or in the forehead? Pain? Nausea? Or is there simply a bang followed by total darkness? The tenor Sobinov [playing the doomed Lensky] once crashed down so realistically that his pistol flew into the orchestra..." (pp. 212-213).

The references are to Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin (1879), based on Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse, to both of which my train of thought (and a serendipitous discovery) next led me.

Next time:Pushkin's Eugene Onegin to Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin

Last time:We Learn Nothing to Speak, Memory

Alexander Pushkin has roughly the same stature in Russian literature that Shakespeare does in English, and Eugene Onegin (1823-1833) is his greatest work. Called "a novel in verse," it is a long narrative poem that recounts the adventures of the title character. Onegin is a sort of Byronic anti-hero: dashing and handsome, with a ready and wicked wit, he is a man of fashionable society who lives for his own pleasure, but who has become jaded with the endless round of dinners, balls, and semi-clandestine affairs with his friends' wives.

At the opening of the poem Onegin has inherited his uncle's country estate. There he is even more bored than in the city, until he meets a neighbor, the young poet Vladimir Lensky. Lensky is engaged to his childhood sweetheart Olga, the daughter of Larin, a local landowner. Lensky ultimately prevails on the reluctant Onegin to attend a dinner party at Larin's estate, where he meets Olga and her older sister Tatyana. The meeting is fateful for everyone involved. Tatyana, shy and serious, falls head over heels in love with this dark, brooding stranger, who seems to embody all the qualities of the heroes of her novels. Daringly, she writes Onegin a letter in which she declares her feelings.

And this is where the tone of Eugene Onegin shifts. Up to this point (the middle of Chapter 3), the narrator has adopted a lightly ironic style in which all the foibles, contradictions, and vanities of his characters are held up for our amused examination; Byron's "epic satire"Don Juan (1818-1824) seems to have been the model. But with Tatyana's letter, the poem shifts into a different emotional register. The narrator writes that he rereads her letter with "secret pain," and is moved by the genuine feeling expressed in her tender, heartfelt, and impetuous words:

Tatyana's Letter to Onegin
I write to you—no more confession
is needed, nothing's left to tell.
I know it's now in your discretion
with scorn to make my world a hell... (translated by Charles Johnston [1])

Tatyana's letter is a key test of any translation of Eugene Onegin. Not only must a translator capture all the shades of Tatyana's emotions, he or she must do so within the constraints of the verse form that Pushkin employs. Called the "Onegin stanza" or the "Pushkin sonnet," it consists of fourteen lines of iambic tetrameter following the rhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where the lower-case letters indicate feminine rhymes (rhymes in which the last syllable is unstressed, such as pleasure/measure) and the upper-case letters masculine ones (where the last syllable is stressed, such as dream/scheme). Iambic tetrameter is a poetic line made up of four two-syllable groups (metrical feet), in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second is stressed; such a two-syllable group is called an iamb. Got all that?

An example of an English poem that uses iambic tetrameter is Byron's "She walks in beauty" from Hebrew Melodies, 1814:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes...

The short rhymed line in less expert hands, though, can sound forced or obvious. Johnston in his translation of the opening of Tatyana's letter uses enjambment ("no more confession / is needed...") to smooth out the rhythm of the first two lines. Here are three other attempts to render the opening of Tatyana's letter:

I'm writing you this declaration—
what more can I in candor say?
It may now be your inclination
to scorn me and to turn away... (translated by James E. Falen [2])

I write to you—what more is needed?
This said, have I not said enough?
And you are free now, I conceded
To slight me with a chill rebuff... (translated by Walter Arndt [3])

I write—what more is there to say?
How shall I add to my confession?
I know it’s in your power today
To punish me with your derision. (translated by A. S. Kline [4])

It's impossible to generalize about the overall quality of each translation from these short excerpts, especially since I don't read Russian. But for me the Falen version sounds a bit too matter-of-fact, and it also loses the sense that Tatyana knows she has revealed everything by the mere act of writing to Onegin. Arndt introduces an odd change of tense (why is it "I conceded" rather than "I concede," except to force the rhyme with "needed"?), and also doesn't convey the perilous position in which Tatyana has placed herself—she's risking utter social ruin, not merely a "chill rebuff." Kline reverses the pattern of masculine and feminine line endings and uses a near-rhyme ("confession"/"derision") that sounds jarring to me.

If you'd like to see further translation comparisons, Stephen Frug has posted eleven different versions of Eugene Onegin's opening stanza on his blog Eugene Onegin in English Translation, and discusses the issues involved in his post "Eugene Onegin in English: Comparing Translations." Douglas Hofstadter gives multiple versions of Chapter 2, Stanza 29 in his lecture "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" (search within the page for "Onegin"). Hofstadter also discusses the problem of translating Eugene Onegin in two chapters of Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (Basic Books, 1997), and in the preface to his own translation of Pushkin's work (Basic Books, 1999).

Famously, Vladimir Nabokov denounced the very possibility of an English translation that attempts to match the rhyme and metrical schemes of the original. In his preface to his own unrhymed translation Nabokov asked, "Can a rhymed poem like Eugene Onegin be truly translated with the retention of its rhymes? The answer, of course, is no." He goes on to say that when a translator goes beyond the "mere sense of the text...he begins to traduce the author." [6] Perhaps Nabokov gave his final word on the subject in his poem "On Translating 'Eugene Onegin'" (written in Onegin stanzas):

What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.

Elsewhere in that poem Nabokov describes his prose rendition of Pushkin's poem as "All thorn, but cousin to your rose." Judge for yourself: here is Nabokov's thorny "literal" translation of the first lines of Tatyana's letter:

I write to you—what would one more?
What else is there that I could say?
'Tis now, I know, within your will
to punish me with scorn.

I think "what would one more?" could be rendered more colloquially (but less tetrametrically) as "what more is it necessary for me to do?" or, perhaps, "must I do more?" or, as Arndt has it, "what more is needed?" But as it stands, an English reader is forced to stop at the end of the first line to try to figure out what's being said. Nabokov disdained "readable" translations, but this awkwardness of locution (far from the only one in his translation, alas) is carrying things a bit far.

My own feeling is that Johnston's translation succeeds admirably in conveying both the structure of the original and its sense—at least, as far as I've been able to determine it by comparison with other translations and with Nabokov's version. For example, here is Nabokov's prose version of Chapter 2, Stanza 29:

Her father was a kindly fellow
who lagged in the precedent age
but saw no harm in reading books;
he, never reading,
deemed them an empty toy,
nor did he care
what secret tome his daughter had
dozing till morn under her pillow.

Any good translation needs to retain the beautiful and poignant image of Tatyana's book sleeping under her pillow; here are several other ways that it has been rendered in English:

Nor did he care what secret tome
His daughter read or kept at home
Asleep till morn beneath her pillow... (tr. Falen)

[He] never thought to bring to light
Which secret volume dreamt at night
Beneath his little daughter’s pillows. (tr. Arndt)

[He] never bothered for a moment
About the volume’s true content,
That slept beneath her pillow thus. (tr. Kline)

[He] cared not what his daughter kept
by way of secret tome that slept
until the dawn beneath her pillow. (tr. Johnston)

I'm not sure what Falen means by "read or kept at home"; it seems to imply, oddly, that Tatyana might place a book she's not reading under her pillow. Arndt introduces the nice image of a book dreaming under Tatyana's pillow, but (if we believe Nabokov) the image isn't Pushkin's: in the original the book is sleeping, not dreaming. Kline uses another awkward near-rhyme of "moment" and "content." For me, Johnston's version is both the most faithful and, yes, most readable.

And there's at least one other person who has said so in print (although it must be admitted that he wrote this praise before Falen's translation was published):

...[Let me] suggest
You spend some unfilled day of leisure
By that original spring of pleasure:
Sweet-watered, fluent, clear, light, blithe
(This homage merely pays a tithe
Of what in joy and inspiration
It gave me once and does not cease
To give me)—Pushkin's masterpiece
In Johnston's luminous translation:
Eugene Onegin—like champagne
Its effervescence stirs my brain.

These lines are from Vikram Seth's Golden Gate (Random House, 1986, p. 102), a novel in verse itself (as you may have already detected) written in the form of Onegin stanzas. And Seth's novel is where my train of thought next took me—with a slight sidetrack first to another work deriving from Eugene Onegin: Tchaikovsky's opera.

Next time:Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin

Last time:Speak, Memory to Eugene Onegin
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Versions of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin quoted in this post:

1. Translated by Charles Johnston, revised Penguin Classics edition, 1979
2. Translated by James E. Falen, Southern Illinois University Press, 1990
3. Translated by Walter Arndt, Dutton, 1963
4. Translated by A. S. Kline, retrieved September 30, 2013 from http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Russian/Onegin3.htm
5. Translated with commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, second Princeton/Bollingen paperback edition, 1990, p. ix

Tchaikovsky in 1877

The first of two scenes:

I. The Letter
A young woman writes an impassioned letter to a man she has met only briefly, declaring her love for him and placing her fate in his hands.

But the woman's name isn't Tatyana Larina; it's Antonina Milyukova. And the man she is writing isn't Eugene Onegin, but the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Antonina's letter arrived in mid-May 1877 at a critical point in Tchaikovsky's life. Eight months previously he had written to his brother Modest about his intention to get married in order to "eradicat[e] from myself my pernicious passions"—his homosexuality.[1]

While Antonina's first letter was lost or destroyed by Tchaikovsky almost immediately, her second and third letters, both dated May 16, still survive. In them she writes,

"I see that it's now time that I began to master my feelings, as you yourself told to me in your first letter. Although I cannot now see you, I console myself with the thought that you are in the same city as I am...[W]herever I may be, I shall not be able to forget you or lose my love for you. What I liked in you [when I first came to know you] I no longer find in any other man; indeed, in a word, I do not want to look at any other man after you....

