372 PAGES


In Lee Siegel's outrageously inventive new novel,
sex manual marries academic farce with orgasmic results.

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By Carol Lloyd

June 7, 1999 | 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.

Also Today The academics who came to dinner Two professors plan a dinner party, aiming for the highest level of ennui. But one of them has an ulterior motive.

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.

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