Word: jhabvala
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...introduction to this selection of 15 stories from four earlier books, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala notes the problem that faces all foreigners who settle on the subcontinent: "To live in India and be at peace, one must to a very considerable extent become Indian and adopt Indian attitudes, habits, beliefs, assume if possible an Indian personality. But how is this possible? And even if it were possible--without cheating oneself--would it be desirable? Should one want to try to become something other than what...
...Jhabvala, 59, knows more about the challenges of living and writing in India than she ever meant to learn. Born in Germany of Polish parents and educated in England, she married a visiting Indian architect and went home with him in 1951. Except for this accident of the heart, she writes, "I don't think I would ever have come here for I am not attracted--or used not to be attracted --to the things that usually bring people to India." She was not, in short, a do-gooder, a foreign-service careerist or a spiritual pilgrim. But her European...
...Jhabvala plays such encounters chiefly for comedy, although her pampered foreign women also face the prospect of paying dearly for their delusions. The stories dealing with Indian heroines are more somber. Westerners can decide to surrender to India; natives do not have the choice. In The Widow, Durga has been left comparatively wealthy by her late husband, an old man whose marriage to her was arranged when she was young. Feeling youthful still and strangely restive, she develops a yen for a neighbor boy, who returns her affectionate remarks with the demand that she buy him a motor scooter. This...
...small matter, though. A Room with a View seems to suit the emotional range (and the budgets) available to the Ivory-Jhabvala team better than its recent forays into the works of Henry James did. There is a lankishness about this picture that is both disarming and insinuating. Two cheers, at least, for permitting the past to appear not as a stern lesson but as a delicious irrelevance...
...will ever be tempted to employ terms like that to describe The Bostonians, for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it. There is a certain undiminishable power in the struggle between Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve), all snaky masculine guile, and Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave), representing feminism at its most sternly ideological, for the innocent soul of Verena Tarrant. But Ivory's camera behaves like a tourist trapped meekly behind a velvet rope at a historical reconstruction, and most of his actors seem afraid they might damage...