Love in a Dead Language is a love story, a translation of an Indian sex manual, an erotic farce, and a murder mystery rolled into one. Enticing the reader to follow both victims and celebrants of romantic love on their hypertextual voyage of folly and lust-through movie posters, upside-down pages, the Kamasutra: Game of Love board game, and even a proposed CD-ROM, Love in a Dead Language exposes the complicities between the carnal and the intellectual, the erotic and the exotic and, in the end, is an outrageous operatic portrayal of romantic love.
"Rare is the book that makes one stop and wonder: Is this a literary masterpiece or do I need my head examined? But such is the alternately awe-inspiring and goofy thrall cast by Lee Siegel's Love in a Dead Language. . . . His work stands out as a book that is not simply a novel but its own genus of rollicking, narrative scholarship . . . it is just the cerebral aphrodisiac we need." — Carol Lloyd
"Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious. . . . [T]he most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction." — Paul di Filippo
"Now along comes Lee Siegel, who mixes a bit of Borges with some Nabokov and then adds an erotic gloss from the Kama Sutra to write Love in a Dead Language, a witty, bawdy, language-rich farce of academic life. . . . Whether it is post-modern or not, Love in a Dead Language is pulled off with such unhinged élan by Mr. Siegel that it is also plain good fun, a clever, literate satire in which almost everything is both travestied and, strangely, loved by its author." — Richard Bernstein
"The publishers of this masterwork deserve a prize for their creative collaboration in Siegel's methodical madness. If his ingenuity is limitless, so is the author's felicity with language." - Shashi Tharoor
"It is a great book. I can’t recall when last I read one so hard to put down. It is bawdy, irreverent and extremely witty. Siegel does not spare anyone." - Khushwant Singh
"Love in a Dead Language is a celebration of kama and a travesty of it; a love affair with India and a spoof on it; an affectionate expose of reality-challenged American academia and a wildly-comic farce inspired by it. It is witty and sophisticated and devastatingly satirical; and if at every odd moment the sex in it seems overwhelming, that's clearly intended too." - Brinda Bose
"Love in a Dead Language [is] a major laughing matter and deserves space on the short, high shelf of literary wonders." - Tom LeClair
"Whether it is post-modern or not, Love in a Dead Language is pulled off with such unhinged élan by Mr. Siegel that it is also plain good fun, a clever, literate satire in which almost everything is both travestied and, strangely, loved by its author." - Richard Bernstein
"This is a campus novel and, as such, never erupts from its self-congratulatory camp. (...) a programmed wank performed for friends in front of mirrors." - Marianne Wiggins
Philip Roth has done it. So have Updike and Nabokov. Now Lee Siegel joins the ranks of novelists who write novels that pretend not to be novels at all. Love in a Dead Language, for example, purports to be the work of one Professor Leopold Roth, and comprises both a translation of, and commentary on, the Kama Sutra, as well as the professor's more personal annotations concerning his amorous yearnings for one of his students. Siegel himself appears in a foreword, protesting vigorously that "I would never permit my name to be associated with a book such as this." This squeamishness is understandable when it becomes clear the entire purpose for this translation is to aid Roth in seducing young Lalita Gupta while leading a study group in India. Seduction, betrayal, and eventually death all follow on one another's heels; when Roth rather abruptly dies midway through the "translation," Siegel refuses to finish it and the task is left to a graduate student, Anang Saighal. So now we have yet another author who is not Siegel adding another layer of commentary to both Roth's professional work and his private journals--contradicting, criticizing, footnoting, while at the same time revealing details about his own unhappy life.
Though there's plenty of story in Love in a Dead Language--romance, transformation, and even a murder mystery--a magical delight in language in all its myriad forms is at its heart. From the academese of professional papers to the more intimate epistolary communications between friends, colleagues, husbands, and wives (letters between an earlier translator of the Kama Sutra, Richard Burton, and his wife--who later burned the translation--are included), Siegel--or is it Roth? or perhaps Saighal?--covers the gamut. Readers who love complicated plots, soaring language, etymological puzzles, and academic tomfoolery will have a ball with this playful instance of literary smoke and mirrors. - Margaret Prior
"General observations, copulation, seduction, marriage, adultery, prostitutes, and erotic arcana," the seven subjects treated by the Kamasutra, are also the motifs of Siegel's whimsical farce. Presented as the unscholarly annotated version of the Indian erotic lexicon as translated by deceased professor of Asian studies Leopold Roth, the novel interpolates the commentary of Roth's skeptical literary executor and former student, Anang Saigha, with notes from ancient translators of the text. Roth's Kamasutra bears little resemblance to the original Sanskrit. It is, in fact, a hymn to entirely uninterested college senior Lalita Gupta, whom Roth construes as the vessel for all his romantic, Eastern fantasies. Ditsy, foul-mouthed Lalita cares nothing about her parents' native land, but to Roth she is a goddess, repository of the East's erotic and spiritual wisdom. Half-mad with love, Roth carries Lalita off to India for a "summer study course" (she's the only pupil) and seduces her in a hotel at Khajuraho where a famed erotic sculpture stands. Upon their return to L.A., Roth is suspended from teaching, Lalita's parents charge him with rape, and his wife, SophiaAwomen's studies prof and chair of the sexual harassment committeeAdumps him. While inserts and footnotes heighten the absurdity (the book is dense with cartoons, Hollywood memorabilia, news clips and 19th-century travelogues), Siegel's criticisms of orientalization and exoticism are serious. And Roth has more than just Lalita on his mind: his daughter Leila was murdered at the age of 12, leaving Roth, his wife and Leila's twin bereft. This multifaceted novel is also a whodunit, for Professor Roth died no natural death. His body was found in his office, hit from behind with a Sanskrit-English dictionary. While this ribald romp, satire on Westerners' spiritual hunger and sendup of academia may prove too rarefied and serpentine for some tastes, others will find it a sophisticated treat. - Publishers Weekly
Siegel’s sixth book (after City of Dreadful Night, 1995, etc.) is a flat chore, defrauding the reader of an engaging story with dense typographical hocus-pocus and the bland tatter of footnotes, appendices, and an ostensibly saucy theme. The novel’s structure is distractingly complex. At the core of the text is Professor Leopold Roth’s translation of the Indian taxonomy of sex, the Kamasutra. Appended to this translation are Roth’s commentaries on each section of the work, and contained in them is the vaguely entertaining story of his seduction of Lalita, a Californian undergraduate of Indian descent who is tricked into taking a trip to India with the professor. This tale is intended to illustrate Roth’s understanding and practice of the Kamasutra’s precepts—with Lalita as his object. The plot concludes with Roth’s murder; after the death, one of Roth’s graduate students, Anang Saighal, assumes the thankless task of assembling the uncollected translation into book form, while providing his own footnoted commentary on both the translation and the story already told in the commentaries. A transparently Nabokovian strategy emboldens Siegel throughout. Footnotes and references to the Zemblan language recall Pale Fire, while the seduction theme mimics Lolita: “Once I had seen the beautiful Indian girl in the sari with the red bindi on her forehead in my Comparative Phonology class, I threw out the Mao poster, folded up the Chinese flag, and bought a poster of the Taj Mahal and a print of Krishna playing his flute for love- enraptured, dancing milkmaids . . . .” Nabokov, though, undergirded his complex constructions with brimming plots and full characters. Siegel’s counterparts are flat, dull, relentlessly trivial—a cascade of comments, asides, interpretations, and appendices. Textually dense, erotically lukewarm, and narratively inert: an unrewarding novel, with its inverted pages, computer-screen replications, and transcripts, that’s too fascinated with how it looks to concern itself with how it reads—poorly, at best. - Kirkus Reviews
I wonder, wonder who, mmbadoo-ooh, who, who wrote the Book Of Love? Wonder no more, for the answer is Lee Siegel, that’s who, the seagull whose wing is a lee for love!
Love in a Dead Language belongs to what I’m calling a perversity trinity of age-gapped intellectual horndog novels in love with both language and illegal labium, the other two being the popular Lolita and the invisible Darconville’s Cat. Even more, this book is a lovechild of Lolita and Pale Fire, about the coitus that produced itself no less, “an anatomy of passion” of the worst and lowest type of love: “Rakshasa: A deviant (hyperpredacitic) form of rape, as practiced by demons, in derision of the Veda, in which a man kidnaps a girl.”
The anti-hero is Leopold Roth, a name that echoes the hero of Ulysses and the author of Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth is a Sanskrit scholar who has steeped himself in everything India, but for as deep as he’s gone, he’s never gone balls-deep. That is, he’s never consummated his obsession by sleeping with an Indian woman, “an erotic spanning of East and West.” Despite being a father and married to a woman he loves, his Indophilia causes him to fall for a student of Indian descent, Lalita Gupta, “Lewd-Lee-ta,” “All-eat-a” (Lalita being an obvious echo of Nabokov’s nymphet but it’s also the name of a Hindu goddess of beauty and, ironically, pure perception). His lust is less for the nubile than for some intellectual if not metaphysical notion of fully integrating (or dominating) the cuntry he’s spent his life studying.
