This post-modern, non-linear comic novel is written in the tradition of Raymond Federman in that the story is probably autobiographical and fanciful. The book is "a love story, a translation of an Indian sex manual, an erotic farce, and a murder mystery." The author writes himself into the plot. Included in the hypertextual story are diagrams and illustrations from the Kamasutra, movie posters, upside-down pages, comic strips, varying typefaces and graduate student essays. The illustrations and cover design were done by Frank Gaard.Amazon.com review Philip Roth has done it. So have Updike and Nabokov. Now Lee Siegel joins the ranks of novelists who write novels that pretend not to be novels at all. Love in a Dead Language, for example, purports to be the work of one Professor Leopold Roth, and comprises both a translation of, and commentary on, the Kama Sutra, as well as the professor's more personal annotations concerning his amorous yearnings for one of his students. Siegel himself appears in a foreword, protesting vigorously that "I would never permit my name to be associated with a book such as this." This squeamishness is understandable when it becomes clear the entire purpose for this translation is to aid Roth in seducing young Lalita Gupta while leading a study group in India. Seduction, betrayal, and eventually death all follow on one another's heels; when Roth rather abruptly dies midway through the "translation," Siegel refuses to finish it and the task is left to a graduate student, Anang Saighal. So now we have yet another author who is not Siegel adding another layer of commentary to both Roth's professional work and his private journals--contradicting, criticizing, footnoting, while at the same time revealing details about his own unhappy life. Though there's plenty of story in Love in a Dead Language--romance, transformation, and even a murder mystery--a magical delight in language in all its myriad forms is at its heart. From the academese of professional papers to the more intimate epistolary communications between friends, colleagues, husbands, and wives (letters between an earlier translator of the Kama Sutra, Richard Burton, and his wife--who later burned the translation--are included), Siegel--or is it Roth? or perhaps Saighal?--covers the gamut. Readers who love complicated plots, soaring language, etymological puzzles, and academic tomfoolery will have a ball with this playful instance of literary smoke and mirrors. --Margaret Prior The New York Times Book Review, Tom LeClair If Love in a Dead Language isn't a free-standing rope, it's a major laughing matter and deserves space on the short, high shelf of literary wonders. From Booklist , May 15, 1999Siegel, a professor of Indian religions, is a minor character in his sly first novel of academic passion gone berserk. Satirizing scholarly discourse, he laces the narrative purportedly written by Leopold Roth, an Indian studies professor, with auxiliary documents, footnotes, and illustrations. He adds further obfuscation in the form of commentary by the graduate student who edited the manuscript after Roth was murdered with a Sanskrit dictionary, an unsolved crime any number of people could have committed. Roth became enamored of India as the child of second-rate Hollywood actors. Naturally, his favorite text was the Kamasutra, and his dream was to have an Indian lover. To that end, he tricked Lalita Gupta, a beautiful Indian American student, into accompanying him to India, with predictably disastrous results. Siegel has demonstrated his literary prankishness in his nonfiction, including Net of Magic (1991). Here he emulates Nabokov in word games and literary ploys, not to mention the naughty love affair between a fustian professor and a duplicitous young woman. Funny, sexy, and surprisingly affecting. Donna Seaman From Kirkus Reviews Siegels sixth book (after City of Dreadful Night, 1995, etc.) is a flat chore, defrauding the reader of an engaging story with dense typographical hocus-pocus and the bland tatter of footnotes, appendices, and an ostensibly saucy theme. The novels structure is distractingly complex. At the core of the text is Professor Leopold Roths translation of the Indian taxonomy of sex, the Kamasutra. Appended to this translation are Roth's commentaries on each section of the work, and contained in them is the vaguely entertaining story of his seduction of Lalita, a Californian undergraduate of Indian descent who is tricked into taking a trip to India with the professor. This tale is intended to illustrate Roth's understanding and practice of the Kamasutras preceptswith Lalita as his object. The plot concludes with Roth's murder; after the death, one of Roths graduate students, Anang Saighal, assumes the thankless task of assembling the uncollected translation into book form, while providing his own footnoted commentary on both the translation and the story already told in the commentaries. A transparently Nabokovian strategy emboldens Siegel throughout. Footnotes and references to the Zemblan language recall Pale Fire, while the seduction theme mimics Lolita: Once I had seen the beautiful Indian girl in the sari with the red bindi on her forehead in my Comparative Phonology class, I threw out the Mao poster, folded up the Chinese flag, and bought a poster of the Taj Mahal and a print of Krishna playing his flute for love- enraptured, dancing milkmaids . . . . Nabokov, though, undergirded his complex constructions with brimming plots and full characters. Siegels counterparts are flat, dull, relentlessly triviala cascade of comments, asides, interpretations, and appendices. Textually dense, erotically lukewarm, and narratively inert: an unrewarding novel, with its inverted pages, computer-screen replications, and transcripts, thats too fascinated with how it looks to concern itself with how it readspoorly, at best." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.