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

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

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

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

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

Expect to laugh out loud often in the reading of this outrageously smart and insightful book.

This comic novel primarily concerns itself with sex and love, together and apart. It centers on Professor Leopold Roth, happily married but consumed with the apparent exoticism of Indian culture. Surrounded by sexual obsessives of both the bluestocking and bimbo variety, and inspired by the advice of well-meaning friends (“The clitoris is to the vagina what the mezuzah is to the threshold of the Jewish home. It must be kissed before enteringâ€?), he becomes fixated on Lalita—her name is far from the only Nabokovian nod on display. He sees her as his dream of India made flesh and begins a translation of the Kama Sutra as a paean to her, although much of his work involves contriving a plan to spirit her to the land of his fantasies and her ancestors.
The text he produces and his commentary on it, along with an additional layer of interpretation supplied by a much less erotically inclined graduate student, is the novel we have before us. Its most notable feature is the range of styles it parodies. It’s a pastiche of academic pedantry, paperback smut, letters of introduction, diary entries, and even board game directions, and in each case, the tone is near-perfect. Wherever the humor might be hampered by the less-than-fresh premise, it’s buoyed by sure-handed execution. Siegel, as a real-life professor of Indian religions, knows his material well enough to treat it deftly, without undue deference. He’s larded his satire with learning and packed it with serious issues; his great accomplishment is that the result is a surprisingly easy entertainment. ( )

reading too many books at once right now

Group V