There are certain books I read over and over; I've read 'The House of Mirth' I don't know how many times, and I've read both 'Howard's End' and 'A Room with a view' twice. While Edith Wharton and E.M. Forster wrote about privileged people living privileged lives, their characters' dilemmas and mistakes and desires resonate a hundred years later, no matter the milieu. And for a reader who loves to travel, it doesn't hurt that these authors set their masterpieces in places like France, Italy, England, and India. The settings provide a neat little excursion for the imagination, but the human drama is just as rich. Wharton's short story 'Roman Fever', is set entirely on a restaurant terrace in Rome as two acquaintances, American women in their mid-forties, engage in a deceptively elegant bout of intense psychological warfare. The setting provides some lovely descriptions of dusk falling over the ancient city, but the real drama lies in the the unveiling of decades' old resentments before a stunning denouement.
Before heading off to India, I read 'A passage to India', a novel I'd been meaning to read for years anyway. I appreciated its insight into the social and political consequences of colonialism, but the one thing I took away from Forster's classic was that unlike the beautiful order of the Austrian countryside or a Parisian quartier, India could be beguiling in its disorder. Near the end of the novel, one of the main characters sets sail for England, skirting the southern tip of India and heading north, eventually sailing up through the Nile and finally landing in Venice, where the exquisite, fading grandeur of that city diminishes the last notions he'd had of what he'd considered, in India, to be beautiful.
When the film version of 'Eat, pray, love' was released, I was eager to see the part set in India, to which I'd soon be going, and the part set in Italy, to which I hoped to someday return. From everything I've heard, Rome can be a chaotic place, but except for a rogue Vespa, the version presented in 'Eat, pray, love' seemed positively serene. Call it dramatic tension: clearly the director was interested in launching Julia Roberts--er, Liz Gilbert--into India in dramatic fashion. The transition from Italy to India is jarring, as Gilbert leaves the flushing pink sunsets of the Eternal City and hits India rolling, bumping along a dirty, narrow street in the back of a cab, where she's assailed by beggars reaching through the car windows and the stink of garbage piled high along the side of the road. Jangling music blares throughout the scene, and the whole effect is an assault on the senses (which is a fairly accurate description of India, actually).
To prepare for our trip to Italy, which is still a good ways off in the distance, I've tried to mix up the romantic with a dash of reality. Both Tobias Jones' 'Dark heart of Italy' and Beppe Severgnini's 'La Bella Figura' attempt to counter the charming, romantic version of Italy present in so many movies and memoirs by describing and analyzing a more complicated, interesting country. Jones' Berlesconi-era Italy is often gloomy and even hopeless; I ended up skimming huge chunks of legal proceedings for crimes that, in Jones' telling, weren't likely to be solved in our lifetime. Severgnini sees the humor in his country and countrymen, and rather gleefully, though gently, dispels the myths of tourist brochures and websites.
What I probably should be doing more of, though, is language learning. I like to think that Diane Hale's 'La Bella Lingua' counts for something.
