This play is a little more obscure and (perhaps needlessly) complicated than The Real Thing, but it has some lovely monologues that prove once again Stoppard's remarkable gift for putting exactly the right words in the right order.

"Kate: Oh - listen! - The larks think it's daybreak.
AEH: Or the end of the world."

AE Housman is credited with more titles of books and poems than anyone except Shakespeare in the English language; this is his story. He was different and similar to Oscar Wilde, who is a character in the play.

To live with love, love with love, despite love, without love, hoping for love, like the poets of yore, and before. To make their muses immortal while making themselves hollow with yearning. A love that dare not speak it's name, even if everyone allowed it. Today, yesterday, and much before Alexander.

I know I am smarter than I currently feel after reading this play. I've read a number of Stoppard plays, and although I respect them, I have a real hard time liking them,.

La invención del amor del dramaturgo británico, nacido en Checoslovaquia, Tom Stoppard, es una elegante y erudita obra de teatro en la que se tratan diversos e interesantes temas entre los que se destacan 2: el amor no correspondido y la rendición de cuentas al final de la vida. No es un libro para principiantes porque Stoppard nos muestra personajes muy cultivados sosteniendo conversaciones de alto vuelo intelectual, con una riqueza enorme en el uso del lenguaje, ironía, reflexiones, todas ellas muy interesantes y para disfrutar con una lectura lenta. Además, el juego de repeticiones ayuda a darle a esta obra una exquisitez para deleitarse.

Uno de los grandes aciertos de esta obra es que, al dar voz a personajes reales, Stoppard produce unos diálogos de tal calidad que para uno como lector son creíbles y coherentes con el conocimiento que se traía de los personajes. Este es un aspecto muy valioso, debido a que sería muy fácil patinar en esta materia si el autor no tuviera la suficiente investigación o talento para producir estas voces tan acertadas.

Además, esta obra tiene 2 características notoriamente borgeanas a destacar:
*El tema del doble. El protagonista, ya muerto, se encuentra con su yo más joven y sostienen conversaciones memorables, llenas de sabiduría y melancolía. A la manera de «El otro», de Borges.
*La lectura enciclopédica. Stoppard, como Borges, llena la lectura de alusiones, referencias y menciones de otras lecturas, otros escritores, otras culturas, de manera que uno como lector siente ante todo 2 cosas: que se está perdiendo parte importante de la esencia de la obra por no conocer dichas alusiones y que es una lectura a la que se puede regresar cada cierto tiempo y cada vez disfrutar o descubrir algo nuevo, como en el infinito universo borgeano.

t*** INICIO SPOILERS ***t
tSinopsis
A. E . Housman, el erudito profesor de estudios clásicos y latinistas, ha muerto y allí junto a Caronte, en las aguas de la Estigia, presencia un recuento de los pasajes más importantes de su vida y otros que nunca sucedieron en un intento por comprender el papel que Housman a jugado en su paso por el mundo. Stoppard nos muestra varias épocas de la amistad de Housman con Moisés John Jackson y Alfred William Pollard, amigos de vida y compañeros de estudios, y el amor que Housman siente por Moisés, que no es correspondido. Todo esto sucede al mismo tiempo que desfilan otros personajes que se relacionaron con Housman, profesores, compañeros, críticos, escritores que lo influyeron como Oscar Wilde y entre todos sostienen conversaciones de altísimo nivel cultural y reflexiones sobre el mundo, el ser humano, los clásicos griegos y latinos, el amor, la amistad, la inmoralidad, el papel de las universidades, la homosexualidad, entre otros.
Después de todo este repaso, al final, Housman se despide del mundo con resignada y elegante melancolía.

Los personajes: Gran trabajo de Stoppard para la construcción de estos personajes históricos, cuyo comportamiento coincide con lo que se conoce de ellos a través de la bibliografía más próxima. Así mismo Stoppard muestra gran habilidad en el desarrollo de las relaciones entre ellos.
La trama: Más que trama (la rendición de cuentas al final de la vida), lo que tenemos acá son flashbacks de instantes con mucho juego e importancia que encajan perfectamente con las reflexiones que desarrolla el protagonista.
El estilo: Una prosa elegante, llena de alusiones, latinismos, inteligentes reflexiones y debates, que no es fácil de leer. Stoppard también interpone monólogos que se tocan y avanzan tangencialmente en un detalle técnico de calidad.
*** FIN DE SPOILERS***

Un libro muy inteligente y culto, de lectura lenta, al que se debe regresar a medida que se profundice en las materias a las que el lector hace alusión, para disfrutarlo a plenitud.

