16 April, 2008

Alzheimer’s Tales

The line of the day comes from Jai Arjun Singh, who writes about U, Me aur Hum:

This is two bad movies for the price of one.

Total VFM for Bollywood fans, in other words. Read his full review; I don’t think I’ll be watching the film now.

The greatest narrative involving Alzheimer’s, by the way, surely has to be Alice Munro’s masterpiece, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” I read it for the first time recently in an anthology of love stories put together by Jeffrey Eugenides, and agree with his description of it as “nearly impossibly good.” I’ve never read a short story that has moved me so much—or been so instructive about the art of writing. It’s a pitch-perfect story, right from the way she introduces the characters in that brief first section, to the dialogue-writing and understated story-telling, to the way she wraps it up. (The New Yorker version of the story is subtly, very subtly, different from the one in the book, and even that was instructive for me—one of the things that blew me away when I read it in the book, the absence of quotation marks in just one very apt piece of direct quotation in the story, isn’t there in the magazine version.)

It’s more than 11,000 words, so I suggest you go to it when you have the time, and read it slowly.

PS: And oh, Munro’s story was made into a film. I don’t think that would be up Devgan’s street, though.