Ang Lee’s version of LIFE OF PI (2012) is beautiful to look at but didn’t work as well for me as I’d hoped. The story of an eccentric young “Catholic Hindu” (“I feel guilty before thousands of gods.”) trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger feels very different when I can actually see the tiger and the trackless ocean and that gave it a very different feel. Still worth seeing though. “My father was right—Richard Parker wasn’t my friend.”
AD INFINITUM: A Biography of Latin and the World It Created by Nicholas Ostler looks at how Latin rather than say, Etruscan or Gaelic became first the lingua fraca of Europe. Ostler unsurprisingly finds that the military power of Rome (and the Romans’ fondness for settling retired soldiers throughout the outlying provinces, giving Latin some speakers everywhere) and then of Christianity (which originally embraced Latin as a vernacular easy-to-understand alternative to Greek) gave Latin a standing that subsequent shifts in history couldn’t erase (with exceptions—an English plague may have wiped out enough Latin speakers that Anglo-Saxon moved in). Ostler shows how the same reverence that led to Latin surviving as a language for intellectuals had the side effect of freezing it in place so that the Latin of two millenia ago became the default setting (which led to glorifying Cicero as the Ultimate Latin Master). Dryer than Ostler’s Empires of the Word, but still interesting.
HARROWING THE DRAGON is a collection of Patricia McKillip short stories ranging from a look at what happened the morning after Romeo and Juliet ended (“Did he break into his tomb and stab her when she was already dead?”), a quest for wealth that encounters “The Lady of the Skulls” (which works even though anyone can see where it’s headed) to a reworking of Beauty and the Beast (“The Lion and the Lark”) among others. Not all successful, but as a McKillip fan, I was satisfied.
THE TRIALS OF FALLEN ANGELS by James Kimmel, Jr. has a dead lawyer learn her job in the afterlife will be to help defend the lives of the recently departed in Heaven’s courts, which forces her to question the nature of justice and the forgotten circumstances of her own death. This was the attorney author’s attempt to work out his own thoughts on the balance between Legal Justice and Christian Forgiveness, but the result fell flat for me. Admittedly lengthy, literary scrutiny of people’s day-to-day lives isn’t something that I go for, but some books, such as Fifth Business, have the flair to make it work. Not this one though (the deeper philosophical issues didn’t do it for me either—this was about as effective as Defending Your Life).