While she may look like an exotic Indian girl, she is completely Americanized and about as tuned into her ancestry as Kelly Kapoor from The Office. In fact, Lalita loathes anything traditionally Indian because it evokes her overbearing parents who hope that she’ll reconnect with her roots even though they emigrated to America for an ostensibly better life, and she tells as much to Roth after their first kiss: “‘I was born in California. I’m an American. And I’m not typical of anything, Indian or American, except myself. I’ve never had an Indian lover. I’ve never even kissed an Indian either, except my mother and father and once or twice my uncle Shyam. Get it straight: I don’t exist just to be your fuckin’ fantasy. Try to take me a little more seriously. Me. Not India. Me!’”
This is why Roth decides early on to translate the Kamasutra, “to bring close something distant in time and space and to substantiate [for her] a delicate dream of what might have been, the inconstant subcontinent of my incontinent subconscious,” even though the ancient work has already been (mis)translated by Sir Richard Burton (it’s even suggested that Roth is Burton reincarnated, finally recreating the truest version of his labors): Roth hopes to use his project as a teaching tool—tumescent tool too, for he thinks the work will help seduce her. This is where Pale Fire comes in because the entire novel is written as his translation of the Kamasutra, with heavy and digressive commentary from Roth and even footnotes from his literary executor and former teacher’s assistant, Anang Saighal. Indeed, the metafictional deposits are as deep and diverse as they are delightful: a Kamasutra game board with instructions, cunnilingus sheet music (“‘The clitoris is the reed…in the mouth of the instrument of pleasure.”), screenplay excerpts from an unfinished film called Taj Mahal that featured Roth’s late father in the lead role, panels from a graphic novel adaption of the Kamasutra, CD-ROM web-like pages from an interactive and multimedia Kamasutra (“…a text that is like a woman, to provide an experience of that text that is more like making love than reading.”), upside-down text written in “kumkum” ink instead of the usual “kohl,” a pieced-together letter retrieved from a trash bin, among other clever ideas that predate the publication of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves by a little under a revolution of the earth ‘round the sun.
Roth is so love-drunk and ego-driven that the commentary serves as the meat of the narrative and equals if not rivals Charles Kinbote’s digressions—a pandemic of the academic between the two, and the latter is even referenced twice in the bibliography, as well as quoted in an epigraph: “For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.”
Like hubba-hubba Humbert Humbert, Roth connives and prevaricates till the fruition of his pernicious plot, which is to go on an extended ‘educational trip’ to India, making it so that the only student who is accepted into the ‘program’ is Lalita, the light of his life, the fire of his loins, “…Imperial Lalita, begging begum of the lunatic fringe, maharanical mystress of the house performing acts of congress…O concupiscent Lalita of Konarka—prurient priestess of the Black Pagoda, devastating devadasi and noumenal nautch girl, subaltern subject of my subtext.” By the time we get to book III of the Kamasutra, under the title of “Seduction”, Roth has arrived in India with his ‘napped kid, his spiritual child bride, Lalita Gupta, whom he’ll gulp down. As the chapter title suggests, rather than clear-cut rape, Roth does what he can to seduce his victim, using the tips outlined in the Kamasutra and more. That they cum closer together in India is inevitable, he being her rock in an alien land (as explained in a footnote, Roth’s depiction of the ghastly funeral pyres they come across on the trip is plagiarized from Lee Siegel’s own City of Dreadful Night, a novel published almost 5 years before Roth’s unfinished Kamasutra translation/commentary). Whether out of some Stockholm syndrome or that combined with pity and the like, Roth indeed succeeds, and the consummation scene isn’t as carnal as one might expect; rather, much like the scene in the Darconville’s Cat, it is hyperbolically romantic: “In making love there were no fixed centers, no edges either, no ends nor boundaries. All lines vanished into the erotic landscape of an exitless maze, with beginnings, middles, and ends no longer part of the immediate display of love. We explored all the possibilities that love provides to human beings.” [Roth’s emphasis]
There are other similarities to the Cat that are worth mentioning (even if Siegel’s amazing effort is at times more clever than Theroux’s is earnest, as Steven Moore briefly mentions in his My Back Pages): They both feature essays written by the maturing nymphets in question, except Dead Language gives the full paper in all its poorly-written glory rather than just a précis, with comments from the TA and Roth, each paper of course receiving high marks from their concupiscent professors. Both novels adapt Tristram Shandy’s mourning page, but Siegel takes it further and includes a blank white page before it, which “replicates…the Emperor’s architectural dream of two Taj Mahals.” And while few if any books can rival the range of vocabulary in Alexander Theroux’s masterpiece, Siegel still offers readers a generous dose of the archaic, medical, and all-out sesquipedalian, including osculatory, paronomastically, mentula, coloratura, phatically, catachresis, hetaera, scotoma, manumitting, coir, vellicate, peccavi, persiflage, lingam, velar, asterisms, geste, alimentary, malovulturine, verbocracy, demulcent, lixiviation, and one of my personal favorites, formicating (which is not the same as fornicating, you pervert!). Last but not beast, not quite, a lovely symmetry that is almost certainly coincidental involves what other animal but felines? Whereas the cat in the Cat goes missing at the climax of love forlorn, a cat comes into Roth’s office as if having pounced from one novel into another: “…a black stray with irregular orange spots and white blotches, which he named [not Spellvexit but] Mayavati. Within the first twenty-four hours of their cohabitation, Roth discovered that he was allergic to cat fur…but refused to evict the animal. ‘How can I throw Mayavati out?’ Roth asked with a sneeze and a smile. ‘She loves me.’”
This is essentially the only love Roth receives in his exile upon returning to India, his plot having been made public, which results in “a leave of absence without pay for the semester” as sexual harassment investigations are conducted. While Roth is mostly disenchanted with it all (“…I know all too well that India is not Lalita. I know that I know very little about India.”), he still persists in some, shall we say, antiquated views, as explained in an interview with the Western Crier: “‘Love, and I mean sexual love for all its power and sanctity, is essential to effective pedagogy.’” He goes on to cite the possible pederast Socrates and others.
Along with everything else that’s going on in this layered novel, there’s also a light mystery element because early on we learn that Roth was murdered, struck in the head by the almost 8-pound Sanskrit-English Dictionary which then caused him to fracture his skull on the edge of his desk. One suspects various possibilities, especially Roth’s own love-insane stalker, Maya Blackwell, till the truth is revealed at the very end and I laughed out loud, a fitting conclusion to a romance of pleasurable reading.
Despite its tight focus, Dead Language manages to be richly peopled, giving us a relatively diverse number of voices and opinions, from Lalita’s boyfriend, the basketball player Leroy Lovelace, to a feminist author who changes her name with each book she writes (in typical metafictional fashion, there’s also a character named Lee Siegel who gets along with Roth about as well as John Self does with Martin Amis in Money). Unlike Lolita (which is not a criticism but merely an observation), we get some of Lalita’s perspective on the situation. This occurs mostly near the last quarter of the novel when many of the characters’ endings are explicated in almost Dickensian fashion, except, in the context of an academic document, it’s made more natural and necessary.
In sooth, Love in a Dead Language is some of the most fun I’ve ever had between a book’s splayed and eager pages, and it also has a lot of substance to it, filled as it is with facts, speculation, and overall intriguing erotology. Among other things, it makes for an ultimate example of how not to love, even if love sometimes or alltimes feels synonymous with obsequious obsession. Aye, ponder the following: “Is it that we do and can love only because we have language, and that eloquence is actually a state of the heart? Do words stand between us and our beloved, or are they the only bridge?” - George Salis
https://thecollidescope.com/2021/08/22/love-in-a-dead-language-by-lee-siegel/
Rare is the book that makes one stop and wonder: Is this a literary masterpiece or do I need my head examined? But such is the alternately awe-inspiring and goofy thrall cast by Lee Siegel's "Love in a Dead Language." It is a book of many things - a satirical romp among the bloviated windbags of academia, a translation of the ancient sex manual the Kamasutra, a cross-cultural Lolita tale, a scholarly exegesis on love, and a murder mystery -- told in myriad whimsical ways through four nested narrators, a Kamasutra board game, a design for a CD ROM of multiple translations of the Sanskrit text, sheet music for a romantic aria, Kamasutra cartoons, numerous newspaper clippings, a bad undergraduate student essay, excerpts from never-to-be-made, presumably apocryphal
Hollywood scripts, and countless fictive and factual quotes from real and fabricated historical lovers of India. As if that were not enough to sate even the horniest linguistic slut, Siegel further molests the reader's experience by sometimes turning the pages upside down or simply offering text fragments for the reader to puzzle together. The result is a contemporary "Tristram Shandy" that makes the original look as spare and controlled as Raymond Carver.
For anyone who hoped that the days of Robbe-Grillet-esque anti-plots had been relegated to the literary dust heap forever, "Love in a Dead Language" may sound like a dangerous step back into the dark ages of postmodern tosh. But that's the beauty of this book: It instills a pleasure so guilty only illicit sex on a hot summer night could outdo it.
