Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0004339, Sat, 21 Aug 1999 16:43:00 -0700

Subject
Nabokoviana: Lee Siegel
Date
Body
Every once in a while I run across a book that I think might particularly
appeal to Nabokovians. One such is Lee Siegel's _Love in a Dead Language_
(1999). Siegel is a professor of Indian Religions at the University of
Hawaii. The novel owes a large and acknowledged debt to Nabokov's LOLITA,
PALE FIRE, and THE KAMASUTRA.

Its central character is Leopold Roth, a 50-year-old, married
professor of Indology at a California university. His academic colleague
and rival is one Lee Siegel, an Indologist at the University of Hawaii, a
rather murky figure who lurks on the sidelines of the action.
Roth, who is engaged in a translation of the _Kamasutra_ (as is Siegel),
becomes obsessed with a student in one of his classes, a Lalita Gupta (a
very Americanized Indian) whom he dupes into becoming the sole student of
his summer study program in India.

The narrative unfolds (posthumously) through Roth's paragraph-by-paragraph
commentary on his _Kamasutra_ translation which serves as the framework
for his comic tale of seduction and disaster. Added to this is the
commentary of Anang Saighal, a former grad student of both Indologists who
has his own axes to grind. A great deal of entertaining Indian exotica and
erotica is worked into the text.

This is a postmodern novel in the grand style with all sorts of graphic
and typographic horseplay: drawings, photos, computer screens,
typescripts, letters,; mirror-image passages; sections of alternating
right-side up, left-side upsidedow pages, etc.. There are even short
passages in Zemblan. Also, Roth is an authority on a special sort of
Sanskit literary charade that involves rearranging the SPACEs in a text to
produce counter-readings of the same texts, e.g., "Woman's laughter" &
"Man slaughter."

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In return for the recommendation, I ask only that you share a favorite
"Nabokovesque" title with me and NABOKV-L.