Dear Reader,

A few nights ago, I had a sudden burst of anxiety at 3 am. As I gorged on cheese in front of the open refrigerator to soothe it, I had a vision of myself as Agneta from the recent Netflix comedy, Je m’appelle Agneta. Based on the superhit novel by Emma Hamberg, the movie follows a Swedish woman, Agneta (Eva Melander), who had lost herself in the rut of middle age, a soul-sucking job of stamping forms, a dysfunctional relationship with a fitness freak husband, and an unrequited longing for everything French, especially cheese, till she finds a job as an au pair to a “little boy” in Provence.

The “boy” turns out to be a 70-something, suspenders-wearing, eccentric gay man from Sweden, Einar (Claes Månsson), who lives companionless in a crumbling monastery where he once held boisterous parties with his lover and artists. The house is still chock-a-block with the paraphernalia of that past life—erotic paintings, garish curtains, costumes, sets, a life-sized papier-mâché tiger. Einar regularly shouts invocations to his libido, imploring it to return. An indomitable rebel, he inspires Agneta to “moult”, shedding her dowdy feathers for the flashy plumage of freedom.

Such “rebirth” narratives are common in fiction, of course—remember the schmaltzy Eat, Pray, Love?—and they always seem to take place in Italy, France, India, or Cambodia. What makes Je m’appelle Agneta a bit less predictable is the character of Agneta, whose stomach tyres, lined face, and frizzy hair, along with an immense appetite for French delicacies that she had been forced to hide from her disapproving husband, stay intact in the course of her transformation.

She merely sheds her conventionality and inhibitions—in a sweet scene, she looks at her unglamorous body in the mirror and begs forgiveness for failing to love it as it is. Eventually, she takes off, happy and free, in her lilac lingerie in a lilac field. Melander, who had played a troll (the mythical creature) in an earlier movie and also Richard III on stage, is well cast as Agneta.

But then, we cannot be made to forget that this is a Netflix drama. The Provence-fuelled change in Agneta happens so fast that it beggars belief. Worse, in a reverse process, poor Einar, the agent of Agneta’s change, has to be brought back into the fold of customs by being reminded of his son, whom he had to abandon when he came out. Why can’t we be allowed to be unapologetically hedonistic, I wondered disappointedly, before stopping the movie at the point where Einar tears up about his long-lost son.

The latest novel by the Pulitzer-winning American writer Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco, fares better in this regard. (Set in Italy, it is charmingly picturesque, but I hope it is never taken up by Netflix.) Its narrator is a young American gay man who finds his first employment as an archivist at a decaying villa in a quaint Italian village in the Tuscan hills. His chief job is ostensibly to catalogue the curiosities (“collection of books, objects, art such as a Picasso”) of the country house, but, as he soon finds out, it effectively entails playing handyman to the owner, a 92-year old flamboyant diva, Lisabetta, or Coco, or the Baronessa. In her villa, nothing is but what is not, but this the narrator, whom the Baronessa calls Giovedi although that is not his real name, will find out only towards the end, after many stumbles in the dark.

Villa Coco—both the novel and the country house—is slightly insane, and I loved this muchness. Stolid Giovedi, from Washington, D.C., with his training in sorting and recording, is tailor-made to bring out the capricious disorder of old Europe. Seen from his eyes, everything seems delightfully off kilter—starting from the cunning Baronessa, her haphazard collection of knick knacks (including a piece of a wall with an Arabic inscription), and her staff, drawn from Lebanon to Sri Lanka, to a stone marten preying on the chickens and the very language (Italian, with bewildering variations) that they all speak.

Giovedi finds himself thrown into the deep end of the pool, but the point is that he has it in him. Hidden behind his ordered exterior is a core of creative chaos, a willingness to depart from rules, that exactly matches Villa Coco’s madness. This potential has its most apparent expression in his sexual affiliation—the Baronessa recognises it easily and promptly masterminds an encounter with her (largely) closeted cousin, Giacomo-Giacomo.

At one level, Villa Coco is a gay novel, like Call Me by Your Name, that other recent novel of homosexual love set in Italy that is imbued with the Hellenistic sensibility of the landscape. But Villa Coco does not take itself as seriously as Call Me does. If one of the “moments” in Call Me constitutes the discovery of a bronze arm of a classical Greek statue, in Villa Coco, what Giovedi and Giacomo come upon during a jaunt in Ravenna is Jesus’ penis, depicted not once but twice, in nude portraits in the baptisteries. And although Giovedi must eventually learn to bear the pain of heartbreak, there is nobody to offer him the kind of valuable advice that the enlightened archaeology professor Samuel Perlman gives his grief-stricken son, Elio, in Call Me.

What Giovedi has instead is the Baronessa’s wicked guidance in shaping the shapeless incidents of life into “stories”. He realises later that while he was being buffeted by the wild winds of his Italian autumn, literally and figuratively, the Baronessa, with the fantastic retellings of her own life, was urging him to gain control of his life’s narrative, to heal himself by looking at it from a distance, and then to perform it, for the delectation of both listener and teller. In short, she was asking him to write his own story instead of letting others’ expectations dictate it.

“It is the work of the metallurgist to extract the gold from a clump of earth, and so it was the work of the speaker, I understood at last, to extract and refine, from the admixed events of love and life, the comedy.” The acquired ability to look at life objectively to churn fiction out of it goes hand in hand with the realisation that morality is fiction, too. Looking inside him, Giovedi finds that he was never moral, “only organized”, and this gives him a kinder view of the Baronessa’s chicaneries.

Ultimately, Villa Coco is a novel about the creative process, about the alchemy of the mind that transforms life’s dross into the gold of art. But all this comes couched in irreverent comedy. Since American literature is not known for its comic potential, Sean Greer’s works leave a mark.

Villa Coco is a perfect read for Pride Month. It is a novel of same-sex love that doesn’t centre the love and so, “normalises” it, presenting it as one of the myriad aspects of any life.

Given the number of Pride Month-related books that have been published this year in India alone, one would like to believe that we, too, have started treating homosexuality as an usual way of being. Maybe we have—only the uncles and aunties on Whatsapp and in the Delhi power corridors are not aware.

In the Frontline essay, “Pride without Prejudice”, Amritesh Mukherjee traces the genesis of homophobia in India while examining the works of two early modern writers—Ismat Chughtai and Pandey Bechan Sharma “Ugra”—who dared to question it. Chughtai uses sly indirection and Ugra pointed satire to analyse the social mores stigmatising not just homosexuality but also any assertion of individual freedom.

As a married woman in her 40s spurned by her husband, Begum Jaan in “Lihaaf” is a social reject. For a while, she tries to compromise. Finding only misery there, she rebels. Begum Jaan “comes out” not when Rabbu starts pleasuring her, but on the day she decides to live her life to the fullest, on her own terms. Like Agneta, she moults, and like the Baronessa from Villa Coco, she scripts her own story. Read Mukherjee’s essay here.

We will again go on a ramble down zigzag ways in a fortnight’s time.

Till then,

Anusua Mukherjee

Deputy Editor, Frontline