The first few pages daunt with their structural complexity, but once the plot is set in motion the novel gyrates and twists with all the disarming energy of a royal whore trained in the court of Agra. The hero is Leopold Roth, a middle-aged, romantically overwrought professor of Indian Studies
at one "Western University," a sun-drenched L.A. college. He falls madly in love with the coyly named Lalita Gupta ("Lolita with an A+," as Roth puts it), a foul-mouthed, second-generation Indian-American undergraduate with no interest in India. At the same time, he embarks on a translation of the Kamasutra -- and it is never quite clear if the translation inspires his infatuation or the other way around. As the translation unfolds, Roth's accompanying "Commentaries" tell the story of his demented obsession with the vapid American student. From the beginning, his love is fueled by his patently racist conception of India as a land of mystery and beauty he can't quite conquer or understand; sex with Lalita, he reasons, will give him some much-needed insight into his subject. Killing two birds with one stone, he contrives a summer study-abroad program in which Lalita is the sole student. In the seduction that unfolds, Roth applies the rules of the Kamasutra, a large portion of which is dedicated to helping the male reader seduce an unlikely lover. In the end (which we know from the beginning), Roth -- ruined by accusations of sexual harassment -- meets an untimely death from a blow to the head from his 10-pound Monier Monier-Williams' Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899; reprint, Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1945).
Again, Roth is but one of four narrators: The others include Vatsyayana Mallanaga, the author of the Kamasutra; Pralayananga Lilaraja, Hindu intellectual and Persian translator of the Kamasutra, whose own past commentaries inform the scholarly background for the final narrator; and finally, Roth's only graduate student, the half-Indian/half-Jewish Anang Saighal. Charged with being Roth's literary executor, he undertakes to bring the entire manuscript together, offering personal and scholarly footnotes for the whole, unwieldy mess that Roth has left. In the process, he sets out to discover the mystery of Roth's death.
The mix of ivory tower babble, murderous intrigue and sicko love story is enticing; the sheer breadth of Siegel's style makes the book irresistible. Reeling from hallucinatory poetry to wry parody, high theory to base eroticism, Siegel seems engulfed by the same rapture over language that his debauched protagonist feels for love.
At times, Siegel shows himself to be a wicked ventriloquist, mimicking a range of writing styles and making each sing with its own perfect stupidity. Here's an announcement of his death from the fictive student newspaper: "Leopold Roth will be remembered not only as a sexual harasser,
but also as a teacher by some undergraduates (who took his Asian Studies 150 class) and by a few graduate students (for his advanced seminars on Sandscript [sic]). He may also be remembered as a person by some of the people who knew him."
Yet such mockery disappears when Siegel approaches his most revered topic: sex. When Anang Saighal details a furtive search through his parents' gynecological texts, the prose turns incantatory and precise. "In secret study, I marveled over the extravagantly flocculent mons veneris, the demure
prepuce, the pearly clitoris, the shadowy vestibule, the puckered urethra meatus, the yawning labia majora and minora, the ravening vaginal portal, the esoteric fourchette, and the contumelious anus."
A few pages later, Siegel offsets the beauty of high-flown and base language
as Lalita Gupta enters Roth's office for an admissions waiver and Roth
rhapsodizes about her sewer-mouthed speech.
"Fuckin' bureaucracy!" She sighed and sat down. "Will you sign me in?"
My heart lubdubbed itself into a gyroscopic spin. Oh, Her use of the precious present participle, "fucking," from the Indo-European peik, cognate with the Latin pungere, related to the Germanic ficken, purloined from the Middle Dutch fokken, associated with the Zemblan
fogen, universalized in the Esperanto fuga.
Despite the inane etymological gushing of such love-drunk passages, Leopold Roth is, finally, more emotionally complex than his cradle-snatching precursor, Humbert Humbert. Roth dearly loves his wife, a professor of feminist studies, and he feels his fall from 20 years of fidelity as a sadness if not a sin. Upon arriving home after running into Lalita at the supermarket and trying to impress her with his purchase of an expensive bottle of champagne, his wife notices.
"What's the occasion?" asked my dear, bright, and beautiful wife.
"I'm in love," I sadly answered, and Sophia smiled.
Despite the plethora of such poignant, understated moments, however, "Love in a Dead Language" can't help but suffer at times from its elaborate facade. Just as an overdressed lover can use his ornamentation to distract from his beloved's inquisitive gaze, so too does this rococo linguistic playland keep us from seeing into the hearts of all but the two primary characters -- Roth and Saighal.
And it's hard not to wonder if Siegel has put just as much misguided faith in the power of the Kamasutra and its intricate codification of love as Roth has. To the extent that Roth's seduction of Lalita works, it also strains the credibility of her character as a naive but basically sensible modern
chick. When Lalita accepts Roth's advances (the extent and result of which I won't disclose) she seems to drift behind the veil that Roth has erected for her -- becoming a full-blown embodiment of his fantasies, but all the more invisible for us. It's compelling that intimacy with Lalita causes Roth to quit idolizing her and begin to see her more as an individual, a process nicely paralleled in orthographic fashion as he drops the Biblical pronominal capitalization. But this doesn't help the fact that we've lost sight of one of the book's most important characters.
Yet, this is nit-picking. "Love in a Dead Language" triumphs in so many areas -- poetic, intellectual, comic, erotic -- that it hardly matters that Siegel bends the integrity of his characters in order to pursue his peculiar vision. His work stands out as a book that is not simply a novel but its own genus of rollicking, narrative scholarship, and in an age when many, inside the academy and out, are finally merging the dreary mind-body split, it is just the cerebral aphrodisiac we need. - CAROL LLOYD
https://www.salon.com/1999/06/07/love_in_a_dead_language/
Lee Siegel's new novel, ''Love in a Dead Language,'' is a novel masquerading as a translation of and commentary on the Kama Sutra. Since that Sanskrit book of love synthesizes hundreds of earlier texts and may or may not have been written by a man named Vatsyayana, who may have lived between the first century B.C. and the sixth century A.D., let's begin with Siegel, an American professor of Indian religions who has published over the last 12 years three increasingly quirky books about India that contribute features to this new one.
''Laughing Matters'' (1987) describes, classifies and analyzes comedy in Sanskrit literature and, in its last 60 pages, reports Siegel's humorous attempts to gather pop-culture comic materials in contemporary India. In ''Net of Magic'' (1991) the author's experiences with New Delhi street magicians supplement and then overwhelm his scholarly study of ''wonders and deceptions'' in Indian books. ''City of Dreadful Night'' (1995) begins with Siegel's traveling to India to interview wandering tellers of horror stories. When he can't find an informant in Benares, where Hindu corpses are burned, Siegel makes up a storyteller and a tale out of ''Dracula'' and his knowledge of Indian lore. At book's end, he finds the storyteller he has invented.
Lee Siegel clearly can't be trusted, and he proves it in the foreword to ''Love in a Dead Language,'' where he writes, ''I would never permit my name to be associated with a book such as this,'' one in which Siegel's ''acquaintance,'' Prof. Leopold Roth of California, records his lust for an American-born Indian girl in his class, prepares a special translation of the Kama Sutra to help seduce her and maneuvers the girl, Lalita Gupta, into a ''group'' study tour of India that is really a Roth tutorial in sex and love.
When Roth is killed, the character Siegel refuses to complete the translation and leaves the task to Anang Saighal, Roth's only graduate student. Also American born, the son of an Indian father and Jewish mother, Saighal fills gaps in Roth's text, edits his confessional journal, provides commentary on both, reveals his own loveless life, discusses his study of ''Tristram Shandy'' and writes long footnotes on earlier Kama Sutra commentaries, one of which Saighal may have invented to criticize his mentor. In his six-page bibliography, Saighal lists the three books by Lee Siegel that I've mentioned, an earlier one entitled ''Sacred and Profane Love in India'' and many items that don't exist.
''You'll never pull off that trick,'' the audience yells in Hindi (my paraphrase of Siegel's translation) at the street performers described in ''Net of Magic.'' You may be saying, ''Philip Roth has used up all the Roth jokes.'' Not the ones about Roth as neocolonial pedant. ''Nabokov already did the novel-as-commentary in 'Pale Fire.' ''But not a collegiate ''Lolita'' at the same time. ''Siegel can't match John Barth's act, in 'Letters,' of juggling six earlier books and a new one in the air.'' ''Love in a Dead Language'' is balls, saucers and torches -- letters, musical notes, formulas, designs, paintings, photographs -- plus a pullout board game.
The ''game of love'' in the Kama Sutra supplies the plot for Siegel's literary game. Like Vatsyayana's clever lover, Roth uses ploys to deceive his wife, trick Lalita's parents and misdirect her boyfriend so Lalita will go to India. While Roth is plying her with romantic lectures on the Taj Mahal, the free-spirited, expletive-spouting student is playing around with a young American she meets. Roth does manage to sleep with Lalita in Khajuraho but not because of the erotic statuary there or Vatsyayana's devices. Instead, Lalita pities her 50-something guide and continues with him because she has fallen in love with India and with herself as an Indian.