"I am dying of longing, and I burn with a desire to see you, to sit with you and talk with you, though I fear that at first I shan't be in a state to utter a word...Farewell, my dear one...I cannot live without you...I implore you: come to me. If you knew how I suffer, then probably out of pity alone you would grant my request."[2]

It seems impossible that either Antonina or Tchaikovsky were unaware of the echoes of Eugene Onegin in this situation. From Tatyana's letter to Onegin:

"...if you've kept some faint impression
of pity for my wretched state,
you'll never leave me to my fate.
At first I thought it out of season
to speak; believe me: of my shame
you'd not so much as know the name,
if I'd possessed the slightest reason
to hope that even once a week
I might have seen you, heard you speak
on visits to us, and in greeting
I might have said a word, and then
thought day and night, and thought again
about one thing, till our next meeting...

Another!...no, another never
in all the world could take my heart!
Decreed in highest court forever...
heaven's will—for you I'm set apart...

Imagine it: quite on my own
I've no one here who comprehends me
and now a swooning mind attends me,
dumb I must perish, and alone.
My heart awaits you: you can turn it
to life and hope with just a glance—
or else disturb my mournful trance
with censure—I've done all to earn it!..."[3]

There are echoes as well of Onegin's response to Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's reply to Antonina. David Brown writes in his critical biography of the composer that Tchaikovsky apparently told her that her love for him would diminish if she really knew his imperfections and failings, and "had counselled his infatuated admirer not to let her feelings run away with her."[4] As Onegin tells Tatyana:

"...Should your perfections be expended
in vain on my unworthy soul?
Believe (as conscience is my warrant)
wedlock for us would be abhorrent...

You'll love again, but you must teach
your heart some self-restraint; for each
and every man won't understand it
as I have...learn from my belief
that inexperience leads to grief."[5]

Elizaveta Lavrovskaya

On May 25, shortly after receiving Antonina's first letter, Tchaikovsky visited the mezzo-soprano Elizaveta Lavrovskaya. The composer was casting around for a new opera project; Lavrovskaya suggested Eugene Onegin. Just a few days later Tchaikovsky reported to Modest that "the idea seemed to me wild, and I didn't reply. Afterwards, dining alone at an inn, I recalled Onegin, fell to thinking about it, next began to find Lavrovskaya's idea a possibility, then was carried away by it, and by the end of the meal had made up my mind." [6]

It was Tatyana's letter to Onegin that inspired Tchaikovsky to begin work on the opera, and it was this scene that was the first that he composed, using almost entirely (as he did throughout the opera) Pushkin's words. Tchaikovsky later wrote his friend, the composer Sergey Taneyev, that "I burned with the fire of inspiration when I wrote the letter scene"[7]:

That Tchaikovsky was inspired to compose this scene shortly after receiving Antonina's letter is surely no coincidence. And writing the scene made him view her in a new light:

"Being completely immersed in composition I so thoroughly identified myself with the image of Tatyana that she became for me a living person, together with everything that surrounded her. I loved Tatyana, and was furiously indignant with Onegin who seemed to me a cold, heartless fop. Having received a second letter from Miss Milyukova, I was ashamed, and even became indignant with myself for my attitude towards her...

"In my mind this all tied up with the idea of Tatyana, and it seemed to me that I myself had acted incomparably more basely than Onegin, and I became truly angry with myself for my heartless attitude towards this girl who was in love with me. Because the second letter also contained Miss Milyukova's address, I immediately set out thither, and thus began our acquaintance." [8]

Reader, he married her.

Tchaikovsky and Antonina after their wedding

The marriage, which took place on July 18, was a catastrophe from the first. Tchaikovsky had told Antonina that he could never love her, but despite her acquiescence to his conditions for their wedded life he quickly realized that he had made a terrible mistake. In a letter to his patroness Nadezha von Meck written three weeks after the wedding he described his growing anguish:

"As soon as the [marriage] ceremony was over, as soon as I found myself alone with my wife with the consciousness that it was now our fate to live with each other inseparably, I suddenly felt not only that she did not inspire me with even a simple feeling of friendship, but that she was hateful to me in the fullest sense of that word. It seemed to me that I, or at least the best, even the sole good part of the real me—that is, my musicality—had perished irrevocably...My wife was in no way guilty in my eyes: she had not invited herself into the bonds of matrimony. In consequence, to make her feel that I do not love her, that I look upon her as an intolerable encumbrance, would be both cruel and base. There remains pretence. But to pretend all one's life is the greatest of torments. And where in all this can one think of work? I fell in to deep despair, the more horrifying because there was no one who could sustain me or give me hope...

"[My wife] loves me sincerely, and wants nothing except that I should be calm and happy. I pity her greatly."[9]

Those feelings of pity and sympathy for women trapped in loveless marriages pervade the opera. In the very first of Eugene Onegin's "seven lyrical scenes in three acts" we learn that Tatyana's mother loved another man at the time of her marriage to Larin. Her new husband, perhaps sensing something of her feelings, took her away from the city to his country estate. She sings,

"I busied myself with the household,
became resigned and settled down...
Habit is sent us from above
in place of happiness."[10]

Tatyana is surrounded by women who have had to sacrifice their feelings on the marriage altar and replace happiness with habit and duty. In her distress on the sleepless night she decides to write to Onegin, Tatyana asks her nurse Filipyevna whether she has ever been in love. Filipyevna tells her the story of being married at age 13 to a boy she had never met, and the tears she wept as her maiden plait was untwined, she was taken to the church, and then into the household of a family of strangers.

Both stories, her mother's and her nurse's, foreshadow Tatyana's bitter fate. And as my loving partner noted, with its focus on the plight of its heroine, the opera could have been entitled Tatyana. There is only one scene that does not feature her, and that scene will be the subject of the second part of this post.

Next time:Eugene Onegin - The Duel

Last time:Pushkin's Eugene Onegin to Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin

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[1] As quoted in David Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Crisis Years (1874-1878). Gollancz, 1982, p. 104.
[2] Brown, pp. 138-140.
[3] Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, translated by Charles Johnston. Penguin, 1979, pp. 100-102.
[4] Brown, p. 138.
[5] Eugene Onegin, pp. 113-114.
[6] Brown, p. 142.
[7] Isaiah Berlin, "Tchaikovsky, Pushkin and Onegin,"Musical Times, v. 121, no. 1645 (March 1980), p. 166.
[8] Brown, p. 143.
[9] Brown, pp. 150-152.
[10] Dmitry Murashev, "DM's Opera Site: 'Eugene Onegin' by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky libretto (English)."

Onegin and Lensky's duel, by Ilya Repin, 1899

The second of two scenes:

II. The Duel
A hotheaded young poet becomes enraged at an acquaintance's flirtatious attentions to his beloved, and challenges him to a duel. It's a famous scene from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. But, as with Tatyana's letter, life came to tragically imitate art.

In 1831 the 32-year-old Pushkin had married the 18-year-old Natalya Goncharova, and the couple became fixtures in the fashionable life of St. Petersburg. Natalya was considered to be one of the most beautiful women in Russian society and had many admirers both before and after her marriage, including Tsar Nicholas I.

Natalya Pushkina, by A. P. Bryullov, 1832

One of those admirers was Georges d'Anthès, a dashing young cavalry officer just a few months older than Natalya. It was d'Anthès' attentions to his wife that Pushkin resented, and with good reason. In a January 1836 letter to his adoptive father (and rumored lover), Baron Jacob van Heeckeren, d'Anthès wrote of Natalya:

"...I am madly in love! Yes, madly, for I do not know which way to turn. I will not tell you her name, because letters can go astray, but remember the most delicious creature in Petersburg and you will know her name, and what is most horrible about my position is that she loves me too, and we cannot see each other, it has been impossible up to now, for the husband is revoltingly jealous...To love one another and only to be able to speak of this between two figures of a quadrille is terrible." [1]

Apart from d'Anthès own claims, is there any evidence that Natalya returned d'Anthès' feelings? Pushkin himself once remarked, "Il l'a troublée," which can be variously rendered; perhaps "he disconcerted her" or "he flustered her" would be fair approximations. We also have the diary of Mariya Mörder, a maid of honour to the Empress Alexandra. Mörder described d'Anthès as "astonishingly handsome"; she wrote of seeing d'Anthès and Natalya together at a ball in February 1836, "they were madly in love!...how happy they seemed at that moment!" [2]

Georges d'Anthès

If there was a mutually acknowledged attraction between the two, it would hardly be surprising. Like Tatyana's sister Olga in Eugene Onegin, Natalya was light-hearted, youthful and flirtatious; Pushkin was emotionally volatile, describing himself as "changeable, jealous, susceptible, violent and weak, all at the same time." [3] He was also unfaithful: perhaps one reason he was so furious at d'Anthès' pursuit of Natalya was that it held an unflattering mirror up to his own not-very-admirable behavior.

During the Shrovetide celebrations of mid-February 1836, d'Anthès attempted to go beyond dancing and flirting, and initiate an affair with Natalya (who by then was several months' pregnant, although her condition may have been concealed by her tight corsets and voluminous dresses). He wrote to Heeckeren that Natalya

"...refus[ed] to violate her duties for a man whom she loves and who adores her; she described her situation to me with such lack of constraint, asked my pardon with such naïvete, that I was really conquered and could not find a word to reply. If you know how she consoled me, for she knew I was suffocating and was in a terrible state, and when she said to me: 'I love you as I have never loved, but never ask more than my heart, for all the rest does not belong to me and I can only be happy in honouring all my duties, pity me and love me always as you do now, my love will be your recompense'; I tell you, I would have fallen at her feet to kiss them had I been alone." [4]

How much of this conversation indicates true feeling and how much is the conventional language of flirtation and the courtly cavalier servente tradition is difficult to say (and to our uncertainties we can add d'Anthès unreliability as a narrator). This scene does bear a striking resemblance, though, to a moment at the end of Eugene Onegin. After an absence of several years, Onegin returns to St. Petersburg; one night at a ball he sees Tatyana—no longer a lovestruck country girl, but now a regal, self-possessed lady of the court, married to a prince. In Pushkin's poem, Tatyana's husband is briefly mentioned as a "grand general," and has a few lines of dialogue; in the opera, Tchaikovsky amplifies the character, giving Prince Gremin a warm and tender aria in which he expresses his devotion to his wife.

