On the surface, Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is about a bunch of tangled relationships. At the centre is Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a man who’s comically deluded about a vast number of things in his life. He’s sleeping with smart and sexy Georgie, a young academic who pretends to be much freer and easy-going than she is actually is. His wife Antonia is beautiful and elegant. Overall, he’s quite smug. Except, all kinds of things are going on around him that he’s unaware of, and as the novel progresses and more characters enter the picture, it’s hard to keep track of who’s fucking whom. So I can imagine the poor man’s bafflement.
But of course there’s much more to this than sexual shenanigans. The book is really about power and information, how closely the two are related, how they are exchanged between humans, and how quickly, surreptitiously and unexpectedly these exchanges can flip lives around. There are also huge Freudian subtexts with Oedipal instincts and incest forming an important part of the relationships. The book’s also extremely funny in bits. Murdoch uses irony and farce to deal with Martin’s predicaments and despite the fact that she touches on infidelity, childlessness, depression and suicide, the book is quite entertaining. I would recommend it for a lazy afternoon. It’s quite a romp.
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Phyllis Bose did an incredible job bringing Gertrude Stein alive yesterday at Ranga Shankara. Her dramatic monologue Gertrude ran for nearly two hours. It had a simple set dominated by reproductions of famous paintings done by Bose herself and there was little movement. Yet she managed to hold interest. Part of the credit must go to the script, carefully woven together from Stein’s own texts and notes but a lot of it was the energy and intimacy she brought to the telling. The focus of the script was Gertrude’s famous friendship with Picasso but there was lots of other stuff in there–insights into Leo Stein (Gertrude’s brother) and Alice Toklas (her partner), anecdotes about the Saturday Salons, and Stein’s views on life and art. Bose was funny and convincing and, quite often, transporting. It was a pleasure.
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Afterward, some of us went to Koshy’s where among other things, we talked of how the place elicits such extreme reactions from people. Some love it and others just don’t take to it at all. Often, the same things about it bring out such diverse reactions — the ancient and faintly dingy air of the place, the lacklustre furnishings, the lack of general hipness, the sense that someone built it a long, long time ago and then forgot to do anything for it ever again. This time-warped air is exactly what some of us love about it. It lets us feel we’ve stepped into a different world, a world where things never change. It makes us feel secure. Also, the sheer variety of human type and activity at these tables — people talking, staring, drinking, gorging, playing some board game, having meetings, sharing quizzes, discussing art — is terribly interesting. Some people like these things. Others don’t. Everyone likes the potato smileys though.
As an aside, Gertrude talked about identity and memory and what happens to them in the face of eternity. I think Koshy’s was rather apt in the circumstances.
This is a picture I took some time back of the place.