Like Humbert Humbert, Roth begins with a fancy prose style, lush and lilting with alliteration, and like Professor Kinbote in ''Pale Fire,'' Roth has cross-cultural delusions, but he's just realistic enough -- bumbling Leopold Bloom as American academic -- to support the almost-December and May story until the ''romance'' (Siegel's subtitle) becomes a murder mystery. To elicit early sympathy, Siegel gives Roth an eccentric childhood with parents who acted in movies about India, a series of wacky lovers who exacerbate his Indian obsession and a daughter named Leila who was murdered at 12. Seen mostly through Roth's eyes and rarely heard in his narration, Lalita struggles to be a person and has some success by responding to tourist India. Lalita says she even comes to love Roth. But that's in another country. Back in California, Roth is exposed, deserted by Lalita and then killed with the heavy Sanskrit dictionary he loves.
We're not meant to love the plot or the characters here. Not even the setting, the vividly described sites and cities. They all exist -- even sex exists -- so that Siegel can display his love of language. His title first points to the Kama Sutra, which was composed in an ancient, though not dead, language. Then Siegel throws wonderful ''living'' voices -- Mr. Gupta's Indglish, a basketball player's dialect, an aging movie actor's inspired vulgarity, the crazed patter of Indian hawkers, cabbies and tourist fixers. But the author's true passion is written language, dead on the page, revivified by a new context or by art. Roth attempts to rewrite the Kama Sutra in contemporary terms. Much more interesting, Saighal and Siegel show, is the process of retrieving the original's linguistic combinations -- Sanskrit words' multiple meanings, the strange categories they create, the cognitive frisson they cause, all impossible to experience without learned commentary.
''Not text, but texture,'' the poet John Shade says in ''Pale Fire.'' Siegel replies with poetic texture and multiple texts -- mirror, backward and upside-down texts, intertexts and hypertexts. Not Vatsyayana's synthesis but syncretism. Siegel fakes contemporary facsimiles -- a term paper by Lalita, screenplay fragments, pages from a Classics Comics Kama Sutra, a scientist's technical study of snails' sexual slime, a letter of recommendation in academic jargon, newspaper articles. With these he mixes quotations from older texts connected to India: correspondence from Laurence Sterne's friend Mrs. Draper and from the Kama Sutra translator Richard Burton's wife, Isabel; a travel account by the 19th-century amateur indologist Edward Sellon; meditations on the Orient by the 17th-century English playwright Nathaniel Lee. The history Siegel doesn't gather he creates -- letters to Lee by the intrepid traveler Thomas Lovely, reminiscences by Francis White, a gung-ho Victorian Bengal Lancer.
Siegel's inventions, new and old, are too lovingly done to be mere parody. They are revels in languages -- in specialist or popular discourses -- presumed dead. While the novel's historical texts, both actual and imagined, give pleasure, they also tell an incisive history of Orientalism, Europeans' construction of Indian sexuality, the elision of exotic and erotic from which Roth and Lalita suffer. And since Roth finds anti-Semitism in the Orient, Siegel shows racism travels both east and west.
''Love in a Dead Language'' has paper chases and derivation quests, fine-print notes and multilingual puns. Even spaces between words get attention. Like Professor Roth, Professor Siegel plays verbal charades, inserting or closing up a space. One example: ''penis'' becomes ''pen is.'' When I found ''le clair de lune,'' this LeClair was Kinbote, certain ''Love in a Dead Language'' was for me, another professor. It's obviously not for every reader, and yet its fundamental and ingeniously varied theme is for everybody. Like snails, we may do sex by chemicals, testoserone and pheromones, but we love in language, dead or alive. Lalita's father calls Dr. Roth ''Dr. Ruth.'' Dr. Siegel advises all lovers anywhere.
Magicians whom Siegel interviewed swore the Indian rope trick -- the ultimate deception -- was possible. Unlike magic acts, a novel need not top fictions that precede it. Ultimately, I think, Siegel's professorial need to clarify, or his lover's desire to please, sometimes censors the artist's urge to let language loose. If a reader is confused by a plot development or allusion, Saighal soon shows up to explain. The novel's whodunit element panders, unsuccessfully I'd guess, to plot-seeking readers. Siegel ardently caresses words, relishes their sound and appearance on the page, but the seduction narrative in Roth's journal more often sounds like Philip Roth's Zuckerman than Nabokov. If ''Love in a Dead Language'' isn't a freestanding rope, it's a major laughing matter and deserves space on the short, high shelf of literary wonders. - Tom LeClair
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/23/reviews/990523.23leclait.html
The professor of Indian studies is a happily married man but he is obsessed by his one carnal failure – he has never made love to an Indian woman. In his quest to overcome the shortcoming, he sets out to seduce his nubile student, Lalita Gupta, even though the second generation Indian American is not interested in India.
The comical and erotic adventure, however, ends in tragedy when the professor is found murdered with an exotic weapon – a Sanskrit dictionary. But this is not a mere mystery. For as the story continues – the book has 408 pages packed with words – the reader is drawn into philosophical and linguistic mysteries.
Love in a Dead LanguageWriter Lee Siegel, who teaches Indian religions at the University of Hawaii, offers a quaint novel, Love in a Dead Language (University of Chicago Press). Partly an exotic farce, partly a murder mystery, and partly a meditation on Vatsayana's Kama Sutra, the book has started gaining a lot of exposure.
'If Love in a Dead Language isn't a free-standing rope,' wrote The New York Times, 'it's a major laughing matter and deserves space on the short, high shelf of literary wonders.'
The book, which has 40 line drawings, offers many delightful puzzles. As one commentator writing for www. amazon.com noted, 'Siegel has joined the ranks of John Updike and Vladmir Nabokov and Paul Theroux, who have written novels that pretend not to be novels.'
'Love in a Dead Language, for example, purports to be the work of one Professor Leopold Roth, and comprises both a translation of, and commentary on, the Kama Sutra, as well as the professor's more personal annotations concerning his amorous yearnings for one of his students,' the commentator notes. 'Siegel himself appears in a foreword, protesting vigorously that "I would never permit my name to be associated with a book such as this." '
'This squeamishness is understandable when it becomes clear the entire purpose for this translation is to aid Roth in seducing young Lalita Gupta while leading a study group in India. Seduction, betrayal, and eventually death all follow on one another's heels. When Roth rather abruptly dies midway through the translation, Siegel refuses to finish it and the task is left to a graduate student, Anang Saighal. So now we have yet another author who is not Siegel adding another layer of commentary to both Roth's professional work and his private journals -- contradicting, criticizing, footnoting, while at the same time revealing details about his own unhappy life.'
The long novel not only offers a complicated plot and etymological puzzles and digs at academia but also involves the likes of Richard Burton, the explorer who translated the Kama Sutra for the first time into English in the late 19th century.
The reaction of some early readers posted on the Internet has ranged from outright hostility ('boring, over-blown, self-indulgent, Lee Siegel can't tell a story') to high praise ('the book is in the best tradition of Borges and Nabokov.')
'HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT,' declared a New York reader. 'People who like this book have to be the author's friends. This so-called novel is all about the stream of consciousness, sub-consciousness, unconsciousness of a very boring man.
'Knowing something about the author, this professor of Indian studies has to be his alter-ego. You are always inside his head, there are no real characters, no dialogue, and no atmosphere. The ideas are half-baked, the narrative is repetitious. No wonder it's published by an academic press.'
A reader from Evanston wrote saying the novel would be either hated or loved. 'I loved it and would like applaud: ''Author, author," but where IS the author in the text? In fact, this is one of Siegel's chief questions in this tale of erotic love and murder.'
The reader continued. 'The story unfolds through a series of mirrors, each held up by a different character as he or she vainly struggles to dominate the narrative.
'Writing through an abyss of mirrors is a tricky business, but by and large, Siegel pulls it off admirably. And, not least, the book offers a great introduction to the Kama Sutra. Plus game boards!'
Warned a reader from Phoenix, Arizona: 'Those of us who wants to read a good story should NOT buy his book.'
But a reader from Houston jumped to defend Siegel, arguing that his book should be read in the same spirit as one reads the works of Borges and Nabokov.
'Lee Siegel isn't trying to tell a story. He's telling several at once, following in the literary tradition of Borges, Nabokov, Barth, and Cortazar,' the reader said. 'Not an easy task, but by and large, he pulls it off with wit and care. And the reader should bring wit and care to the reading of this book: not easy, but infinitely rewarding. And a real tease in terms of the ways in which various formal aspects of a book (text, footnotes, illustrations) constitute discrete narrative voices.
'In this book, the voices weave, fight, talk back to one another, swallow one another, and ultimately tell an intriguing, ironic tale of murder and -- guess what – love.' - Alysha Sideman
https://www.rediff.com/news/1999/may/26us3.htm
Lee Siegel's multilayered romance is: a translation of the Kamasutra, a commentary on that classical text, a murder mystery, a love story. It is, primarily, a big mess. Lee Roth, professor of Indology and translator of the Kamasutra, falls in love with one of his students, Lalita (oy veh, indeed). He gets killed, eventually (not soon enough). This text -- Love in a Dead Language -- is presented as an annotated edition of his Kamasutra, which doubles as a journal of sorts, and also comes with the annotations of Roth's literary executor and student, Anang Saighal. It recounts, basically, Roth's affair with Lalita and the consequent end of his academic career.