Onegin is dazzled by the new Tatyana, and in an ironic reversal writes her a passionate letter. Receiving no response, he finds a way into her house:

"...An emotion
of wild repentance and devotion
threw Eugene at her feet—..." [5]

Tatyana then reproves him:

"...I beseech you, go;
I know your heart: it has a feeling
for honour, a straightforward pride.
I love you (what's the use to hide
behind deceit or double-dealing?)
but I've become another's wife—
and I'll be true to him, for life." [6]

Here is how Tchaikovsky rendered the scene. His Tatyana, because she is more vulnerable, more conflicted, and more anguished, and because she has a husband who loves her to distraction, is even more sympathetic; and, of course, the music adds another emotional dimension:

But life rarely has the satisfying finality of art. D'Anthès continued to pursue Natalya more or less openly as she returned to society in late summer after the birth of her daughter. Anonymous letters were soon circulated that implied that Pushkin had been cuckolded, and a duel was barely averted when d'Anthès agreed to marry Natalya's sister (!). Now Natalya's (and Pushkin's) brother-in-law, d'Anthès used his new familial proximity to intensify his campaign of seduction.

Finally, at a winter ball attended by all the court (including the Tsar), d'Anthès' overfamiliar behavior towards Natalya enraged Pushkin to such an extent that a duel became inevitable. It took place in the early evening of Wednesday, January 27, 1837. According to the rules agreed on by the seconds, cloaks were placed on the ground ten paces apart. The two men would begin twenty paces apart; at a signal, each man could advance up to where the cloak had been placed, and fire at any time. D'Anthès fired first, and Pushkin fell, mortally wounded. (He was able to raise himself on his left arm and shoot d'Anthès, wounding him in the arm and chest, but not fatally.) Pushkin died two days later.

Alexander Pushkin, by Vasily Tropinin, 1827

In Eugene Onegin Lensky and Onegin attend a ball held at the Larin's for Tatyana's name-day (January 25). In his boredom with and contempt for the rural society in which he finds himself, Onegin decides to revenge himself on both Tatyana and Lensky by monopolizing and openly flirting with Tatyana's sister Olga. Lensky and Olga have been sweethearts from childhood, and Lensky is infuriated by Onegin's deliberate affront and by Olga's flattered acquiescence.

A challenge is issued, and the poet meets the jaded man of fashion at dawn the next morning. As with the addition of Prince Gremin's aria, there is a telling difference between the opera and the novel. In Pushkin's original Lensky writes a poem in the predawn darkness full of romantic clichés. Onegin, although he feels some affection for Lensky, can't take either his poetic or his romantic aspirations entirely seriously, and neither, Pushkin signals us, should we.

In the opera, though, Lensky's poem becomes an aria of longing and foreboding; Tchaikovsky's sweeping music gives the moment quite a different weight than does Pushkin's irony:

Finally, the outcome of the duel seems eerily prescient of Pushkin's own death:

The video excerpts in this post are taken from the 2007 Metropolitan Opera production conducted by Valery Gergiev and featuring Renée Fleming as Tatyana, Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Onegin, and Ramon Vargas as Lensky. Robert Carsen's effectively spare production places the emphasis on the intimate drama between the characters, as Tchaikovsky desired. This production has been issued on DVD and is also available through Met Opera on Demand; it's strongly recommended.

On CD, the first choice by general consensus is the 1955 mono recording with Galina Vishnevskaya as Tatyana, Evgeny Belov as Onegin, and Sergei Lemeshev as Lensky, accompanied by the Bolshoi Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Boris Khaikin. I haven't heard it, but I am definitely going to seek it out.

Khaikin's conducting is praised as "nuanced" and "delicate." By all accounts on the other end of the emotional spectrum is the version conducted by James Levine in 1988. It features Mirella Freni as Tatyana, Thomas Allen as Onegin, Neil Shicoff as Lensky and Anne Sofie von Otter as Olga, accompanied by the Staatskapelle Dresden. Levine's lush, passionate approach is highly effective, and the cast is excellent (even if none of the principals is Russian); Shicoff is an especially ardent Lensky. It was this version that I happened across at a library sale this summer, and which inspired me to seek out Pushkin's brilliant novel in verse. T. J. Binyon's biography of Pushkin (Knopf, 2003) was an invaluable source for this post, and is fascinating in its own right.

Next time: Vikram Seth's Golden Gate and A Suitable Boy

Last time:Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin - The Letter

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1. T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography, Knopf, 2003, pp. 502-503.
2. Binyon, pp. 503-504.
3. Binyon, pp. 245.
4. Binyon, pp. 504-505.
5. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, translated by Charles Johnston. Penguin, 1979, p. 228.
6. Eugene Onegin, p. 231.

The Golden Gate
After Eugene Onegin, I turned to Vikram Seth's novel in verse The Golden Gate (Random House, 1986), which is written entirely in the form of Onegin stanzas. And I mean entirely, from the dedication and table of contents to the "About the Author" note.

It's an astonishing homage from one writer to another, and an amazing performance in its own right. The Golden Gate's stanzas are fluid, witty, and follow the intricate Pushkinian rhyme scheme (see Pushkin's Eugene Onegin) while rarely landing with a thud on an obvious rhyme or stretching too far for a groan-worthy one, unless it's with an implied wink to the reader. (Seth does display a Nabokovian love of puns and wordplay, which he—just—manages not to overdo.)

The book is also filled with the texture of everyday life, or at least everyday life as experienced by highly educated young professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1980s. (Seth attended Stanford, where he studied economics and creative writing, so he was obviously drawing on some first-hand experience.) References abound to real-life bars, radio stations, streets, places, events, and political issues: several of the characters participate in an anti-nuclear weapons demonstration at "Lungless Labs" (a thinly veiled allusion to Livermore National Laboratory, where atomic weapons are designed and where a series of nonviolent blockades took place in the early 1980s). So Bay Area readers (or, at least, Bay Area readers of a certain age) will regularly experience a little frisson of recognition.

Those who have previously read Eugene Onegin will also experience that frisson, and not just because of The Golden Gate's verse form. The main character in Seth's cast is John, whose description is very Onegin-like:

Gray-eyed, blond-haired, aristocratic
In height, impatience, views, and face,
Discriminating though dogmatic,
Tender beneath a carapace
Of well-groomed tastes and tasteful grooming...

A passionate man, with equal parts of
Irritability and charm..." [1]

And like Onegin, John winds up in a serious quarrel with his best friend.

The book does so much so well and so cleverly that it feels a little churlish to complain that the romantic travails of its privileged characters simply aren't that compelling. John, in particular, seems (like Onegin) to almost wilfully destroy his own happiness, but utterly lacks Onegin's tragic dimension. Ultimately, despite its many virtues, The Golden Gate feels slighter than it should.

A Suitable Boy
There's nothing slight about Seth's next novel, A Suitable Boy (Harper Collins, 1993): it weighs in at nearly 1500 pages and close to 2 pounds (and that's the paperback edition). Set in northeastern India a few years after independence, it's the story of several families connected by marriage and friendship. It has more than two dozen characters, but its temporal scope is surprisingly limited: the action seems to take place over the course of a single year.

I have to confess that I'm writing about the book while I'm still immersed in it, so all of my judgments are necessarily preliminary and contingent. But it seems to me that so outsized a novel has to justify its length, as least if it wants me to be one of its enthusiastic readers. The reviewer's blurbs printed in the book compare A Suitable Boy to Dickens, Trollope, and Eliot. But while the novels of those writers are indeed lengthy, every scene (even most of Trollope's notorious hunting scenes) furthers the narrative or expands our sense of the characters. The events described at such great length and detail in Seth's novel instead often have the messiness, and one might say the pointlessness, of real life. Something happens, and then another thing happens, but it's not always clear why we are being told about it.

If such a multi-focal novel can be said to have main narratives, they are chiefly the college-age Lata Mehra's attempts to fend off her mother's endeavors to arrange her marriage to "a suitable boy," and the dissolute Maan Kapoor's unhappy love affair with the singer Saeeda Bai. Along the way we witness a demonstration that ends in violence, a rural hunt for wolves, a court case surrounding the Zamindari Abolition Act, and a stampede at a Pul Mela religious gathering (based on the 1954 Kumbh Mela tragedy). Many of these incidents seem to be included to provide Seth the opportunity to write set-pieces, rather than because the structure of the work demands them.

Of course, sprawling sagas don't need justification if the incidents are of sufficient interest and the writing doesn't tax our patience. But the writing in A Suitable Boy often feels slack, full of needless detail. At one point Haresh, one of Lata's suitors, invites her and her mother to his place for lunch, and for no discernable reason we are treated to the entire menu:

First there was tomato soup. Then fried fish for everyone except Mrs Rupa Mehra, who had vegetable cutlets. There there was chicken curry and rice with fried brinjal and mango chutney (Mrs Rupa Mehra had a vegetable curry.) And finally there was caramel custard. [2]

Perhaps this recitation says something about the tastes, economic standing or cultural background of Haresh which is too subtle for me to understand. Or perhaps this is intended as a kind of cinematic montage, where the flat description of the succession of dishes emphasizes the void of conversational silence that surrounds them. Or perhaps it's meant to add some local flavor, as it were. But scenes like this one lead me to suspect that Seth simply didn't know what to leave out.

Seth's writing can also be surprisingly sloppy. Fifty pages in I came across this sentence: "But despite Professor Mishra's open-armed avuncularity, his Falstaffian bulk and charm, Pran detected something dangerous: his wife and two young sons were, so it seemed to him, afraid of their father." [3] If this wordy, awkward, and ambiguous sentence (Mishra isn't his wife's father, thankfully) was an isolated instance, it could be overlooked. But clunkers like this crop up regularly throughout the book. To take a few more examples at random:

"'No—no—I have to go—' Varun found his voice at last, and almost fled from the hall without even laying a bet on the next race." [4] Does "almost" refer to Varun's precipitate exit from the hall, and if so, does "almost fled" mean "did not flee"? Or does it refer to his betting, and if so, does "almost...without even laying a bet" mean that far from leaving hastily, he stopped to make a bet on the way out? Indeed, when he is spotted a few minutes later he is celebrating his winnings on the race, so he must have bet. So what is this sentence intended to mean?

