Frozen Assets ~or~ Musing upon Viewing The Grand Budapest Hotel and Reading Wodehouse*

My husband and I recently passed an evening by sharing a much-needed bottle of red, eating pate, and watching the latest Wes Anderson offering, “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”  Our little family had recently gone through a harrowing time from which we had emerged victorious, and our souls were deeply in need of soothing.  We could not have selected a better film to foot the bill.  Wes Anderson has been a favorite of mine for a while, although his last two films have really sealed the deal for me.**  There is something about his mannered, whimsical, melancholy style of storytelling that appeals to me on a primal level.  Regardless of where an Anderson film is set, be it in New York, India, or a fictitious Eastern European country named after a brand of vodka, there is always a similar feeling that for me is akin to plunging into a particularly delightful bath.

While I was reading Frozen Assets***, I discovered that the same could be said of Wodehouse.  Only a couple of characters have appeared before.  For the most part, we are greeted with a host of new people trying to cope with the muddle that is life.  Still, I could expect witty rejoinders from the smart, sane young man and hijinks from his rowdy friend.  This pattern dances all over the woks of Wodehouse.

Although the repetition might not appeal to all, I find it almost comforting, a panacea for life.  The years since I began this project in 2008 have been oddly action-packed.  This period has seen me experiencing my life’s highest highs and lowest lows (the same can, perhaps, be said for the banking industry as well).  Moreover, as I steadily progress into middle age, I am realizing that Change, far from being on occasional visitor, is my constant bedfellow.  While it is gratifying watching my contemporaries come into their own, it is painful to witness the decline of some of my older friends.  People who were a fixture at every gathering are now no longer with us.  Even though there are new, delightful people popping up, things will never be quite the way they were.  One wonders if they ever were that way to begin with.

So it is times like these that I see nothing wrong in plunging into Wodehouse.  Perhaps the glorious familiarity is an element of what made him so popular during his life.  The twentieth century was filled with nothing but Change (as the inhabitants remind us again and again).  His readers suffered two world wars, a massive economic depression, and those free-loving hippies.  Many people probably needed to dip into a world when the outside presented too many unpleasant surprises.  As I write this, I am sitting in a train that has been beleaguered by this historic winter, and I think that humanity will always need its little escapes into worlds that might never have really existed, but feel like they almost could. 

*Read March 2015

**I have similar feeling about Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Minghella.  A former inhabitant of this list was Woody Allen but, unfortunately, I am too conflicted about him.  I have similar feelings about Roman Polanski.

***Given that the world is engulfed by snow, I thought that this title would be appropriate.