This overclever academic thriller naturally also features a Professor Lee Siegel. It also includes a bibliography consisting half of invented works and half of real ones. There are far too many nods to master Nabokov, including lots to the Zemblan language. There are multimedia concepts, newspaper articles, and even a whole section printed upside down. Of everything there is too much.
Siegel redeems himself to some extent by writing that is generally very solid, often clever, and sometimes funny. However, he gets too carried away and so the good is lost with the bad. A professor of Indian religions himself Siegel gets the Indian stuff down decently, but to little purpose and end.
Parts of the book are fun, but the story itself is particularly empty and pointless, at least as presented in this manner, and the reader wants to go conk all the cartoonish characters on the head with the oversize dictionary that is the murder weapon.
It is a neat looking text, and it seems like it might be an enjoyable puzzle. Regrettably, it is not. A disappointment and a curiosity, it is nothing more.
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/siegell/lovein.htm
The book has an impossibly long title: Love in a Dead Language, a romance by Lee Siegel, being the Kamasutra of Guru Vatsyayana Mallanaga as translated and interpreted by Professor Leopold Roth, with a foreword and annotation by Anang Saighal, following the commentary of Pandit Pralayananga Lilaraja. Whew! The title says it all about the several participants who created this multi-layered enterprise. Take a deep breath, because now the dedications begin. "To Bridget...who taught me how not to be Leopold Roth in love" - this is Lee Siegel's dedication. But there are other players in this farcical story, and they, too, want to dedicate their efforts to their various muses: Vatsyayana Mallanaga to Auddalaki; Leopold Roth to his Lalita, and so on.
And then there are the sections of the book; there is even a Prolegomenon. The chapter headings are wickedly provocative, from "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" all the way to "The Come-on", "The Move", "The Kill". For good measure, there is a blank page (translation), and there is a black page (commentary). If there is a section entitled "Wives and Mistresses", there is another entitled "Mistresses and Wives" - only, it's printed in red ink, and upside-down. There are quotations, asides, commentaries, footnotes to commentaries, clarifications, newspaper cuttings, poorly-written pieces from the student papers, and even a torn-up letter pieced together.
There are two narrators: one, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, Indian philosopher-pedagogue known for his Kamasutra; the other, Leopold Roth, American Indologist, linguist, and translator-interpreter of the Kamasutra. To add to this, we have interpretation and commentary by Pralayananga Lilaraja, "Hindu intellectual ornament to the Moghul court", and Anang Saighal, Indian-American doctoral candidate and witty, often vicious annotator. Love is the theme, preoccupation, and grand obsession of the work, built around Professor Roth's dangerous attraction to the lovely Indian-American student, Lalita Gupta. Roth, son of movie stars, studied first at Berkeley and thereafter at Oxford, where he met the woman he would marry, Sophia White. Both took up academic positions at Western University in California. Even as Roth was suspended from teaching in fall 1997 as a consequence of his relationship with Lalita, his wife demanded a separation. Mysteriously, during the Christmas vacation, he was found dead in his office, apparently the result of being struck with a large book, the heavy Monier-Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899; reprint, Oxford 1945). "Dead Language Professor", says the student paper in a telling headline.
This is the background of the work: but the story in the inside pages is a tale of lust, love, obsession and a comically dangerous liaison. Lalita, American-born and out of touch with her Indian roots, has been persuaded by her NRI parents to take Roth's course for the experience of Indian culture. Roth is immediately obsessed, a Humbert to a Lolita; and manages, through a series of devious means, to take Lalita on a trip to India, leaving her basketball-playing boyfriend Leroy behind. What happens in India is the real story being unfolded by the annotator Anang Saighal, and through him, by Roth.
And who is Lee Siegel, you ask, in this complicated story? He's also a fringe player in the tale: he was a friend of Roth's at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford, but Roth liked to write dismissively, even scathingly of Siegel's work.
All the ingredients of a densely packed, hilariously funny, globally and historically allusive, post-modern academic novel, are here: western midlife crisis, exoticism, intellectualism, pompous prose, pseud's corners, campus romances, faculty politics, even an Indo-American Right wing, the mental health problems of immigrants, and an American-Born Confused Desi. The problem, of course, is that for me, the book was at least a hundred pages too long. An exhaustingly funny read, and there are parts where you might laugh out loud; but stretched out beyond a manageable length. Nevertheless, it's a must-read for its humour, its exuberance and its endless ability to surprise. Love in a Dead Language is not only a raunchy romp through the hallowed halls of academia, but also through the corridors of contemporary angst. - Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta
https://www.indiatravelogue.com/book/book8.html
Lee Siegel is a professor of South Asian religions at the University of Hawaii and the author of several books, including Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India and City of Dreadful Night: A Tale of Horror and the Macabre in India. His most recent book, Love in a Dead Language, tells a tale of love and death in academia through journal entries, news clips, film posters, and excerpts of the Kama Sutra. Writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Shashi Tharoor calls it "a work of brilliance and originality... that will delight anyone who cares about love, India, or the pleasures of language."
The author spoke with Asia Society from his home in Hawaii.
Have you always written fiction in addition to academic writing? Do you find it difficult to switch back and forth between academic writing and fiction? How do the two types of writing inform each other? Is there that much of a distinction between the two?
While the challenge for me in academic writing has been to figure out how to be interesting despite having to tell the truth, the challenge for me in writing fiction is to figure out how to be interesting even when lying. I consider scholarly writing as much a literary genre as fiction or poetry. I like fiction that teaches me something and scholarship that entertains me. Each genre has a different set of conventions that deserve continual reconsideration and challenge. In my academic writing I had employed the conventions of narrative fiction in the service of scholarship and, after pushing that as far as I could, it seemed reasonable to try to use the conventions of academic writing in the service of fiction. Love in a Dead Language was the result. The great thing about being able to make up all the facts--all the footnotes, entries in the bibliography, and epigraphs-- was that I didn't have to go to the library or double-check my sources.
I see much of your book as a satire on academia, on a white, male professor's obsession with India and, on a larger scale, with Orientalism and the West's fascination with India. How does satire function in this book? How important is it to know how to make fun of yourself?
In my understanding, satire is moral, acrimonious, and condemnatory; it exposes and, as it comically castigates human folly, it demands reformation. In that sense, my book isn't meant to be a satire especially since I am, after all, a white male professor who is obsessed and fascinated with India. In any case, I'm not interested in morality, denunciation, or changing people. I appreciate human folly and enjoy all that is goofy about us. But I suppose it's because I used parody, lampoon, caricature, and other rhetorical devices that are associated with satirical attack, that many of the reviewers of the book construed it as satire. This has particularly been the case in India where reviews have consistently characterized it as a satire of Orientalism. I'm pleased because, as a result of that, the book has been on the bestseller list there (second for a while only to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire); but in my mind it's about a thoroughly universal human need for fantasies about love, a pandemic belief that there are experiences of sexual intimacy in other times and places that are different from our own (and somehow grander and more voluptuous) and yet possible to be imported and known. The book could just as well have been a satire of Occidentalism, written about an Indian Professor of American literature at Banaras Hindu University who falls in love with an American girl enrolled in one of his classes.
When you were writing this book, who was your intended audience?
When David Brent, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, was asked by a member of the publication board who the audience for the book was, he answered, "anyone who has both gone to college and been in love." My intended audience while writing the book, however, was one substantially smaller than that; in fact it was an audience of one (though someone who had gone to college and been in love), namely me. Before beginning to write I spent a good deal of time trying to imagine reading a book, a book that entertained me enormously, with the idea that, if I could imagine it clearly enough, I might be able to write a version of it down. Once I stopped imagining that the first line was "Call me Ishmael," I started writing the book we're talking about.
I thought the book was a marvelous account of the love-hate relationship many academics have with academia. Do you this think this is an accurate characterization?
A couple of years ago, while working in India on an ethnographic piece about snake charmers, I'd ask each of the many of them that I met if they liked being snake charmers. Every single one of them said that, even though it wouldn't make them rich, they loved their job--that it was fun and easy and they had plenty of free time, that they got to meet a lot of people and show those people something interesting. Although the same things could be said about being an academic, I doubt that every American professor likes his or her job as much as all of the snake charmers seemed to like theirs. I personally have revelled in the 25 years that I've spent as a teacher in the academy. When I say something, people write it down--that rarely happens outside the classroom. And teaching pays better than snake charming.
How much of Love in a Dead Language is inspired by the Kama Sutra specifically and Sanskrit literature in general?
