Subject:	BBC six-part television adaptation beginning on PBS this Sunday ...
Date:	Fri, 20 Jan 2006 13:14:27 -0500
From:	Sandy P. Klein <spklein52@HotMail.com>
Reply-To:	SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To:	spklein52@HotMail.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/arts/television/20blea.html

TV Weekend | 'Bleak House'

A Very Modern Dickens, Still Haunting but Lively

Published: January 20, 2006

"Bleak House" is too good to be homework.

Gillian Anderson plays Lady Dedlock in "Bleak House."

Unfortunately, it is such a fixture on required reading lists that many people forget to read Dickens's novel for fun. J. Hillis Miller's introduction in the old Penguin edition doesn't help: "The novel calls attention to its own procedures and confesses to its own rhetoric, not only for example, in the onomastic system of metaphorical names already discussed but also in the insistent metaphors of the style throughout." (And he gets the girl?)

The six-part television adaptation beginning on PBS this Sunday is a faithful, respectful rendition of the book that does not in the least feel like fodder for a seminar on semiotics at Yale. The series, made for the BBC, is as pleasurable as its tale is grim. It would probably even please Nabokov, who in a college lecture explained: "All we have to do when reading 'Bleak House' is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades."

The story starts at a spine-tingling pace: a young woman cloaked in gray is swept up in a swirl of rain, fog and mud and sped to London by horse-drawn carriage.

[. . .]

It's hard to detect any subliminal messages about Tony Blair's Cool Britannia in this "Bleak House." Mostly it is an overt, loving tribute to Dickens and one of his greatest novels. And it proves Nabokov wrong. In his lecture, the writer insisted that if readers did not experience a "shiver" of pleasure in reading "Bleak House," "then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week."

This video might make even Nabokov's spine tingle a little.