"Lunch was presided over by Miss Mason, a desperately ugly and lifeless woman of forty-five...the lifelessness of Miss Mason succeeded in freezing most of the conversation." [5] I would imagine it might. Although "lacking in energy" is one of the meanings of "lifeless," when applied to persons the far more common meaning is that they are dead. Perhaps Seth was anticipating by a decade or so the rise of the zombie as a cultural referent; or perhaps he should have chosen another modifier.

"[The room] was full of heavy furniture...and at the far end of the room...hung an oil painting of an English country scene containing cows. Mrs Rupa Mehra thought of their edibility, and was upset." [6] Again, "their" is grammatically ambiguous: while of course it is intended to refer to the cows, it could also refer to the heavy furniture and oil paintings, which indeed aren't very appetizing.

"For today she had no wish at all to talk to Kiran or anyone—least of all to Mrs Rupa Mehra." [7] The character on whose thoughts we are eavesdropping is Lata Mehra, Mrs. Mehra's daughter— would she really mentally refer to her own mother by her full name and honorific?

These are all the sorts of minor errors and awkwardnesses that are easily committed in the heat of inspiration, but which rewriting, and the careful attentions of copy editors, should eliminate. But on the evidence of what wound up being printed, it seems that A Suitable Boy didn't get very many drafts or much copy editing.

My judgment is undoubtedly premature and unfair; after all, I've only read two-thirds of the book so far. And if I come to feel differently after completing it, I will happily modify these comments (watch this space!). But at page 1018, A Suitable Boy feels as though could have been a superb novel—worthy, perhaps, of the comparisons to Dickens, Trollope and Eliot—if only it were shorter.

And this is where my train of thought reaches the end of the line. Thanks for bearing with me on this journey from Tim Kreider to Vikram Seth via Nabokov, Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, but I can't pretend that all of what I experience or seek out is as carefully connected as this sequence suggests. It's great when it happens, but I also try to leave myself open to serendipitous discoveries or just the randomness of everyday life. While I've been writing this series, I've also been reading the novels of Javier Marías, watching the postwar films of Jean Renoir, listening to superb recital recordings by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Janet Baker, attending operas by Boito and Verdi, and anticipating the pleasures of Shuddh Desi Romance, Chennai Express, Phata Poster Nikla Hero and Ram-Leela. So have no fear: randomness will be reasserting itself with my very next post.

Last time:Eugene Onegin - The Duel

Update 4 November 2013: The last third of A Suitable Boy confirms the mixed impressions made by its first part: we are treated to more lengthy digressive set pieces (Parliamentary debates, legal arguments, election speeches and a cricket match), underelaborated incidents, and clunky sentences ("The Chief Secretary's eyes drifted across his table" [8]; I hope he was able to recapture them before they flew out the window)—not to mention a preemptive self-comparison to Middlemarch.

At the wedding that (of course) concludes the novel, there are hints of a sequel: "'You too will marry a girl I choose,' said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger son [although her daughter isn't marrying a girl she chose, so where does that "too" come from?...never mind.]...'A suitable girl, and no exceptions.'" [9] And indeed, it was recently announced that, having missed a June 2013 deadline for the delivery of the manuscript of A Suitable Girl to Penguin, Seth was negotiating a deal with another publisher. The novel is now expected to be published by Orion in the fall of 2016. Let's hope the additional time allows Seth and his editors the opportunity to avoid some of the faults of A Suitable Boy.

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1. Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate, Vintage Books, 1987, p. 5.
2. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, HarperPerennial, 1994, p. 621.
3. A Suitable Boy, p. 54.
4. A Suitable Boy, p. 476.
5. A Suitable Boy, p. 621.
6. A Suitable Boy, p. 621.
7. A Suitable Boy, p. 634.
8. A Suitable Boy, p. 1053.
9. A Suitable Boy, p. 1467.

The name Karan Johar in the credits of a film signals immediately that it will be glossy, formulaic and manipulative. I know this full well going in, and yet more often than not his movies still manage to sneak under my critical defenses.

It doesn't much matter whether he's listed as writer, director, or producer. The look, tone and content of most of the films he's involved with immediately announce them as a Karan Johar product, even if someone else is credited with the screenplay or direction.

That's certainly the case with the Johar-written Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come, 2003), which was the first Bollywood film I ever saw, and which to this day remains one of my favorite movies. Nikil Advani directed KHNH, but as his post-KHNH career has demonstrated either he had an incredible case of beginner's luck or he was getting constant input and advice from Johar. (Advani was Johar's assistant director on Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something's Happening, 1998) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Joy, Sometimes Sorrow, 2001).)

One reason I mention KHNH is because it established or continued tropes that Johar's films have frequently returned to since. Dostana (Friendship, 2008) and Student of the Year (2012) center on love triangles (as does his first film, KKHH), while Wake Up Sid (2009), I Hate Luv Storys (2010), and Ek Main aur Ek Tu (One Me and One You, 2012) feature opposites-attract main couples. All of the films focus on the struggles of their characters to find their paths in adult life in the decade following their graduation from college.

To this list of KHNH descendants add Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (These Young People Are Crazy, 2013). Naina—Deepika Padukone in one of her best performances—is a shy, bespectacled medical student. On impulse she joins a Himalayan trek with a group of her former college friends including the free-spirited Aditi (Kalki Koehlin) and the troubled Avi (Aditya Roy Kapur).

Also along on the trip is the popular, extroverted Bunny (Ranbir Kapoor). He seems to possess everything that Naina feels she lacks: confidence, social ease, spontaneity, fearlessness, good looks. Of course, Naina falls hopelessly in love with him, although Bunny is unaware of her feelings, or perhaps dismisses them as just another crush. Fate intervenes, and the two are separated, seemingly forever.

Naina and Bunny are very reminiscent of KHNH's shy, bespectacled MBA student Naina (Preity Zinta) and the object of her secret love, the popular, extroverted Aman (Shah Rukh Khan). The two Nainas are even given the same nickname by their crushes, "chashmish" (please forgive any spelling error; it's translated as "specsy" in the subtitles of KHNH):

Naina (Deepika Padukone, YJHD)

Naina (Preity Zinta, KHNH)

Eight years later, at Aditi's ultra-lavish wedding, Naina and Bunny are unexpectedly reunited. And at this point there are strong echoes of another Karan Johar film. Like the heroine of KKHH, Anjali, Naina has apparently carried a smoldering torch for her clueless crush for eight years. But this time Bunny begins to see her with new eyes, and has a familiar question for her:

Bunny and Naina reunite after 8 years (YJHD)

Anjali (Kajol) and Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) reunite after 8 years (KKHH)

But despite all the parallels, which writer/director Ayan Mukerji underscores with all the subtlety of hot pink highlighter, YJHD isn't a remake of either KKHH or KHNH—quite. Unilke KKHH's Anjali, the smart, accomplished and gorgeous Naina somehow doesn't have another man in her life. And unlike KHNH's Aman, Bunny doesn't have a life-threatening disease, he's got a relationship-threatening aversion to commitment.

There are many good things in YJHD. Deepika, cast against type, gives an utterly believable and highly affecting performance as Naina, and her chemistry with Ranbir seems very real. Ranbir, although his role plays more to type than cutting against it, also convinces as Bunny, a guy who is single-mindedly focused on his dreams of travel and adventure. And when Mukerji's script isn't cribbing from other movies (and sometimes when it is), it gives Deepika and Ranbir several heartbreaking scenes together.

It's also great to see some veterans given screen time, and making the most of it. Farooq Shaikh (of the classics Umrao Jaan (1981), Chashme Buddoor (1981) and Katha (1983), among many other films) plays Bunny's father, who, despite their conflicts, helps him realize his dreams. And although her "surprise" item number was highly publicized before the film's release, watching Madhuri Dixit dance is always a pleasure:

However, I want to talk a bit about the ending of the film, so If you haven't yet seen YJHD, be aware that spoilers follow.

Deepika gives such a moving performance as Naina that we want above all else at the end of the film to see her happy. And the film supplies us with what is intended to be a happy ending. But when Bunny gives up the dream job he's been working towards for eight years to be with Naina, my logical centers started to kick in. This seems like a surefire recipe for resentment and recriminations once the honeymoon has worn off. As Bunny himself realizes,

While it's unusual (and partly redresses an immense imbalance) to see the man making sacrifices for the couple, rather than (as is so often the case) the woman, I think Naina and Bunny will be facing some major issues in the not-too-distant future. Just to be perfectly clear, I would think the same thing if being with Bunny required Naina to give up her medical practice. I'm just not sure I see a way for this couple to be together and for both partners to be fulfilled.

Unless Bunny can somehow learn to take Naina's wisdom to heart. If Bunny ever goes looking for his heart's desire, he probably doesn't need to look any further than sharing a gorgeous sunset over Udaipur with Deepika Padukone:

Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora's Box (1929)

Another in the occasional series of my favorite recent articles, posts, etc. from around the web:

1.Is the marriage plot still possible?

It can seem as though contemporary mores have killed the time-honored marriage plot. In the post "Who cares if Tanu Weds Manu?: The new Bollywood romantic comedy," I wrote: "So in a modern world where everyone can choose (and change) their romantic and sexual partners at will, where class and caste barriers are diminished and the concept of social disgrace seems quaint (at least, once you've graduated from high school), is the romantic comedy still possible?"

Adelle Waldman thinks so ("Why the Marriage Plot Need Never Get Old,"New Yorker, Nov. 14, 2013). Not because we resemble the heroes and heroines of the great 19th-century novels, but because they resemble us:

"The issue turns on where we think the narrative power of those older novels originates—whether it’s attributable to the social constraints on their characters (as well as the satisfying decisiveness of their fates—the suicides on the one hand or marriages that last “forever” on the other), or if, instead, these novels are, like so many contemporary novels, primarily dependent on psychological and internal drama.

"I think that, if we look closely, we find that much of their strength derives from the internal and the timeless—from conflicts rooted in the perversity of human nature and the persistent difficulties of social life."