In writing Love in a Dead Language, I aspired to do for the Kama Sutra what the Talmud did for the Torah. It's confusing to refer to the Kama Sutra, however, without distinguishing between the scientific-sexological treatise compiled by a Brahmin moralist in Gupta India and the romantic-erotic symbol construed in the nineteenth and twentieth century and still developing. While the ancient Sanskrit text itself has inspired very little other than a few obscure commentaries, the symbol has inspired a full line of products including massage oils, body dusts, pleasure balms, lingerie, lubricants, condoms, sex toys, plenty of X-rated videos and adult web sites, lots of illustrated sex manuals and compilations of erotic art, a major motion picture, and Love in a Dead Language. The symbol is incredibly powerful--it intrigues me that people who have never heard of Sanskrit or the Veda, who would not be able to name the capital of India, have heard of the Kama Sutra and could tell you exactly what it's about. When Clinton was in India last year, an Indian diplomat gave him a book; the President looked at the cover and, seeing that it was the Kama Sutra, immediately and wisely handed the dangerous symbol back. It's a cheerful thought that with George W. Bush in the White House, Bill Clinton will finally get to read the Kama Sutra.
What is the relationship between yourself and the character that bears your name in Love in a Dead Language?
In real life I am much more handsome than the Lee Siegel in the novel (although, I must admit, he does know more Sanskrit than I do).
What are you working on next?
A new novel about the same old stuff: sex, love, death, and trying to have a good time anyway.
https://asiasociety.org/lee-siegel-and-love-dead-language
The Kamasutra, the Indian manual on sex and love, has fascinated many a writer, artist, and film-maker. It inspired Lee Siegel, a professor of Indian religions at the University of Hawaii, to write Love in a Dead Language, a book that blends fact with fiction. It is a love story, a translation of the Kamasutra, an erotic farce and a murder mystery.
Love in a Dead LanguageThe hero of this protean comedy, Leopold Roth, complains, "I am a tenured professor of Indian studies and a Sanskrit scholar, and yet never, never in my life, have I made love to an Indian woman." Imagining that such an intimacy would provide a deeper and truer understanding of what he has spent his academic life mastering, a happily married Roth becomes obsessed with Lalita Gupta, a nubile student and avatar of his fantasies of a sexually-idyllic ancient realm.
Although this California-born Indian girl has no interest in India, the past or him, Roth sets out to seduce her and, at the same time, to teach her who she is in terms of the history of Indian culture. To that end he begins to translate the Kamasutra for her, interspersing that translation with confessional commentary. By inventing a bogus summer study abroad program, the professor is able to abduct Lalita to India.
After an emotionally tumultuous summer, Roth returns home only to be suspended from teaching, left by his wife and beaten to death with a Sanskrit dictionary. Roth's murder leaves the completion of his translation to graduate student Anang Saighal.
Love in a Dead Language exposes the complicities between the carnal and the intellectual, the erotic and the exotic, the false and the true. According to the amazon.com review, "Readers who love complicated plots, soaring language, etymological puzzles, and academic tomfoolery, will have a ball with this playful instance of literary smoke and mirrors."
A graduate in Fine Arts from Columbia University, with a post doctorate in Sanskrit from Oxford University, Siegel was smitten by teaching when he chanced upon a job in Washington which he had to take up as his wife was expecting. He moved to the University of Hawaii in 1976 when he was offered a position in the Department of Religion. Since then his interest in everything Indian has grown, which is reflected in his books which include Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India, City of Dreadful Night: A Tale of Horror and the Macabre in India, and now, Love In A Dead Language.
In a telephone interview with Madona Devasahayam, Siegel, 53, speaks about how his new book came about and his impressions of India.
How and why did Love In A Dead Language come about?
There are a variety of ways to respond to this question. My earliest notions of India have to do with the Kamasutra, the temples of Khajuraho, everything erotic and exotic about India. The Kamasutra is not about India, but about dreams of love-making, about facing the reality of longing. There is this temptation to imagine there is something exotic.
When one thinks of India, two books come to mind, the Bhagvad Gita and the Kamasutra. India knows something about religion and sex and we don't know but we want to know.
The worst and best books ever written are about love. My inspiration is the Kamasutra. The book is an attempt to write about love. Most of the people attempt to write about love, some fail, some don't.
How much time did you spend on this project?
I had thought about it for a long time, almost six to seven years. I made a few bad starts. I started off by translating the Kamasutra, making the book an academic one. But I soon let go of the need to be truthful. I guess all lovers do that. I wrote a lot, then junked it, then did nothing for 8 to 9 months. The book was a little bit of a struggle. I decided to make it a narrative for scholarship. It is a pure novel which looks like scholarship. I realized that writing novels was hard, but scholarly writing was easier, and it was easier to get a publisher. In each of books I have played around with two literary genres.
For whom is this book intended?
Anyone who has been to college and has been in love could be the reader. It is not so much restricted to the academic circle. But I think it is a book that is not easy to read, and therefore caters to a specialized audience. I cannot expect people in Hawaii lying in bikinis reading this book. The book makes an argument, it educates. One should have fun reading the book and I hope there a few around who would have a laugh. I am sure Khushwant Singh would be interested in reading it.
What is the feedback you have received from readers on this book?
The review in The New York Times was flattering. I felt so lucky. I liked the reviewer's appreciation. He focused on the language. But readers who read it for page turning plot would be disappointed. People who love me have responded positively and lovers lie. The press was nervous about the book earlier, considering it a tricky book. But it is selling. All my earlier books sold not more than 3,000 copies. But this book is getting much more attention than I am used to.
What are some of the moments you cherish while working on this book?
What is interesting about working on this book was that I spent writing it at my mother's home in Beverly Hills. It was where I grew up as a child. It was there I felt the emotions of a child, a teenager, the first awakenings of love and fantasies of being in India. The long-lost feelings came back to me when I wrote the book in the poolhouse at home. The experiences were more internal.
Why did you choose the names you did in the book?
I am a sucker for Indian languages. People in India have names that mean something. That is so attractive. The names in the book had some association. All of them have some reason. Lalita Gupta means "perfect" and "hidden". Anang (in Anang Saighal) means "bodiless." Roth is taken from my mother's maiden name, and not Philip Roth as the New York Times Reviewer noted.
Why did you to decide to study Sanskrit?
What interested me in the rich culture, the grand civilization that is India. India was a place where one could go to. The past there is persistent with the present. Both the modern and the 1,000-year old co-exist there. I was attracted to the art and culture.
How often do you go to India?
I have been to India about 15 times since 1974. I was in Madras for a long time. So many centuries overlap in that city and I had a wonderful time. I have been to Calcutta, Puri, and I am very happy in Delhi. While in Benaras, I felt as if I were in ancient India. Benaras is a struggle. I worked on a book about jadugars (street magicians) and saperas (snake charmers), and spent a lot of time travelling and performing with them. We had a pet python named Phoolan Devi that we would take with us to the bar and would ask for "Do beer, ek doodh!" ('Two beer and one milk'). I spent my 51st birthday at the Taj Mahal. There is something about walking there and sitting on the cool marble. You love places where you have friends and I love India.
https://www.rediff.com/news/1999/jun/02us2.htm
Anatomizing the Language of Love: An Interview with Lee Siegel
Lee Siegel, Typerotica, Deuxmers, 2020.
Typerotica is a hilariously comedic and poignantly nostalgic portrait of an aspiring artist as a young man. Consisting of the typed manuscripts of two love stories—QWERTYUIOP and AZERTYUIOP—it illustrates an analogy: typing was once to literature what sex is to love.
As a fifteen-year old, Lee Siegel is dazzled by a then contraband copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and decides that he must become a writer. He imagines that in order to do that he needs to learn how to type and then go to Paris to drink French wine, smoke French cigarettes, and have sex with French women. Imagining, furthermore, that in order to become a writer of compelling literature he needs to learn how to type, he enrolls in a typing class at a secretarial college in Los Angeles and falls in love with the typing teacher.
The two stories are framed by nonfictional introductions and annotations, including a true account of the author’s friendship with Henry Miller.
Set in the early 1960s, the novel nostalgically evokes that period when it was actually illegal to read authors like Henry Miller—who plays a large role here—and for that reason was thrilling and liberating for some readers.
Unfortunately, as Siegel notes in his mournful introduction, that earlier Puritan revulsion at frank depictions of sex seems to be making a comeback in politically correct/woke culture. Healthy, joyous, even silly depictions of sexual allure are now subjected to ludicrous sociopolitical theorizing, and subject to cancellation.
But don’t let that prevent you from reading this handsomely produced book. “Don’t be such a prude,” the narrator’s French lover tells him. “Don’t be so puritanically American.” — Steven Moore
Read a review by Richard Polt on The Typewriter Revolution blog
Lee Siegel, City of Dreadful Night: A Tale of Horror and the
Macabre in India, University of Chicago Press, 2018.
read it at Google Books
When Lee Siegel went to India to do research for a book on Sanskrit horror literature, a friend in New Delhi told him about an itinerant teller of ghost and vampire tales, a man with clusters of amulets around his neck and a silk top hat with peacock plumes on his head. Siegel set out in search of the old man—called Brahm Kathuwala—to hear his stories and to learn about his uncommon life.
But what started out as a study of other people's stories became a compelling story itself. City of Dreadful Night is an astonishing work of fiction, a tangle of tales that transports the reader from the Medieval India of magicians, witches, and vampires, through the British India of Brahm Kathuwala's childhood, into the chaos and political terror of contemporary India. Vividly recreating Indian literary and oral traditions, Siegel weaves a web of possession, reincarnation, and magical transformation unlike any found in the Western tradition. Flesh-eating demons, Rajiv Gandhi's assassin, even Bram Stoker and Dracula populate the serpentine narrative, which intermingles stories about the characters with the terrifying tales they tell.
