Six
Six
Posted 11:49pm (Mla time) Feb 13, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 14, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
"ROMEO and Juliet" remains possibly the most romantic love story ever, and has deservedly survived war and famine through the ages to gain that reputation. Franco Zeffirelli did right to cast the teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in his version-possibly the best one, which too deservedly has earned its fame-of the star-crossed lovers. It takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to rise, or plunge, to those levels or selflessness or recklessness, defying adversity, opposition and death itself. It takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to exhibit such joy and exuberance, such physical immediacy and spiritual distance at the same time, while in the throes of that euphoria or affliction.
Well, it takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to fall in love at first sight, and surrender to it with such unyielding absoluteness. You get to be a little older, you get to sympathize (and empathize) with the worldlier Mercutio, or even the more cynical Athos in Alexandre Dumas' "The Three Musketeers," and look at the mating rituals of the birds and the bees with more amusement than awe.
But I leave you to discover the book and movie, or better still the stage presentation, at your leisure. Though you might want to check out, too, the books mentioned below. I don't know that they are the best books written about love, I do know they have made the strongest impression on me in that respect.
Foremost is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera." It's the one book that has been compared to his incomparable "One Hundred Years of Solitude." It's just as lyrical and far more romantic. I can say with much assurance, don't wait for the movie. The producers won't make it, this isn't the sort of thing that makes for a good one. Look what happened to "Catch-22." The movie, made by Mike Nichols, was horrible, though it starred Alan Arkin, one of my favorite actors, as Yossarian. Why anyone would think to turn Joseph Heller's magnificent anti-novel into a movie, well, there's a thin line between lunacy and genius. The book was genius, the movie was lunacy.
But I digress. In "Love in the Time of Cholera" (as far as I can recall, I read it years ago), a young man who fancies himself a poet falls in love with the daughter of a fairly rich man, woos her, goes to great lengths to do things for her. And just as she is on the verge of requiting his love, she changes her mind. And marries a man of more reasonable means. Devastated but resolute, young man vows to have her if he was to wait forever to do it. He does wait, bedding in the interim women left and right, but they do not count, he remains chaste in his mind, with his single-minded pursuit of-or waiting for-his one great love.
I won't reveal whether he gets her in the end. I just want to draw the reader's attention to the part where the young man falls in love for the first time. He is stricken badly, and the symptoms he exhibits are not unlike those of cholera. He is feverish and delusional, unable to sleep, unable to eat, retching and vomiting all the time. It is all his devoted mother can do to see him through his delirium tremens. It takes genius to write about this with poetry and humor at the same time. Marquez does so, in style.
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is a "bizarre love triangle" to use the title of a song that became popular in the '90s. Milan Kundera I really like. I can understand his ironic sensibility, his compassion and sarcasm, his love-hate relationship with the socialist utopia.
The triangle consists of Tereza, who comes from a world where everything seems trivial and who longs for depth and seriousness; Sabina, the painter, who comes from the plodding weight of political activism and longs for the soaring airiness of art; and Tomas, the doctor, who returns to Prague after the Russian invasion, longing to do something for his country and ends up being "remolded" into a cleaner of glass windows. The novel, of course, explores their relationships, in particular, as the above suggests, the many facets of weight and lightness, or indeed their paradoxical meanings or modes of being. Weight can often be very light, and lightness can often be very heavy.
Typically Kundera, we see the couple Tomas and Tereza (Sabina is the sometime mistress), toward the end of the book, keeping watch over their dying dog. How is that for a truly ironic, and dazzling, play at the many shades of lightness and heaviness?
This one you don't have to wait for the movie, it's been made-as far back as 1988. And quite a good one it is, too. Like all great movies from great books, this one doesn't rely faithfully on the original but goes on to create its own world while retaining the original's spirit and energy. It demands to be judged by its own terms and not by literary ones. The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin, and was directed by Philip Kaufman.
Olin is one hell of a sexy Sabina in this movie, which adds all sorts of reverberations to the antimonies physical-spiritual, trivial-substantial, light-heavy. Lightness can often truly crush you with its unbearable-ness. You want the gripping visuals and the stunning immediacy, watch the movie. You want the suppleness of language and the even more suppleness of thought, read the book. You can't lose either way. You win double if you do both.
Arundathi Roy is both enviable and unenviable. She it is who wrote "The God of Small Things," a brilliant first novel, as awe-inspiring a debut as "Catch-22." But she may well end up having the same problem as Heller, who was unable to write a second novel until well after a decade. How the hell do you top a work of genius?
But I leave that for tomorrow.
