Persuasion

At her insistence we saw The Lake House tonight. The best moment or scene and the only one I could vividly remember from the movie is how Keanu Reeves ran with a copy of Austen's Persuasion in his hand trying to return it to Sandra Bullock who was already on the train. Fate had it they won't meet eye to eye because they 'exist' two years apart.

How do you hold on to someone you've never met? That seemed to be the movie's central theme, another is that of waiting and lost chance.

It's an utterly sappy, feel-good movie and I forewarned M that I'd fall asleep in the theater. Lol. Thank goodness I didn't as I was trying to recall the novel Persuasion I read donkey years ago. It was one of the many A level literature texts my brain was damaged on and The One I certainly could not relate to. You can say that I could handle Blake, Wordsworth, Johnson, Coleridge, and Shakespeare but never Austen and her female internalisations. How to, right? I was like 17 or 18 and all doofus back then.

I knew the book is essentially a comedy of manners -- a work in which the characters must negotiate a complex code of conduct in the Austen social milieu in order to survive, much less achieve their ends. Austen's narrative sparkles with wit, humour and cutting remarks and astute human observation. But the understanding stopped there and I was only content to scratch the surface.

Anne Elliot, the heroine of Austen's last novel had let the love of her life get away because she was persuaded by a trusted family friend that the man she loved wasn't an adequate match, social stationwise, and that Anne could do better. The novel opens some years after they broke up with Anne assuming a certain bleak, neurotic, august and resigned outlook in life. This is just Austen's charming way of saying Anne hadn't get laid for a very long time.

I think I'll dust off my Austen collection tomorrow. Having read Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, I still think Persuasion kicks ass!