2. The revenge of Lulu

Would Emma have avoided marrying Charles Bovary if she'd known he was #ObsessedWithMom? Would Elizabeth Bennet have been more on her guard if she had learned that the #TallDarkAndHandsome Wickham had a #WanderingEye? Deborah Schoenman writes about Lulu, a social networking app where women can rate the men they date ("What’s He Really Like? Check the Lulu App,"New York Times, Nov. 20, 2013):

"Last summer, Neel Shah, a comedy writer, was at a bar in Los Angeles on a date with a woman who pulled up his profile. 'She started reading me these negative hashtags and I was like, "Uh, this is awkward,"' said Mr. Shah, 30, whose profile has been viewed 448 times and 'favorite' eight times for an average score of 6.7 [out of 10]. His hashtags include #TallDarkAndHandsome and #CleansUpGood, along with the less flattering #TemperTantrums and #WanderingEye."

Lulu sounds a lot like RateMe Plus, a formerly fictional feature of the near future in Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010). As Shteyngart describes RateMe Plus, it's an app that allows others to instantly rank you in categories such as "Fuckability" and "Male Hotness." The main character of Super Sad True Love Story, Lenny, "naturally had a lot of problems with his Fuckability—entering a bar in newly chic Staten Island (one prediction that has not yet come true), he is immediately and publicly ranked as the fortieth-ugliest man out of the forty men present." (See "Suggested reading: Google Glass.")

Lulu, of course, was the anti-heroine of Franz Wedekind's plays Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora's Box (1904), which became the basis of both G.W. Pabst's film Pandora's Box (1929) and Alban Berg's opera Lulu (1937). In the plays, film and opera, Lulu is outcast, condemned, and ultimately murdered for daring to adopt behaviors—having sex purely for pleasure, and using her partner's desires for her own ends—that men have always been able to take for granted. Is the way that Lulu (the app) enables women to assume the formerly male prerogative of publicly rating and shaming (or praising) their sex partners the ultimate revenge of Lulu (the character)?

3. Bad sex, part 1

Bad writing about sex just makes you feel embarrassed for the writer, especially one whose literary pretensions are painfully obvious. Jonathan Franzen's first novel The Twenty-Seventh City has been reissued, and Parul Sehgal reviews it ("Jonathan Franzen’s First Novel Was Terrible (But It's Being Reissued Anyway),"Slate Book Review, Nov. 2013):

"In this novel, Franzen first glimpses his plot, that small fertile plot that will sustain three more books: the psychosexual dramas of the nuclear family; his horror of Midwestern complacency, hectoring mothers, militantly joyless fathers. We see, too, the missteps that will continue to dog him, especially the satirist’s blind spot for his own fallibilities, for his own Midwestern complacency, his propensity for hectoring and militant joylessness. For how completely he is a Jonathan Franzen character."

The villain of Franzen's novel is a sexually manipulative South Asian woman whose aim is to subvert a morally pure Anglo man who stands in the way of her corrupt (and profitable) real estate schemes—and terrorist plots. Alas, Sehgal writes, "I confess I’m making the book sound more entertaining than it is."

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux as Adèle and Emma
in Blue Is The Warmest Color

4. Bad sex, part 2

Film critic Manohla Dargis has bravely opposed the (largely male) critical consensus that has anointed Blue Is The Warmest Color as a masterpiece about women's desire. In "Seeing You Seeing Me: The Trouble With ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color'" (New York Times, Oct. 25, 2013), she writes,

"I first saw 'Blue Is the Warmest Color' at Cannes, where I wrote 399 dissenting words on the movie and raised some of the issues I had with it...Primarily, I questioned [director Abdellatif] Kechiche’s representation of the female body. By keeping so close to Adèle, he seemed to be trying to convey her subjective experience, specifically with the hovering camerawork and frequent close-ups of her face. Yet, early on, this sense of the character’s interiority dissolves when the camera roves over her body even while she is sleeping. Is Adèle, I had wondered then, dreaming of her own hot body?"

In her original article, Dargis wrote that "the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else....'Men look at women,' the art critic John Berger observed in 1972. 'Women watch themselves being looked at.'* Plus ça change...."

For a contrary view, see Richard Brody's "The Problem With Sex Scenes That Are Too Good,"New Yorker, Nov. 4, 2013. Brody has called Dargis' article "malevolent" ("Out Loud: Sex Onscreen,"New Yorker, Nov. 18, 2013, 8:10 - 8:30).

Man Carrying Corpse on His Shoulders (detail). Luca Signorelli (ca. 1500)

2. Death, boredom, and smart phones

Do Italian Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli, the boring but strangely compelling contemporary novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle) and Tao Lin (Taipei), and Louis C.K. have anything in common? The wide-ranging intelligence of Zadie Smith discovers that they do: each is struggling to come to terms with the unfathomable—our own mortality ("Man vs. Corpse,"New York Review of Books, Dec. 5, 2013):

"'You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there…. That’s being a person…. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty.'

"That’s the comedian Louis C.K., practicing his comedy-cum-art-cum-philosophy, reminding us that we’ll all one day become corpses. His aim, in that skit, was to rid us of our smart phones, or at least get us to use the damn things a little less ("You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your products, and then you die"), and it went viral, and many people smiled sadly at it and thought how correct it was and how everybody (except them) should really maybe switch off their smart phones, and spend more time with live people offline because everybody (except them) was really going to die one day, and be dead forever, and shouldn’t a person live—truly live, a real life—while they’re alive?"

--

* John Berger, Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972, p. 47.

It's time once again for my roundup of movies, television shows, books, and music first encountered (although not necessarily first released) over the past year. In our classic Bollywood viewing 2013 was the year of Rajesh Khanna.

Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz in Aap Ki Kasam (Your Promise, 1974)

Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz: Prem Kahani

Somehow after Bollywood viewing that's spanned 10 years and nearly 300 films we had never managed to see any of Mumtaz's movies before. I regret that we didn't discover her sooner—she and Rajesh are wonderful together. Their chemistry is utterly delightful to watch, as in Laxmikant-Pyarelal's title song for Prem Kahani (Love Story, 1975):

But the course of true love doesn't run smooth. In the days of the Quit India movement, wounded freedom fighter Rajesh (Rajesh) seeks refuge from a police manhunt with his childhood friend Dheeraj (Shashi Kapoor). Two inconvenient problems which Rajesh has overlooked: Dheeraj is himself a police inspector, and he's celebrating his wedding night with his new bride Kamini (Mumtaz)—the woman Rajesh loves, but rejected so that his martyrdom wouldn't burden her with widowhood. The stage is set for conflicting loyalties, parallels to Puccini's Turandot, and barely suppressed emotions surging unbidden to the surface.

I wrote in my original post on Prem Kahani that "Kamini is an incredibly compelling character: smart, courageous and complicated. And Mumtaz is wonderful in the role. In a film packed with male stars, she more than holds her own, and makes Kamini the focus of our sympathies." Mumtaz is not only adorably vivacious and playful, she can convey profound depths of feeling, as in "Phool aahista phenko" (Gently pluck the rose):

As Memsaab wrote in her wonderful review of Prem Kahani: "This is Hindi cinema at its finest, honestly. So much communicated so beautifully in one simple song! How to explain it when someone says 'Oh, Bollywood—those are musicals, right?' Sigh."

Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore: Amar Prem

Mumtaz is not the only heroine who makes a superb jodi with Rajesh. Last year we also saw two of the movies in which he was paired with Sharmila Tagore, Aradhana (Adoration, 1969) and Amar Prem (Immortal Love, 1972). Both have great soundtracks; Aradhana's songs were composed by S.D. Burman and Amar Prem's by his son R.D. Burman. "Chingari koi bhadke" (A raging fire) is a beautifully melancholy example of R.D.'s art:

Anand (Rajesh) is trapped in an unhappy marriage, and seeks solace in the arms of the courtesan Pushpa (Sharmila). As in Prem Kahani, their love story does not have a conventionally happy ending, but that's one of the things that makes the film so emotionally affecting. As I wrote in my original post on Amar Prem, it "remains radical more than 40 years on for suggesting that true families are those formed by love."

Waheeda Rehman in Teesri Kasam

Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman: Teesri Kasam

We also explored some other classic movies this year. Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow, 1966) is a gorgeously photographed, wistful film featuring Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman, and excellent songs composed by Shankar-Jaikishen (lyrics by Shailendra).

Hiraman (Raj), a bullock-cart driver, is hired to transport the nautanki dancer Hirabai (Waheeda) to her next performances at a village fair. Over the hours they spend together on the lengthy journey they form a deep attachment. Hiraman awakens emotions in Hirabai that for many years have remained buried, as we're shown in the lovely, sad "Sajanwa Bairi Ho Gaye Hamar" (My beloved has become my enemy):

Hirabai recognizes, though, that no matter how much she cares for Hiraman (and he for her), they inhabit different worlds. As I wrote in my original post on Teesri Kasam, "Sometimes, no matter how much we might wish otherwise, love can't conquer all....Teesri Kasam is a minor-key masterpiece that rewards multiple viewings."

Next time: Favorites of 2013: Contemporary Bollywood

My viewing of current Bollywood movies tends to lag about six months behind their release dates. It's strange to me that no San Francisco cinema has yet realized that it should be showing first-run Bollywood films. I could travel to smarter theaters in Emeryville, Fremont or Santa Clara, but I can't quite bring myself to turn watching a movie into a five- or six-hour commitment. I'm not a fan of streaming, so I still wait for the DVD release (although eventually, of course, DVDs will be going away). But the availability of new Bollywood movies on DVD rental services like Netflix is spotty, to say the least.

So I haven't yet seen Chennai Express, Shuddh Desi Romance, Phata Poster Nikla Hero, Ram-Leela, R...Rajkumar, Krrish 3 or, of course, Dhoom 3 (although in the cases of the last two, it sure feels like I've seen them already). My favorite contemporary Bollywood films are necessarily chosen from those released from late last year through the first half of this year. And they are:

Sridevi in English Vinglish

English Vinglish
Shashi (Sridevi), an Indian housewife and mother, begins to feel excluded and taken for granted by her family, the rest of whom slip easily between Hindi and English. On a trip to New York to help with the wedding of her niece, feeling overwhelmed and isolated, Shashi decides to take a crash course in English. Her choice has unexpected consequences for those around her, her family, and especially for Shashi herself.

English Vinglish (2012) was Sridevi's first Hindi film after a hiatus of nearly a decade. In my original post on English Vinglish, I wrote that it "is a nicely observed and thoughtful film on issues of language, cultural identity, and family dynamics...And I hope it's only the first of many well-written, nuanced roles for Sridevi on her return."

