This film just took me back to India, so much so that as we drove home from the theater I experienced the same impression of orderliness and calm that I did when we returned from the actual India.
The characters in the film made some of the usual observations about how India is an assault on the senses, which it is; like my mother pointed out, though, it’s a colorful assault. The characters also made choices about how they would respond to the chaos, noise, and unpredictability in India. One of them entrenched herself, holding out hope that fortunes would change and she’d be on a plane back to England. Her husband, meanwhile, embraced all that India (or at least Jaipur) had to offer. Another character (played by the always remarkable Judi Dench) compared immersion into India as a wave: if you fight it, you’ll struggle and perhaps drown; it’s best to let it carry you. You might just end up someplace wonderful.
(Cover design by Andrew Davidson for Harper Perennial.)
I don’t know if it’s trend in the arts, or if it’s sheer coincidence, but there seems to be a strong interest in World War I right now. This past weekend we saw the film ‘War Horse’ (based on a book that was later made into a play), which at first glance appears to be a boy-and-his-horse tale, but in actuality demonstrates how quickly and completely warfare was changed by advancements in technology; or, in simpler terms, by more efficient killing machines. On Sunday evening I settled in to watch the US premiere of the second season of Downton Abbey, which kicked off in the midst of World War I, and is (thankfully) more interested in being a highly entertaining, beautifully decorated soap opera than in capturing the trauma of war.
On the literary front I’ve been plowing through the Maisie Dobbs novels, each of which tell not only a good mystery, but also explore the social consequences World War I wrought in the decade that followed. The author of this series, Jacqueline Winspear, embeds lots of period detail, making each book a chance to travel to another, convincingly rendered, period of time. Winspear’s heroine often draws upon her wartime experiences as a nurse, but is equally haunted by all that she saw and endured attending to wounded soldiers in France. In each case, Maisie Dobbs uses her keen perception, her cultivated empathy (she mimics a person’s posture in order to get a better sense of what they are feeling), organization (creating a case map complete with a case of characters and drawing possible links) and a calm, cool demeanor achieved by meditation. There are no clear cut hero’s or villains, as Winspear takes pains to show how complex people—and their motivations—really are.
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Is Italy too regionally diverse, and its citizens too culturally diverse, to be a truly unified country? A new book, The pursuit of Italy: a history of a land, its regions, and their peoples explores whether and how Italy works as a unified country, and perhaps if it’s one instance of a place whose parts are more valuable and functional than the whole. 2011 marked the 150th year of Italy’s Risorgimento, or unification. Considering a history that spans thousands of years it’s surprising to consider that, as a political entity, Italy is younger the U.S.
Even a cursory bit of research about Italy reveals the depth and extent of its regional diversity. In preparing for our trip I came across variations of the following observation at least three or four times: Italians consider themselves residents of their town or city first, then their region, then as ‘Italian’, and finally as European. They identify first and foremost with their local dialect, their local culinary specialties, their local campanile.
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