Siegel pursues Brahm Kathuwala from the ghastly lights of the cremation ground at Banaras through villages all over north India. Brahm's life story is revealed through countless tales along the way. We learn that he was raised, and abandoned, by two mothers—one the destitute floor sweeper who bore him; the other her employer, a wealthy Irish woman who read and reread to him the story of Dracula. We hear of his marriage to the daughter of a cremation ground attendant, his battles against her demonic possession, and their painful parting. We come to understand the daily life and motivations of this "horror professional," who uses terrifying tales to ward off the evil he himself fears.
This unorthodox book is more than a story; it blends scholarship, fantasy, travelogue, and autobiography—fusing and overlapping historical accounts and newscasts, literary texts and films, dreams and nocturnal tales. Siegel uses imagination to explore the relation of real terror to horror fiction and to contemplate the ways fear and disgust become thrilling elements in stories of the macabre.
This book is the product of Siegel's deep knowledge of both Indian and Western literary and philosophical traditions. It is also an attempt to come to grips with the omnipresence of political and religious terror in contemporary India. Shocking, original, beautifully written, City of Dreadful Night offers readers a captivating immersion in the wonder and terror of India, past and present.
City of Dreadful Night is an astonishing work of fiction, a tangle of tales that transports the reader from the Medieval India of magicians, witches, and vampires, through the British colonial period with its culture clashes and simmering unrest, into the chaos and political terror of contemporary India. Flesh-eating demons, Rajiv Gandhi's assassin, even Bram Stoker and Dracula populate the serpentine narrative, which intermingles stories about the characters with the terrifying tales they tell. At the heart of the book is an itinerant teller of ghost tales called Brahm Kathuwala, an old man wearing amulets around his neck and a silk top hat with peacock plumes. As Siegel follows him all over north India, Brahm's life story is revealed through countless interlocking tales. We learn of his two mothers - one the destitute floor sweeper who bore him; the other a wealthy Irish woman who read and reread to him the story of Dracula. We hear of his marriage to the daughter of a cremation ground attendant and his battles against her demonic possession. We come to understand the strange life of this man who uses terrifying tales to ward off the evil he himself fears
Ancient Sanskrit tales of horror meet Bram Stoker's Dracula by way of an elderly storyteller in postcolonial India: Siegel, a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii, has assembled this bizarre but brilliant novel from sources spanning the corners of anthropology, history and oral storytelling traditions into a garish, fanciful kaleidoscope. Divided into seven sections headed by quotes from Sigmund Freud, Stephen King and 11th-century Indian religious texts, the narrative falls into three basic layers. The first is Siegel's straightforward account of his 1991 trip to India to research a book on "horror and the macabre in India," where he learns of Brahm Kathuwala, a renowned vagrant storyteller. At the novel's core is Brahm's own story, fluctuating from the present to flashbacks that reveal his surrogate English mother, Mary Sheridan Thomson, a leader of her Gothic Literary Club who taught English to Brahm by reading him Dracula; and his marriage to Mena, a woman raised among the ever-burning funeral pyres which her father attended. Finally, to villagers, Brahm tells tales drawn from "the river of stories" that are often as gruesome as they are ancient. The narrative's endless interlocking stories-within-stories make use of elements as diverse as Hollywood horror films, a trunk full of Bram Stoker's research on vampires and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by a "human bomb." In Siegel's explorations of why horror fascinates, Brahm's belief that "ideas tear people apart; stories bring people together," proves correct?especially when the story is as inventive, entertaining and over-the-top as this one. - Publishers Weekly
In addition to its tradition of nonviolence, India has other traditions in which ghosts, vampires, and horrific monsters appear. Siegel (religion, Univ. of Hawaii) uncovered these traditions when he traveled to Banaras to research a book on Sanskrit horror literature. In a fast-paced style, he interweaves his actual experiences with the violent events of 1991 India and the life and work of Bram Kathuwala, an elderly storyteller who specializes in macabre tales. In this re-creation of a storytelling tradition dating from medieval times, magicians, vampires, and flesh-eating devils pop up?as does Rajiv Gandhi's assassin. The line between fact and fiction quickly blurs, and the reader soon is absorbed into this spellbinder. A hair-raising book that is not what you'd expect from an academic publisher; recommended for collections on South Asia and/or mysteries.? - Donald Clay Johnson
Lee Siegel, Trance-Migrations: Stories of India, Tales of Hypnosis,
University of Chicago Press, 2014.
read it at Google Books
Listen to what I am about to tell you: do not read this book alone. You really shouldn’t. In one of the most playful experiments ever put between two covers, every other section of Trance-Migrations prescribes that you read its incantatory tales out loud to a lover, friend, or confidant, in order to hypnotize in preparation for Lee Siegel’s exploration of an enchanting India. To read and hear this book is to experience a particular kind of relationship, and that’s precisely the point: hypnosis, the book will demonstrate, is an essential aspect of our most significant relationships, an inherent dimension of love, religion, medicine, politics, and literature, a fundamental dynamic between lover and beloved, deity and votary, physician and patient, ruler and subject, and, indeed, reader and listener.
Even if you can’t read this with a partner—and I stress that you certainly ought to—you will still be in rich company. There is Shambaraswami, an itinerant magician, hypnotist, and storyteller to whom villagers turn for spells that will bring them wealth or love; José-Custodio de Faria, a Goan priest hypnotizing young and beautiful women in nineteenth-century Parisian salons; James Esdaile, a Scottish physician for the East India Company in Calcutta, experimenting on abject Bengalis with mesmerism as a surgical anesthetic; and Lee Siegel, a writer traveling in India to learn all that he can about hypnosis, yoga, past life regressions, colonialism, orientalism, magic spells, and, above all, the power of story. And then there is you: descending through these histories—these tales within tales, trances within trances, dreams within dreams—toward a place where the distinctions between reverie and reality dissolve.
Here the world within the book and that in which the book is read come startlingly together. It’s one of the most creative works we have ever published, a dazzling combination of literary prowess, scholarly erudition, and psychological exploration—all tempered by warm humor and a sharp wit. It is informing, entertaining, and, above all, mesmerizing.
Lee Siegel, Horseplay: Equine Fables of Love and Death, Deuxmers, 2020.
If we are to believe critically acclaimed fiction writer Lee Siegel, the author of Horseplay is actually a horse, yes, a talking horse named Gulliver. And if that is not unbelievable enough, this witty and erudite equine waxes quite eloquently on myriad subjects in various languages.
According to Siegel, Gulliver dictated the series of twelve stories that constitute this fantastic text. Each marvelous tale is about one of his male progenitors, each of them endowed with the gift of speech. The stories, passed down to Gulliver by those amazingly garrulous ancestral stallions from generation to generation, constitute a kind of comedic stud book or literary breeding registry.
The stories are at once sublimely romantic and yet bawdily down to earth, occasionally melancholy but fundamentally hilarious. Horseplay is indisputably one of the greatest books ever composed by a horse.
Lee Siegel, Who Wrote the Book of Love?, University of Chicago
Press, 2010.
read it at Google Books
Who Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex—beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love.
Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love.
"Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.
Siegel continues his Love series of arch and diverting novels about the body-mind conundrum, sexy tales that revolve around the influence of texts as much as the libido. In his larkiest work yet, the focus is on the sex manuals his young, curious, and affectionately indulged narrator studies so avidly in his comfy Beverly Hills home. The elder son of an actress and a doctor to the stars, lucky Lee (who is and is not the author) tells the story of his sexual education from kindergarten to his bar mitzvah in a hilarious mix of candor and naivete, while Siegel parses the absurdities of the good life, 1950s style. Precocious Lee plays cowboy, fears communists, gets into scrapes, covets cute girls, and discovers the thrill of lying. As always, mischievous Siegel revels in the magic of language while offering tart social commentary on everything from Jewish assimilation to racism to the atomic bomb, but never has his humor been sharper or his characters more alluring than in this shrewdly spiked, cheerfully erotic, incident-rich Hollywood coming-of-age tale. - Donna Seaman
Lee Siegel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man: A Novel, University
of Chicago Press, 2008.
read it at Google Books
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” begins one chapter of critically acclaimed Lee Siegel’s new novel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man. “In the beginning” starts another. What else can a novelist do when hired as a ghostwriter by an elderly, irascible, conquistador-costumed man claiming to be the 540-year-old Juan Ponce de León? The fantastic life of that legendary explorer—inventor of rum, cigars, Coca-Cola, and popcorn—is the frame for Siegel’s fourth chronicle of love, lies, luck, loss, and labia.
Summoned with cold hard cash and a pinch of flattery, a professor and novelist named Lee Siegel finds himself in Eagle Springs, Florida, attempting to give form to the life of the man who, contrary to popular and historical opinion, did indeed find the Fountain of Youth. Spending humid days listening to the romantic ramblings of the old man and sleepless nights doubting yet trying to craft these reminiscences into a narrative that will satisfy the literary aspirations of his subject, Siegel the ghostwriter spins an improbable tale filled with Native Americans, insatiable monarchs, philandering cantors, deliriously passionate nuns, delicate actresses, androgynous artists, and deceptions small and large. For de León, and for Siegel too, centuries of conquest and colonialism, fortune and identity, are all refracted through the memories of the conquistador’s lovers, each and every one of them adored “more than any other woman ever.”
