Word: prawer
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...personal partner, in 1961 in Manhattan. The Merchant-Ivory brand ("Well," Ismail said of the billing, "who wants to be known as an Ivory Merchant?") won wide acclaim with their first collaborations, The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah, both written by the other crucial member of their group, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In these fables about a collision?rather, a gentle jostling?of cultures old and new, imperial and indigenous, the team had found their enduring theme...
...Masterpiece Cinema. The epithet was derisive, but it carried an implicit acknowledgment that the noble lineage of stiff-upper literature was now wholly in the care of the boy from Bombay, the kid from Oregon and the Polish-German lady who'd married an Indian. Merchant, Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala were like the servants who'd been bequeathed a ducal castle just as its ramparts were crumbling, its halls haunted by the ghosts of the glory days...
...party over? Ivory without Merchant is like Conan without Doyle, or Lloyd without Webber. But I hope Ivory now 76, and Prawer Jhabvala, 78, continue. Just as Merchant-Ivory ignored the death notices for the movie traditions of craftsmanship and delicacy, and revived them for more than 40 years, it would be appropriate, and heroic, for the surviving partners to go on making fine films about the good manners of sad and complicated people...
DIED. ISMAIL MERCHANT, 68, producer half of the filmmaking team that revitalized and repopularized the literary, elaborately costumed period film; after surgery for stomach ulcers; in London. With director James Ivory (also his life partner) and usually with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the Indian-born Merchant oversaw more than 40 films over five decades, turning classic novels by authors like E.M. Forster (Howards End), Henry James (The Europeans) and Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) into box-office successes. Famous for his relentless, sometimes outlandish efforts to keep costs low (he was known to steal props and grab journalists...
...those of her generation--Desai was born in 1937, only a few years after the likes of V.S. Naipaul and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala--foreignness has itself been a driving theme. The classic Desai figure is the title character of her most propulsive novel, 1988's Baumgartner's Bombay, an old-style German long settled in India who comes into fatal contact with a younger German of the mobile, backpacking generation. Nowadays, when millions are living in places not fully their own, foreignness is nothing to write home about. The characters in Ali's and Lahiri's fiction might...