(To be concluded)
Posted 11:49pm (Mla time) Feb 13, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 14, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
"ROMEO and Juliet" remains possibly the most romantic love story ever, and has deservedly survived war and famine through the ages to gain that reputation. Franco Zeffirelli did right to cast the teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in his version-possibly the best one, which too deservedly has earned its fame-of the star-crossed lovers. It takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to rise, or plunge, to those levels or selflessness or recklessness, defying adversity, opposition and death itself. It takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to exhibit such joy and exuberance, such physical immediacy and spiritual distance at the same time, while in the throes of that euphoria or affliction.
Well, it takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to fall in love at first sight, and surrender to it with such unyielding absoluteness. You get to be a little older, you get to sympathize (and empathize) with the worldlier Mercutio, or even the more cynical Athos in Alexandre Dumas' "The Three Musketeers," and look at the mating rituals of the birds and the bees with more amusement than awe.
But I leave you to discover the book and movie, or better still the stage presentation, at your leisure. Though you might want to check out, too, the books mentioned below. I don't know that they are the best books written about love, I do know they have made the strongest impression on me in that respect.
Foremost is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera." It's the one book that has been compared to his incomparable "One Hundred Years of Solitude." It's just as lyrical and far more romantic. I can say with much assurance, don't wait for the movie. The producers won't make it, this isn't the sort of thing that makes for a good one. Look what happened to "Catch-22." The movie, made by Mike Nichols, was horrible, though it starred Alan Arkin, one of my favorite actors, as Yossarian. Why anyone would think to turn Joseph Heller's magnificent anti-novel into a movie, well, there's a thin line between lunacy and genius. The book was genius, the movie was lunacy.
But I digress. In "Love in the Time of Cholera" (as far as I can recall, I read it years ago), a young man who fancies himself a poet falls in love with the daughter of a fairly rich man, woos her, goes to great lengths to do things for her. And just as she is on the verge of requiting his love, she changes her mind. And marries a man of more reasonable means. Devastated but resolute, young man vows to have her if he was to wait forever to do it. He does wait, bedding in the interim women left and right, but they do not count, he remains chaste in his mind, with his single-minded pursuit of-or waiting for-his one great love.
I won't reveal whether he gets her in the end. I just want to draw the reader's attention to the part where the young man falls in love for the first time. He is stricken badly, and the symptoms he exhibits are not unlike those of cholera. He is feverish and delusional, unable to sleep, unable to eat, retching and vomiting all the time. It is all his devoted mother can do to see him through his delirium tremens. It takes genius to write about this with poetry and humor at the same time. Marquez does so, in style.
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is a "bizarre love triangle" to use the title of a song that became popular in the '90s. Milan Kundera I really like. I can understand his ironic sensibility, his compassion and sarcasm, his love-hate relationship with the socialist utopia.
The triangle consists of Tereza, who comes from a world where everything seems trivial and who longs for depth and seriousness; Sabina, the painter, who comes from the plodding weight of political activism and longs for the soaring airiness of art; and Tomas, the doctor, who returns to Prague after the Russian invasion, longing to do something for his country and ends up being "remolded" into a cleaner of glass windows. The novel, of course, explores their relationships, in particular, as the above suggests, the many facets of weight and lightness, or indeed their paradoxical meanings or modes of being. Weight can often be very light, and lightness can often be very heavy.
Typically Kundera, we see the couple Tomas and Tereza (Sabina is the sometime mistress), toward the end of the book, keeping watch over their dying dog. How is that for a truly ironic, and dazzling, play at the many shades of lightness and heaviness?
This one you don't have to wait for the movie, it's been made-as far back as 1988. And quite a good one it is, too. Like all great movies from great books, this one doesn't rely faithfully on the original but goes on to create its own world while retaining the original's spirit and energy. It demands to be judged by its own terms and not by literary ones. The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin, and was directed by Philip Kaufman.
Olin is one hell of a sexy Sabina in this movie, which adds all sorts of reverberations to the antimonies physical-spiritual, trivial-substantial, light-heavy. Lightness can often truly crush you with its unbearable-ness. You want the gripping visuals and the stunning immediacy, watch the movie. You want the suppleness of language and the even more suppleness of thought, read the book. You can't lose either way. You win double if you do both.
Arundathi Roy is both enviable and unenviable. She it is who wrote "The God of Small Things," a brilliant first novel, as awe-inspiring a debut as "Catch-22." But she may well end up having the same problem as Heller, who was unable to write a second novel until well after a decade. How the hell do you top a work of genius?
But I leave that for tomorrow.
(To be concluded)
posted by Dante at 12:00 AM
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