Comic, melancholic, lusty, and fully engaged with the act of invention, whether in love or on the page, Love and the Incredibly Old Man continues the real Lee Siegel’s exuberant exploration of that sentiment which Ponce de León confesses has “transported me to the most joyous heights, plunged me to the most dismal depths, and dropped me willy-nilly and dumbfounded at all places in between.”
"Whimsical, erotic and comic all at the same time."― Kirkus Reviews
"A creative attitude to the novel is in abundant evidence across all Siegel's fiction; and this new novel is a worthy addition to a body of work which deserves a wider audience." - Stephen Burn
Mix a history of Spanish conquistadors in the New World with a porny pulp tale, and the result is this entertaining novel. The premise: Juan Ponce de Leon, the venerable 16th-century Spanish conquistador, is alive and living in Florida thanks to the Fountain of Youth (which he discovered). But with the fountain running dry, the explorer is anxious to chronicle his 540 years on Earth before shuffling off this mortal coil, and summons ghostwriter Lee Siegel to record the lurid details of his countless love affairs. The irascible explorer—between coining imaginative words such as cardarring (meaning, among other things, to have sex)—lays out a reasonably reliable (lurid embellishments notwithstanding) rendering of Ponce de Leon's travels. In addition to his other vices, Ponce de Leon (who claims to have invented cigars, rum and popcorn) leans heavily on cocaine-infused rum punch and morphine as he and Siegel race to beat the explorer's quickly approaching death. While this novel offers a decidedly goofy point of view, surprisingly, it works. Siegel slips in the history lessons so deftly that readers will barely realize they are being educated as well as titillated. - Publishrs Weekly
A better title for this novel would have been “Sex and the Incredibly Old Man,” because there’s little love in this compendium of carnal adventures related by a 16th century Spanish conquistador.
Here’s the premise: The author receives a letter from a man who claims to be Ponce de Leon. Having discovered the Fountain of Youth five centuries ago, Ponce faked his death and lived under a series of aliases, shifting livelihoods and religions as required in order to protect the fountain through the years. Now the fountain has run dry, and Ponce is feeling his mortality. He needs someone to write his memoirs.
Five hundred years of history, yet all Ponce wants to talk about are his lovers. Spanish aristocrats, Native Americans, artists, actresses, whores, and other men’s wives—they all fall to their knees to worship him. Ponce insists that he “loves” every one of them: He also lies, cheats, denies them the secret of the fountain, and then abandons them when they notice he fails to age. This treatment of women is offensive enough, but it’s not the worst example of a subtle, insidious anger in this novel. What begins as a series of awkward metaphors—an attempt to thematically connect sex and religion—soon solidifies into something blatantly anti-Christian. The tipping point is a scene involving rosary beads and masturbation. After five hundred years, you’d think old Ponce might have learned something profound. Something about love, perhaps. Don’t look for it here. - LISA ANN VERGE
https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/love-and-the-incredibly-old-man/
Lee Siegel, Love and Other Games of Chance, Viking, 2003.
Circus performer, entertainer, and world traveler Isaac Schlossberg shares, in one hundred chapters, his experiences as the son of Jewish immigrants, a sideshow performer, carnie, stage and movie actor, and lover. 15,000 first printing.
This second novel by Siegel (Love in a Dead Language) lives up to its subtitle: it's organized as a game of Snakes and Ladders, with each chapter representing a square on the game board; the reader can choose between a traditional reading, from start to finish, and a playful one, letting the roll of the dice decide. The story follows Isaac Schlossberg, a swindler, circus performer and entertainer. As Schlossberg travels around the world (and across the board), his stunts-from childhood appearances in sideshow acts with his Jewish immigrant parents at the turn of the century to his attempts to beat Sir Edmund Hillary to the top of Mount Everest-are woven together into one exceptionally tall tale. Depending on one's point of view, this is either the book's failing or its forte: the reader hardly has time to take in Schlossberg's romance with a Hindu snake charmer, for example, before he flies off to a different corner of the earth, a different occupation and a different woman. At the beginning and end of the novel are somewhat more grounded first-person accounts by a writer called Lee Siegel, Schlossberg's estranged son, who explains that "a person's lies always reveal some truth about them." The whole enterprise is finally redeemed by Siegel's amusing deadpan style: "The end of the war was... a blow to my father.... without a government paycheck... my father had to take agricultural work, using [his plane] to spray citrus groves with a poison that, developed for use on German infantrymen, proved lethal to American fruit flies..-- to spray citrus groves with a poison that, developed for use on German infantrymen, proved lethal to American fruit flies." - Publishers Weekly
Raucous adventure tale of a man’s journey from the Dead Sea to the top of Mt. Everest, in a hundred vignettes touring early 20th-century pop culture.
Author Siegel’s mother reveals in a prologue that Siegel’s recently deceased father wasn’t really his father. His real father was Isaac Schlossberg, a showman and adventurer who left behind a box of papers and a mysterious game that looks a lot like Chutes & Ladders but is actually Snakes & Ladders, a chessboard-like device of Eastern origin. Stories are written on each of the squares of his version of the game, and such is the book: a hundred chapters detailing Schlossberg’s madcap adventures. Says second-novelist Siegel (Love in a Dead Language, 1999), “To play the game, it seems to me, is to become acquainted with the author in the same way we get to know a person in real life.” The “squares,” or chapters, go from the Wild West to the Mystic East, and through the Prime Meridian to Novel Antipodes, eventually heading toward the enlightenment of Everest, where it may turn out that Schlossberg made it to the top before Hillary. The story, fragmented and random (and entirely without paragraph breaks), offers up history in an old-fashioned pop culture—biblical figures in the context of vaudeville acts, for example. There are cameos from famous figures (“Buffalo Bill and Geronimo were shooting it out for the heart of Matanka Hickok at the Old London Theater,” or ‘ “I act according to the intent of the Almighty Creator,’ ” Germany’s chancellor, Adolf Hitler, said in a speech at an anti-Jewish rally in Munich”). It’s never clear whether we’re supposed to read the book or play it, and one wishes the “game” came with a clearer set of instructions. But the cast is lively and the history complete. Even if we don’t buy into Schlossberg’s adventure entirely, Siegel is there to tell us that “A person’s lies always reveal some truth about them.”
Vast and zany. - Kirkus Reviews
Has Siegel launched a series of hilarious literary tall tales with the word love at each title's helm? First came Love in a Dead Language (1999) and now another love novel, in which Siegel is even more adept at lacing outrageous storytelling with shrewd observations and exuberantly erudite eroticism as he celebrates and mocks humankind's seemingly endless capacity for make-believe, chicanery, tomfoolery, adventure, and, yes, love. He uses the old game of chance, Snakes and Ladders, as the underlying structure for a gleefully episodic romp through 40 years in the improvisatory and peripatetic life of charming, wily, and romantic Isaac Schlossberg, who makes his way from the close-knit Jewish immigrant community in early-twentieth-century New York to California, Calcutta, London, Honolulu, Miami, and Tibet. The son of performers, Isaac is a snake handler who acts in phony seances, Wild West shows, vaudeville, and silent movies, all the while getting entangled in myriad absurd escapades, one involving a fake wolf boy and a sexy, animal-obsessed gal named Pythia. Siegel himself is a conjurer and a tease, a connoisseur of language and a great fan and purveyor of entertainment, and this three-ring circus of a novel is as smart as it is ebullient. - Donna Seaman
Using the game of snakes and ladders as an organizing principle, Siegel has constructed a work of 100 almost perfectly equal chapters to be read in the order presented or by sliding back and forth as the rules indicate. Magic and illusion form the core of this book, whether at Wild West shows or circuses. The story begins at the lowest point of the Dead Sea at the winter solstice of 1899 and ends on the peak of Everest at the summer solstice of 1946. In between we have followed the career of Isaac Schlossberg and the bizarre cast of characters who witness its twists and turns.
The tightrope walker he calls angel meets him while he earns his living charming snakes. As the principal love of his life, she pops up in many of the book’s hundred sections, especially on the ones where ladders throw the narrative forward or snakes drop it back. His attachment to her does not prevent experiments with a female pilot in the early days of erotic aviation. A fake feral child gains fame as the boy raised by tigers who is a reincarnation of Warren Hastings. We are told that Bachnele Poopik, the Yiddish-speaking dwarf who is irresistible to women, has “stooped” Eleanor Roosevelt.
This is one of the details which make us think Siegel relied more on invention than history, but you can’t prove a universal negative, as one of his characters observes.
This novel does not conform to much of what makes an historical novel, but it delivers the novelty it promises. Sprinkled throughout the text we find colorful Yiddish, appropriate Bengali and the universal language of magic. - JAMES HAWKING
https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/love-and-other-games-of-chance/
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