It also has an improbably catchy title tune; somehow that "Hah!" perfectly captures Shashi's joy in her small triumphs as she begins to broaden her linguistic (and emotional) horizons:

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani
A smart, tomboyish but shy girl falls secretly in love with a popular, extroverted boy. She never lets him know, but eight years later she's blossomed into a beauty—and is suddenly reunited with her old crush...

Ranbir and Deepika in YJHD

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (These Young People Are Crazy, 2013) is largely a mashup of elements from two earlier Karan Johar films, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something's Happening, 1998) and Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come, 2003). So it doesn't win any points for originality. What it does have, though, as those earlier films did in Kajol and Preity Zinta, is a compellingly sympathetic heroine. As I wrote in my original post on YJHD, "Deepika, cast against type, gives an utterly believable and highly affecting performance as Naina." As the unobservant object of her affections, Ranbir Kapoor is also in good form, but it's Deepika's Naina that we come to care about.

Oh, and having an item by the fabulous Madhuri Dixit doesn't hurt, either:

Kandukondain Kandukondain
Speaking of compellingly sympathetic heroines, Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It, 2000) has two: Sowmya (Tabu) and Meenu (Aishwarya Rai). This film doesn't quite qualify for my Contemporary Bollywood Favorites list even under my extremely lax and entirely self-imposed rules: it wasn't released recently, it's not a Bollywood film, and I didn't watch it for the first time this year. I can't resist giving this wonderful Tamil adaptation of Sense & Sensibility another plug, though. As I wrote in Bollywood Rewatch 3, Rajiv Menon's film "manages to be surprisingly faithful to its source while believably updating the story to the present." And if there's no scene in Austen's novel where Marianne Dashwood dances in front of a giant stylized peacock, there should be:

Some years trying to think of movies to include on my favorites list is a bit of a struggle. Not this year; in fact, I'm leaving some excellent films off the list just to keep it a manageable length. Here are my favorite (non-Indian) movies first watched in 2013:

Classic Hollywood

If in our Classic Bollywood viewing 2013 was the year of Rajesh Khanna, in our Classic Hollywood viewing it was the year of Myrna Loy. We started with the brilliant Libeled Lady (1936). When they say "They don't make 'em like that anymore," this is the kind of movie they're talking about: a witty, sophisticated comedy delivered with sparkling timing by a quartet of glamorous stars (Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, William Powell and a radiant Loy). Tracy plays a newspaper editor who's being sued for libel by Loy; to trap her in a compromising situation, he asks Powell to romance her. But for there to be a scandal, Powell needs to be married—and Tracy suggests his own long-suffering fiancée Harlow for the job. But as in comic opera, the convoluted plot is almost beside the point.

Myrna Loy, Asta, and William Powell in After the Thin Man

After seeing Libeled Lady, we decided that we had to rewatch all of the Powell-Loy Thin Man films just so we could continue to enjoy their affectionate onscreen chemistry. (After the Thin Man (1936) is not only the most cleverly-titled sequel ever, it gets my vote as the best film in the series.) And even that wasn't enough: we also watched some of Loy's earlier and later films, including Vanity Fair (1932)—Becky Sharp was one of her last femme fatale roles—and the decades-ahead-of-its-time The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). That film follows three World War II veterans (played by Fredric March, Dana Andrews and actual veteran Harold Russell) returning to civilian life, and their struggles with post-traumatic stress, disability, self-medication, and societal indifference. And, yes, Myrna Loy is as radiant as ever.

Independent

A micro-budget independent film, Today's Special (2009) was far and away the best recent American movie we saw in 2013. The cast includes Naseeruddin Shah, Madhur Jaffrey, Harish Patel, and writer Aasif Mandvi, who is brilliant at portraying wide-eyed disbelief as catastrophe piles on catastrophe. Mandvi plays Samir, a chef who reluctantly agrees to give up his dreams of moving to France in order to take over his family's struggling Indian restaurant in Queens. But Samir has never cooked Indian food before, and quickly discovers that he's in way over his head—until a loquacious cab driver (Shah) comes to the rescue. As I wrote in my post on Today's Special, Mandvi's film "shows that it's not the budget of a movie that counts, but the imagination of its creators."

Foreign

We saw some wonderful films from outside the U.S. this year, but three stood out as favorites:

Valentin (2002), an Argentinian film, is set in 1969, just a few years before the country was plunged into social upheaval, a military coup and the Dirty War. Valentin (the wonderful Rodrigo Noya) is a precocious 8-year-old who tries to make sense of a confusing adult world. The extended scene where Valentin spends the day with his neglectful divorced dad's new girlfriend (Julieta Cardinali), and we see her dawning awareness that she faces a critical moment of decision, is heartbreaking. And the interview with writer-director Alejandro Agresti included as an extra on the DVD, shot in a poorly lit, noisy cafe in the middle of the night, is essential viewing as he reveals the elements of the film that were drawn from his own story.

No (2012), based on a play by Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta (of Il Postino fame) is about the 1988 plebiscite on dictator Augusto Pinochet's continued rule. Pinochet had declared himself President in 1973 after violently seizing power in the CIA-backed overthrow of the democratically-elected Salvador Allende. The film follows René (Gael García Bernal), a designer of slick ad campaigns, as he tries to convince the earnest, angry opponents of Pinochet to use humor, suggestion and symbolism to win the hearts and minds of voters. We want the "No" campaign to win, but at the same time we realize that René represents the triumph of image over substance in political discourse. With its urgency and immediacy, No gives at least a hint of what it must have been like as a democratic movement struggled to emerge in Chile after 16 years of brutal suppression.

My Mother's Castle (1990) is the sequel to My Father's Glory. Both movies are based on Marcel Pagnol's memoirs of growing up in the forbidding but beautiful landscape of Provence in the years before World War I. Every image is suffused with the glow of nostalgia and the warmth of remembered family closeness.

Documentaries

Perhaps because my partner worked in theater and dance for many years, we love performing arts documentaries. We saw several excellent ones in 2013:

Pina (2011) is Wim Wender's meditation on Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. The choreographer herself, who died during the filming, is largely absent; instead, we watch her extraordinary, generation-spanning company of dancers performing her works, which unfold with the logic of dreams.

Two excellent films follow the complex process of staging opera. In Pelléas et Mélisande: Le Chant des Aveugles (Song of the Blind, 2008) we watch stage director Olivier Py and conductor Marc Minkowski working with a group of French and Russian performers on Debussy's mesmerizing score. This fluid documentary exemplifies director Philippe Béziat's axiom that "Film is the continuation of music by other means."Becoming Traviata (2012) follows rehearsals for Verdi's opera La Traviata at the Aix-en-Provence festival. The cast features the extraordinary Natalie Dessay as Violetta. At the end of the opera, Violetta collapses, and the final images of the film are of Dessay falling to the stage over and over, trying to find a physical expression of the emotional truth of the moment.

Every Little Step (2008) focusses on the 2006 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line. Just as in the musical, we meet the auditioning actors and learn about their lives, hopes and fears. Structuring the film as a reflection of the show that it's about is a clever device. To make it all even more meta, we also get interviews with the original cast in the present day, some grainy footage of their 1970s performances, and excerpts from tapes of the famous rap sessions held by Michael Bennett as he was developing the show. Before seeing the film I wasn't the biggest fan of A Chorus Line, but I found Every Little Step irresistible.

Finally, actress-filmmaker Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell (2012) is a compelling film about the solution to a longstanding family mystery. When Sarah reaches adolescence, her siblings tell her that there are rumors that Sarah's dad might not be her biological father. After a decade of uncertainty, Sarah sets out to find the truth—only to discover that there are as many stories about her parents' complicated marriage as there are witnesses.

Next time: Favorites of 2013: Books

Last time:Favorites of 2013: Contemporary Bollywood

Nonfiction

Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing (2012): Somehow I'd remained unaware of Tim Kreider until this year. Kreider is a cartoonist and a writer on film, books, and, as in this collection, his own life. As I wrote in my post on We Learn Nothing, "each of his insightful (and often darkly hilarious) essays is about how a rueful, observant and reflective single man in early middle age assesses the passage of time, with its gains (experience, an occasional glimmering of wisdom, and a tenuous emotional maturity) and losses (passion, heedlessness, and many loved ones)."

Fiction

In chronological order:

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1823-1833): "Alexander Pushkin has roughly the same stature in Russian literature that Shakespeare does in English, and Eugene Onegin (1823-1833) is his greatest work," I wrote on my first encounter with this masterpiece in Charles Johnston's faithful, readable and elegant translation. And Pushkin's novel in verse has been an inspiration to many other artists, including Tchaikovsky, Nabokov, and more recently Vikram Seth.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868): T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels." The first and last of Eliot's claims for this unruly novel are doubtful, but as I wrote in my post on The Moonstone, "Collins' novel remains compelling, less for the implausible solution of the mystery than for what it reveals about its author's unconventional life and unusual attitudes" towards opium use, mixed-race parentage, same-sex affection, and anti-imperialism.

Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (1938). The producer David O. Selznick wrote in a memo to the director Alfred Hitchcock that "every woman who has read it has adored the girl and has understood her psychology, has cringed with embarrassment for her, yet has understood exactly what was going through her mind." In my post on Rebecca I wrote that I would expand Selznick's observation to include "anyone who has ever felt the awkwardness of entering a social situation governed by unstated rules that everyone else seems to know instinctively—and that's pretty much all of us." My post, by the way, includes a defense of Hitchcock's version, which I've come to feel is among his best films.

Phillip Pullman, The Sally Lockhart Mysteries (1985-1994): While these young-adult novels set in late Victorian England "are firmly grounded in the grim realities of 19th-century capitalism and imperialism, they are also ripping yarns featuring criminal masterminds, powerful industrial magnates, international spies, and other fiendishly evil nemeses" for Pullman's intrepid heroine. As I wrote in my post on the series, though, due to its high level of violence and frankness about sex be prepared for some interesting questions if you give these books to a young person.