AE Housman was notoriously reticent, but recently discovered letters reveal the intensity of a friendship begun as a young undergraduate at Oxford, which was to have a profound influence on his poetry and the rest of his life.

- By Tom Stoppard (3 June 2006)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/rev...

you can always tell when someone is writing a book to reassure themselves of their own intelligence

"You want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself … to be shipwrecked together, (to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him – to die in his arms, like a Spartan, kissed once on the lips … or just run his errands in the meanwhile. You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language."
I'M THISCLOSE TO LOSING IT

Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.

Poet or Scholar

Singapore Jade had been insisting that I read this Stoppard play for quite some time, and finally made it impossible for me to put her off by giving me a copy the other day. Plays don't come alive to me until I see them performed, and The Invention of Love struck me, on first reading, as more brainy than acute, more showy than moving. But Stoppard's Housman and Wilde came back to me again and again in the last few days, while I was waiting for the bus, or listening to a friend's chatter, or working out in the SAFRA gym near my house.

The desire to lay down your life for your lover. A desire represented in the play by repeated references to the Theban band, an army made of same-sex lovers, slaughtered by the Macedonians. Housman wants to lay down his life for his love, Moses Jackson, but the latter is straight and does not love him back, and Housman remains closeted all his life. Wilde, on the other hand, gives his life and reputation for his love, refusing to run from standing trial.

The serious Housman. The apparently frivolous Wilde. Housman was a first-year student at Oxford when Wilde was in his final year there. Housman is going to be a scholar of Greek and Latin, Wilde an Aesthete of Life. Housman raises points of linguistic interest in Catallus. Wilde raises witty epigrams quoted around the university. Wilde receives a First in Finals. Housman is ploughed by the Finals because Propertius, his life work, is not on the examination.

You cannot be a poet and a scholar of the first rank; you must choose. The poet's supreme god is beauty but the scholar's ultimate goal is knowledge. In life, as well as career, Housman chooses to be a first-rank scholar. Wilde chooses to be a poet.

The love elegy, like the motor-car and the telephone, had to be invented. Homosexual love had to be invented. Housman decides not to invent homosexual love, but to live a life of permanent longing. Wilde is a self-invention.

Which of the two men lived a better life? What regrets and joys attend each man waiting by the river for Charon?

Funny, whimsical and moving - and literally about the invention of love, the word, the poetry, the meaning. Tom Stoppard is just so clever, and knows so much, yet presents it in such a light and careless way. "Oh yes, I know scads about AE Housman's life of literary criticism - don't you?" Not to mention it was about boylove, and Oxford, two subjects very dear to my heart.

Housman I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way. Betrayal is no sin if it's whimsical.

DID I MENTION IT WAS FUNNY?

Ruskin When I am at Paddington I feel I am in hell.

Jowett You must not go about telling everyone, Dr Ruskin. It will not do for the moral education of Oxford undergraduates that the wages of sin may be no more than the sense of being stranded at one of the larger railway stations.

BECAUSE IT IS.

AEH Confronted with two manuscripts of equal merit, [Franken] is like a donkey between two bundles of hay, and confusedly imagines that if one bundle were removed he would cease to be a donkey.

WITTY AS ... A REALLY WITTY THING.

Chamberlain
t'But this unlucky love should last
tWhen answered passions thin to air.'

Did you send them to Jackson, the ones you didn't put in your book?

AEH No.

Chamberlain Saving them till you're dead?

AEH It's a courtesy. Confession is an act of violence against the offending.

Also? HEARTBREAKING.

Wilde [...] Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography, and biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes. I was said to have walked down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand. There was no need. To do it is nothing, to be said to have done it is everything. It is the truth about me. Shakespeare's Dark Lady probably had bad breath - everyone did until my third year at Oxford - but sincerity is the enemy of art. This is what Pater taught me, and what Ruskin never learned. Ruskin made a vice out of virtue.

Wilde The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bose is what became of me. He was spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. "Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day," and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.

And I loved his Wilde, although ... what he said about 'inventing' the person you love? It made me feel a little uncomfortable, a little too much like that's really true. I don't want that to be true.

“the future perfect i have always regarded as an oxymoron. i wouldn’t worry so much about your monument, if i were you.”

Very hard to follow the classical dialogues if you are dumb like myself. The story of A.E Housman is what I liked. The setting in the river Styx made it all the more sentimental. How will I see my life when facing death?