well, I suppose this counts as an Advent meditation

Somehow, Francis Ford Coppola's production of the Mircea Eliade novella Youth Without Youth slipped by me until eleven or twelve days before the film's release date. I have so often discussed The Forbidden Forest, in which the fantastic element is rather subtle, that I had quite forgotten what a melodramatist Eliade could be in creating baffling convolutions of time, thought, history, and sexuality.

Coppola outdoes Eliade in bringing the book to the screen, and one hopes Variety's thoroughgoing pan of the preview isn't going to turn out to be definitive.

If the paperback edition of the book (with a new foreword by Coppola) sells, I hope Mac Linscott Ricketts gets ongoing translator's rights to royalties. (So many translators don't.) Mac is one of those quintessentially decent human beings who has just kept pushing ahead with translating Eliade's fiction through good times and bad.

Amazing that Wendy Doniger (who I really don't know except as an author and scholar) gave Coppola the novella and he decided to run with it. If, against all expectations, there turns out to be a market for fantasy that incorporates vast tracts of philosophical discourse, we know what projects to pitch next, if not necessarily who to use as an intermediary.