The novels of Javier Marías may be the subject of a full-length post in the near future. Many of his books are structured like mysteries, but mysteries in which there is no clear solution. Marías is more interested in the dark undercurrents in everyday lives, and the way his narrators try to navigate among uncertainties and doubts, than in neat conclusions. His style may take a bit of getting used to; most of his books are written in a way that approximates how we actually think and speak, that is, with hesitations and reconsiderations and digressions, with one thought leading into the next rather than emerging as perfectly formed and discrete ideas. With their chains of stream-of-consicousness clauses, his sentences must be difficult to translate, and Margaret Jull Costa, his regular translator, generally does an excellent job (although her occasional use of British slang may feel somewhat jarring for American readers).

Perhaps a good place to start is with his latest novel, The Infatuations (Knopf, 2013). A man is murdered on the street in an apparently random act of violence. But then it turns out that perhaps the violence wasn't so random; and then, that the murdered man may have been harboring a secret. As the narrator María explores further, the motives and culpability of the man's wife, his best friend, the mentally disturbed murderer, and the victim himself become ever murkier. The only clarity is that, when it comes to the human heart, nothing can be certain.

Biggest disappointment

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Knopf, 2013). Lahiri's second novel is on many critics' best-of lists this year. But I felt that in most of this book Lahiri has taken the writing-program dictum "show, don't tell" to a blank, affectless extreme. And in those few moments in the book when she is not following one clipped, terse, surface-skimming sentence with another, she produces instead jarringly mixed metaphors and thuddingly obvious symbols:

Around Bela her mother had never pretended. She had transmitted an unhappiness that was steady, an ambient signal that was fixed. It was transmitted without words. And yet Bela was aware of it, as one is aware of a mountain. Immovable, insurmountable...

When her mother had left Rhode Island, she'd taken her unhappiness with her, no longer sharing it, leaving Bela with a lack of access to that signal instead. What had seemed impossible had taken place. The mountain was gone. In its place was a heavy stone, like certain stones embedded deep when she dug on the beach, in the sand. Too large to unearth, its surface partly visible, but its contours unknown.

She taught herself to ignore it, to walk away. And yet the hole remained her hollow point of origin, the cold crosshairs of her existence.

She returned to it now. At last the sand gave way, and she was able to pry out what was buried, to raise it from its enclosure. For a moment she felt its dimensions, its heft in her hands. She felt the strain it sent through her body, before hurling it once and for all into the sea.

Perhaps Lahiri should be given credit for attempting something a bit different stylistically than her usual well-crafted short stories, but as this passage shows, the writing is in places shockingly clunky. As a result, The Lowland narrowly beat out Vikram Seth's slack, overlong and sloppily written A Suitable Boy (1993) as the biggest disappointment of 2013.

More favorites:Classic Bollywood, Contemporary Bollywood, Movies

I was saddened to learn this morning of the death of Farooq Shaikh, an actor equally at ease in comedy and drama. He appeared in films directed by Satyajit Ray (The Chess Players, 1977) and Hrishikesh Mukherjee (Rang Birangi and Kissi Se Na Kehna (1983)), among may others. If you are not familiar with Farooq Shaikh's work, I recommend the following films as places you might want to start:

Chashme Buddoor (Knock on Wood, 1981): Shaikh stars as university student Siddharth (perhaps an in-joke; Shaikh had been a student at Siddharth College of Law), who meets and falls in love with the lovely Neha (played by Deepti Naval). Siddharth's roommates, though, decide to interfere, in part because Siddharth's seriousness about Neha throws their own aimlessness (and lack of romantic success) into stark relief. Soon, though, they realize their mistake—only to discover that it's much harder to get the couple back together than it was to break them up. This charming comedy written and directed by Sai Paranjpye is pleasurable not only for its tongue-in-cheek take on filmi conventions, but especially for the warm and affectionate chemistry between Shaikh and Naval:

Katha (Story, 1983): Another Sai Paranjpye film featuring Farooq Shaikh and Deepti Naval. This time, though, Shaikh plays a heartless cad, Basu. Local beauty Sandhya (Naval) sees only Basu's charm, however, and falls in love—to the dismay of Rajaram (Naseeruddin Shah), Sandhya's shy, good-hearted neighbor who has loved her from afar for years. Basu isn't evil, but he is hugely self-centered and manipulative, basically seeing everyone he meets as a means to his own ends. Farooq Shaikh effectively portrays Basu's almost pathological narcissism, while at the same time suggesting why people might be drawn to him. Of course, Basu's lies can't go undiscovered forever, but when they are revealed will it be too late for Sandhya?

Umrao Jaan (Beloved Umrao, 1981): Based on Mirza Hadi Ruswa's novel, Muzaffar Ali's film about the impossible love of the courtesan Umrao Jaan (Rekha, in her greatest role) and the Nawab Sultan (Farooq Shaikh) has achieved classic status. In the scene below, long after their affair has ended, Umrao Jaan is unexpectedly reunited with the Nawab—and with his new bride, Umrao Jaan's childhood friend Bismillah (Prema Narayan). The wistful sadness of "Justju Jis Ki Thi," composed by Khayyam and sung by Asha Bosle, perfectly expresses the emotions of all three characters in this moment:

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (These Young People Are Crazy, 2013): In one of his final roles, Farooq Shaikh plays Rishikant, the father of the main character Bunny (Ranbir Kapoor), who looks indulgently on his son's foibles and tries to help him realize his dreams. This warm, loving role is a fitting swan song for this deeply appealing actor. Our thoughts are with his family, friends and colleagues.

Happy New Year! I'd like to bid farewell to the old year and welcome the new with the final installment of my Favorites of 2013: Music.

Live performances

Tales of Hoffman, San Francisco Opera, War Memorial Opera House, June 5:

Christian Van Horn in Tales of Hoffmann (Photo: Weaver/SF Opera)

This is exactly what I'd love to see more of at the San Francisco Opera: A striking production of an uncommon opera (Hoffmann was last performed at SFO in 1996) with a superb cast. Laurent Pelly's visually arresting staging of Offenbach's late masterwork employed the recent critical edition of the score edited by Michael Kaye. Kaye's edition restores much material in this frequently cut and rearranged opera—particularly in the prologue and epilogue, making the Muse's transformation into Hoffmann's companion Nicklausse and back much more dramatically coherent.

The cast was virtually flawless: it featured tenor Matthew Polenzani as an ardent Hoffmann, thrillingly sinister bass-baritone Christian Van Horn as the four villains, the lovely (and lovely-voiced) mezzo Angela Brower as the Muse/Nicklausse, the (almost literally) stratospheric Hye Jung Lee as the doll Olympia, and Natalie Dessay as the tragic Antonia. It's difficult to imagine a more compelling production of this dark, eerie, and beautiful work.

Teseo, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Herbst Theater, April 11:

Dominique Labelle and Valerie Vinzant in Teseo (Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

Speaking of superb casts in rarely-performed works, this semi-staged version of Handel's 1713 opera was a delight. Dominique Labelle was a standout with her fierce performance as the sorceress Medea (yes, that one), but the rest of the cast was also very fine, especially the women: Amanda Forsythe as the heroic Teseo (Theseus, a role originally written for the castrato Valeriano Pellegrini), Céline Ricci as the flirtatious Clizia, and Valerie Vinzant as Teseo's steadfast lover Agilea. (Vinzant was such a last-minute substitute that our programs only named the soprano originally scheduled for the role—there wasn't even an insert—but she was so assured that you would never have known.) The cast and orchestra under the leadership of Nicholas McGegan gave a vividly rewarding account of this unjustly neglected Handel opera.

Missa Salisburgensis, American Bach Soloists, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, July 13:

This mass of celebration composed by Heinrich Biber for the 1100th anniversary of the founding of the archbishopric of Salzburg is, well, massive. It has 53 parts for voices and instruments, divided into eight groups plus continuo. Given its sheer scale, it's no wonder the mass is so rarely programmed. American Bach Soloists' performance of the work, conducted by Jeffrey Thomas, practically lifted us out of our seats. This rehearsal video recorded by the San Francisco Classical Voice will give you a sense of what we experienced (especially if you boost the volume a bit):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L3YKoe1vEk

Recordings

Vivaldi: Ercole sul Termodonte. Rolando Villazón (Ercole), Joyce DiDonato (Ippolita), Vivica Genaux (Antiope), Romina Basso (Teseo), Patrizia Ciofi (Orizia), Diana Damrau (Martesia), Philippe Jaroussky (Alceste), Topi Lehtipuu (Telamone). Europa Galante, Fabio Biondi, conductor; Virgin Classics.

Talk about luxury casting: all the roles on this amazing recording are taken not only by first-rate singers, but by major international stars. And while this opera may not quite have the emotional depth of, say, Handel's best works, it is filled with scintillating, virtuosic music, brilliantly realized by the cast and Europa Galante under the direction of Fabio Biondi. Now if only some enterprising opera company would consider getting these singers together onstage and not just in a recording studio...

Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin. Thomas Allen (Onegin), Mirella Freni (Tatiana), Anne Sofie von Otter (Olga), Neil Shicoff (Lensky). Staatskapelle Dresden, James Levine, conductor; Deutsche Grammophon.

This operatic version of Pushkin's narrative poem may be Tchaikovsky's greatest work. In my full-length posts on the Letter Scene and the Duel from this opera, I wrote "Levine's lush, passionate approach is highly effective, and the cast is excellent (even if none of the principals is Russian)."

Pergolesi: Stabat Mater. Julia Lehzneva and Philippe Jaroussky. I Barocchisti, Diego Fasolis, conductor; Erato.

Composed by Pergolesi in the final months of his tragically short life, Stabat Mater has become his best-known work. If you are not already familiar with this gorgeous music (and even if you are), I recommend seeking out this new recording. The voices of Lezhneva and Jaroussky blend beautifully, and Fasolis' tempos are well-judged. Here is the opening duet, which imagines the grieving Mary standing at the foot of the cross:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9ZET0kU9qs

Arias for Caffarelli. Franco Fagioli. Il Pomo d'Oro, Riccardo Minasi, conductor; Naïve.

