[HPforGrownups] A recommendation

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 177708

From: eggplant107 <eggplant107 at hotmail.com>
>For all those suffering from Harry Potter withdrawal now that the last
>book has been published I suggest you read a wonderful novel about
>magic called "The Prestige" by Christopher Priest. It's absolutely
>first rate! They made a movie out of the book and the movie may be
>even better than the book.

Bart:
The movie was certainly different from the book, although it had more to do with art than magic. As someone who was quite knowledgeable about the history of stage magic, I was asked by my wife numerous questions about things mentioned in the book. When I admitted that I had never heard the term "the prestige" in reference to stage magic, I felt MUCH better when I heard an interview where Christopher Priest stated that he made up the usage of the term. Which just goes to show you that if you claim to be an expert in something, and you don't know the answer to a question, it is better to admit that you don't know, rather than to try and bluff your way through. Nobody knows EVERYTHING about a subject. 

On the other hand, the book version of the Prestige brings up a problem that the movie version avoids, which, by strange coincidence, is a theme that is very important in the Harry Potter novels, yet annoyingly disregarded by JKR: What is a soul? In the final two books, and, by implication, the first five, the idea of souls is extremely important, yet there is no attempt to define what it means. This is notable in the Harry Potter novels, as the soul is treated as a concrete thing, actually separable from the body. 

There's an old philosophical puzzle. You take a ship. You remove a board from it and replace it with a new board. You continue to do this one board at a time, until every board on the ship has been replaced with a new board. Then, you take the old boards, and reconstruct the ship with them. The question is, "Which one is the original ship?"

In Harry Potter, the question is not only "What is a soul?", but, "What is the atom of the soul?" 

Did anybody else notice that diary Tom seemed to have a bigger soul piece than Morty did? 

Bart