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Lee Siegel (2) (1945–)

Autor(a) de Love in a Dead Language

Para outros autores com o nome Lee Siegel, ver a página de desambiguação.

11+ Works 404 Membros 17 Críticas 1 Favorited

About the Author

Lee Siegel is professor of religious studies at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of many books, including Love in a Dead Language, Who Wrote the Book of Love?, and Love and the Incredibly Old Man, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Obras por Lee Siegel

Associated Works

Gita Govinda: Love Song of the Dark Lord (1977) — Tradutor, algumas edições193 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Membros

Críticas

It is an unusual thing for me to review a book without having first read it cover-to-cover, but Love and Other Games of Chance is an unusual book. It is a piece of Lee Siegel's para-autobiographical fiction project that comprehends Love in a Dead Language and Who Wrote the Book of Love?, and it details the life of "Siegel's" alleged genetic father, who was raised in a circus family in California, advancing from snake-boy to sharpshooter, traveled the world from India to France, and recounted his many loves in a manuscript that this book purports to publish.

The book is in 100 short chapters, keyed to a board for a game of snakes & ladders. The overt implication is that a reader might use a conventional die to "play" through the book. After reading Chapter 1, roll the die and move on the included board, suffering the effects of any ladder or snake thus reached. Then read the chapter for the resulting space, and continue. So I did. I probably read thirty to forty chapters in this fashion, mostly in an ascending sequence on a first rapid pass up the board before I encountered my first snake.

Although I enjoyed everything I read, the book did not benefit from the lack of narrative continuity introduced by my reading procedure. As much as my attempt was in the spirit of the book, I would not recommend this method to other readers. After several months of intermittent engagement with the book, I'm shelving it to await a more conventional reading in the future.
… (mais)
2 vote
Assinalado
paradoxosalpha | May 20, 2018 |
50 pages in, I'm finding the style this is written in—uneven, verbose, self-congratulatory, trying too hard to be poetic—severely annoying. On top of it, the stories Siegel recounts early on just aren't very interesting. Maybe it gets better after another, oh, 300 pages, but I won't find out.
 
Assinalado
mrgan | Oct 30, 2017 |
Who Wrote the Book of Love? coyly straddles the line between memoir and novel. Author Lee Siegel admits in a prefatory note regarding his book's protagonist Lee Siegel that "so many of our experiences are ... identical," but there are parts of this book that are certainly fictional. I was so entertained by Siegel's account of the volume In the Beginning: A Child's Book about Grown-up Love by Dr. Isaiah Miller, that I mentioned it to my Other Reader, thinking that it must be real. But she quickly used the 'net to demonstrate that the only traceable references to it originated in Siegel's book! I maintain, though, that my confusion was understandable, given the many references to actual culture and events of the 1950s that fill this book.

The structure of the book also belies a certain measure of artifice if not invention, in that it has five chapters (corresponding to the five chapters in the lyric of "Who Wrote the Book of Love" by the Monotones, as well as the five chapters of Miller's In the Beginning), each divided into two years, and thus perfectly spanning the integral decade of baby-boomer childhood.

Siegel's childhood takes place in a well-off Jewish enclave in Beverly Hills. His father is a physician and his mother is an actress, and he attends the curiously-named Ponce De Leon Elementary School until delivered to Beverly Hills High School in "Chapter Five, She Loves You, and All Your Dreams Come True." The confessions of a childhood quest for love and/or sex are complicated only slightly by Cold War paranoia and the vagaries of US mass culture. Siegel and his cigarette-smoking pals tutor each other ignorantly through puberty, the reader is introduced to each of the girls in the series of his infatuations, and the story culminates in the exposure of the erotic origins of his cacoethes scribendi.

I've previously read one other of Siegel's novels (Love in a Dead Language) and one volume of his scholarship (Net of Magic), and he has yet to disappoint.
… (mais)
3 vote
Assinalado
paradoxosalpha | Nov 20, 2016 |
Love in a Dead Language is described by its author Lee Siegel as "a translation of [the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana] as well as the Sanskrit commentaries with extensive notes on the history of interpretations of the text in the context of both India and the West. ... also articulating a new theory of translation and commentarial rhetoric" (236). Or, wait. Maybe that's not this book, because the description is in fact offered by "Lee Siegel," a third-person character in the fictional introspective narrative that forms the bulk of the "commentary" in this volume. Still, Love in a Dead Language does seem to conform to those specifications. In addition to an original translation of the Kamasutra from Sanskrit, some ancient and modern commentaries, and a novel constructed as the journal of the fictitious translator, there is glossing from his equally-fictitious posthumous editor, imaginary business correspondence, a complete board game, and screen mockups for a digital multi-media version of the Kamasutra.

This book is a deployment of cutting-edge devil-may-care scholarly method. It stretches and plays with textual conventions to demonstrate theses such as these: Translation is an attempt at transmigration of consciousness, while reincarnation is itself mythopoesis. Love is a confabulation, a collaboration on a narrative that can only be "true" in a performative sense.

Love in a Dead Language includes sex farce, genuine love story, cultural satire, and gastropodology. It is a genre-buster with metatextual convolutions, like The Chess Garden of Brooks Hansen. Readers who objected to a footnoted fantasy novel like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell should give this one a wide berth! As Siegel has his alter-translator Roth quote his wife concerning her grandfather's Indian memoir, "It's shameless in every way--erotically, morally, politically, religiously ... even rhetorically" (72). Abandon your sense of textual propriety at the threshold of a book that trains itself on fantasies of "the inconstant subcontinent of my incontinent subconscious" (11)!

No worthwhile book about love fails to be a book about death, and from the opening pages of this one, the reader is advised that Professor Roth is already dead, murdered even. Despite a foreseeable (but simultaneously comic and profound) twist at the end, Love in a Dead Language offers more openings than closure. "Most people, I suppose, don't finish their lives; they die before they've resolved all the themes, taken care of all the characters, established a unity of narrative, peripety, and discovery out of the random episodes of experience" (327).

This is a book with a fascinating surplus of authors, and even Siegel, the most empirically actual of them, seems determined to slip into a state of fictionality, if not myth. On one level, the present text appears to be an attempt to re-invent (in a contemporary context) the lost second translation of the Kamasutra by Captain Burton (in papers destroyed by Burton's widow, cf. 285-6). In a Varanasi restroom, Roth imagines himself as the rebirth of Burton, himself reincarnating Vatsyayana, who was the bodily vessel of the earlier author Auddalaki. By implication, Siegel identifies in this passage with the god Shiva, "laugh[ing] at the spectacle of men who try to write books about love" (243).

Expect to laugh out loud often in the reading of this outrageously smart and insightful book.
… (mais)
5 vote
Assinalado
paradoxosalpha | 3 outras críticas | Aug 2, 2015 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
11
Also by
1
Membros
404
Popularidade
#60,140
Avaliação
½ 3.4
Críticas
17
ISBN
54
Línguas
4
Marcado como favorito
1

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