For the soundtrack of the film Farinelli (1994), the voice of the famous castrato was approximated by electronically combining the voices of countertenor Derek Lee Ragin and coloratura soprano Ewa Godlewska. Had Franco Fagioli been available, the filmmakers could have spared themselves the trouble. On this album of pieces written for Farinelli's chief rival Caffarelli, Argentinian countertenor Fagioli displays an astonishingly wide range and can sing coloratura with an almost Cecilia Bartoli-like intensity.

Also like Bartoli, Fagioli will be an acquired taste for some. When I first heard his voice, I compared it to an Islay single malt scotch for its smoky, dusky quality in the lower range. Decide for yourself: here is the opening track from his Arias for Caffarelli album, "Fra l'orror della tempesta" from Johann Hasse's Siroe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_ift7q4jsw

I applaud Fagioli's decision to seek out works by lesser-known composers such Cafaro, Sarro, and Manna. Interestingly, he does not include arias by either Handel (Caffarelli created the title role in Serse (1738)) or Gluck (he sang Sextus in that composer's La Clemenza di Tito (1752), to the same libretto later set by Mozart). Arias for Caffarelli is a wonderful album, and we'll definitely be watching for Fagioli in the future.

Stephen Sondheim: Company. Book by George Furth; direction and musical staging by John Doyle. Image.

This DVD records the 2006 revival of Sondheim's groundbreaking musical, and was originally broadcast on PBS as part of the Great Performances series. As he did in his 2005 revival of Sweeney Todd, director John Doyle strips down the musical accompaniment and has the actors playing instruments onstage—which heightens the intimacy of this ensemble work. Up until this year I had known Company only from a cassette tape I was given in college of the original Broadway cast album, which has received hundreds of plays over the years. Seeing the show onstage made me realize for the first time how formally inventive and funny it is. Raúl Esparza gives a strong performance as Bobby, the 35-year-old protagonist who resists his married friends' attempts to fix him up, but still yearns for connection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJgMlwMGB3U

Incidentally, three of my five favorite recordings from 2013 were gifts—many thanks again to the givers (you know who you are)!

More Favorites of 2013: Classic Bollywood, Contemporary Bollywood, Movies, Books

We're diehard Shah Rukh Khan fans, and think Deepika Padukone is often the best thing about the movies she's in (Exhibit A: Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (2013)). And we've been wondering how long it was going to take before a producer figured out that the charming jodi of Om Shanti Om (2007) should be reunited.

So why did we find Rohit Shetty's Chennai Express (2013) to be so disappointing? Let me count the ways:

1. It starts out as a parody of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, and ends up as a remake: The woman-running-for-the-train scene from DDLJ has been appropriated by many filmmakers, often with parodic intent. (For my money it was most effectively used in Dor (2006), where Ayesha Takia's character reaches out for the hand of Gul Panang.) Chennai Express offers the parody with a bit extra—four extra, in fact—and as Rahul (Shah Rukh) hauls person after person onto the train we have a growing (and well-founded) sense of foreboding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-sSeyqyZvQ

This scene is also a quick introduction to Rohit Shetty's directorial style: present a joke, repeat it until it's no longer funny, and then keep repeating it in the hope that it starts to become funny again—which, amazingly enough, it often does.

The woman racing for the train is Meena (Deepika), and the DDLJ echoes should tell you how the rest of the film unfolds. Yes, there's a stern, unbending father, and yes, there's a violent and completely unsuitable guy to whom (against her will) Meena has been promised in marriage. Will Rahul and Meena fall in love, and will Rahul attempt to convince her stern, unbending father to agree to their marriage? If you don't know the answer to those questions, you're sentenced to a remedial viewing of DDLJ.

But just as DDLJ ends with a scene of violence that almost ruins the movie for me, so does Chennai Express. Only the scene in Chennai Express is far more violent and goes on far longer. While dishoom-dishoom has a long and unavoidable history in masala movies, the hyper-realism (spraying blood, thudding soundtrack) of the scene in Chennai Express kept my finger firmly on the fast-forward button. And why, apart from the DDLJ parallelism, is the heroine left to stand and helplessly watch the hero getting beaten up by a gang of thugs? Hema Malini's Geeta (from Seeta aur Geeta (1972)) or Fearless Nadia might have something to say to the filmmakers about that.

2. The lack of songs:"Great songs" is one of Beth Loves Bollywood's criteria for masala films, but Chennai Express felt song-poor to me. Of the film's seven songs, one is essentially background music and one (the Rajinikanth tribute "Lunghi Dance / Thalaiva") happens over the closing credits, leaving only five for the movie itself.

Perhaps I'm mis-remembering, but I think only one dance number happens before the intermission, and it's an item. On a first listen, I didn't find Vishal-Shekar's efforts to be particularly memorable—at least, in a good way. Learning to say "hichaka-michaka" (from "1-2-3-4 Get On the Dance Floor") was fun, though.

And given that Chennai Express features two stars who can actually dance, if not perhaps quite at a Hrithik Roshan-Aishwarya Rai level, it felt like some opportunities were missed. Deepika has a few seconds of long-limbed gracefulness towards the end of "Titli," (at 3:25, to be precise), but it's not nearly enough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8zXLMIjlcw

3. Where is the dil? In Veer-Zaara (2004), Shah Rukh's Veer impulsively decides to help Preity Zinta's Zaara on her road trip through India to immerse the ashes of her Hindu ayah. Since Zaara is a Pakistani Muslim, this tells us something about her loyalty, courage, and sense of familial obligation. And since Veer is an Indian Air Force officer, this tells us something about his humanity and sense of duty. And when Zaara asks Veer to participate in the immersion ritual, we know that a deep emotional bond has been formed between them.

In Chennai Express, Shah Rukh's Rahul (a joking reference to previous characters he's played in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), among others) must immerse the ashes of his demanding, crotchety grandfather. Of course, Rahul learns that he must do the right thing and honor the wishes of the dead despite their shortcomings in life and his own inclinations to take the easy way out. But somehow, despite the significant looks exchanged by Rahul and Meena during the immersion, it just doesn't have the same resonance.

4. Throwing away the best bits, lingering on the worst: In the middle of the film one of its best scenes is thrown away. While they're staying together in Meena's father's crowded house, Rahul wants to see Meena alone for a few minutes to plan their escape. He scrawls "Meet me in the storeroom" on a piece of paper and throws it at her. She reads it, signals to him with her eyes, then crumples up the message and throws it away. Only, it hits someone else, who thinks that it's a message that Meena intends for him. Then he throws it away, and it hits someone else...Later, ten people arrive in the darkened storeroom, each seeking someone who is looking for someone else. It's a brilliant moment. I understand that it's an homage to a scene from Muthu, a 1995 Tamil film starring Rajinikanth and Meena, but it also echoes the garden scene in Act IV of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. Alas, the scene is far too short and most of its comic potential is unrealized. And then Shetty moves on to another lengthy car chase, another confrontation with thugs, or another bit of slapstick.

So despite SRK's charm and Deepika's grace and beauty, Chennai Express sinks under the weight of a rehashed scenario, mediocre songs and picturizations, and way too much dishoom-dishoom. I recommend instead taking the local, and lingering over the better SRK films to which this one pays both too much and too little homage.

K. S. Ravikumar's Muthu (1995) is the Tamil movie that, along with Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Heart Will Win the Bride, 1995), provides one of the main sources for Chennai Express (2013). And for the first hour or so, under the influence of its charismatic star Rajnikanth, its enjoyable A.R. Rahman soundtrack, and a screenplay that winks at time-honored movie conventions, I was convinced that I was undergoing a masala conversion experience.

Alas, as with Chennai Express, the good humor of Muthu's first half is increasingly replaced in the second by lengthy and very violent fight scenes. By the end, despite all of the move's early promise, I remained unconverted.

Muthu (Rajnikanth) is the good-hearted servant of the zamindar Ejama (Sarath Babu). But we're given some clues that not all is as it appears. Ominous music plays when the zamindar's uncle Ambarathar (Radha Ravi) drives up in his specially-accessorized Plymouth:

The zamindar's mother (Jayabharathi, who looks about the same age as her onscreen son), is harboring a secret:

(Ummm...yes?)

And Muthu doesn't know who his parents are:

There's also a holy sage who bears an uncanny resemblance to Muthu wandering around the neighborhood:

Could these things possibly be connected?

Meanwhile, his mother is pressuring Ejama to marry, and has her eye on her niece Padmini (Subhashri) as a prospective bride. But the zamindar has fallen in love with Ranganayaki (Meena), the lead actress in a threadbare travelling troupe:

Muthu and Raganayaki are at first antagonistic. But after Muthu foils an attempt to abduct her, she starts looking at him with new eyes.

This is where the film took its first wrong turn for me. The chase scene where Muthu and Raganayaki elude the goons of a local head man involves dozens of horse carts. Some of the falls that men and horses take during this scene look absolutely brutal. I'll spare you the screencaps, but I would be amazed if stuntmen weren't injured and horses destroyed as a result. It just seemed cruel, not exciting or fun.

Raganayaki and Muthu return to the zamindar's house, where the stage is set for some romantic confusion. Particularly when a note suggesting a nighttime meeting in the garden goes astray and gets read by half a dozen different people, each of whom imagines that it was intended for them.

Yes, this is the original of the Chennai Express storeroom scene, except that here the comic possibilities are far more fully developed; it's like something out of The Marriage of Figaro. And of course it leads to a Deepavali dance number, "Thilana Thilana" (Sweet as honey):

Unfortunately from this comic high point things go downhill rapidly. Plots by Raganayaki's abusive brother-in-law and the zamindar's evil uncle mean that the goons take over, and the final hour is just an endless series of bloody fights.

Does Muthu emerge victorious, win the girl, and regain his birthright? If you're in any suspense, or if you don't mind fight scenes that go on, and on, and on, then by all means seek out Muthu. It left me with no doubts about why Rajnikanth is a superstar in South Indian cinema, or why Rajnikanth and Meena were paired in several films in the mid-1990s—they make a charming jodi. But I'm still looking for a masala film that won't force me to fast-forward through the final hour.

Thanks to Rajshri Films, you can watch Muthu for free on YouTube.

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Favorites of 2013: Classic Bollywood

Favorites of 2013: Contemporary Bollywood

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Favorites of 2013: Books

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Favorites of 2013: Music

Why Chennai Express is disappointing

Muthu