Sample paragraph: "Lol dreams of another time when the same thing that is going to happen would happen differently. In another way. A thousand times. Everywhere. Elsewhere. Among others, thousands of others who, like ourselves, dream of this time, necessarily. This dream contaminates me." The three-star rating is not for readability.

Loved it! Maybe as much or more than The Lover (I have to reread to decide I think, and I plan to soon). Nobody but her can break my fragile tiny heart in a single precise sentence while also making my head spin with crazy formal experiments. This entire book revolves around Lol but we only see her through the perspective of a character who admits he’s just making up all the stuff he doesn’t remember/wasn’t present for. Constantly jumping around in time and perspective and going back and forth between real and imagined events, it’s definitely a lot tougher to follow than her later work, but I think it just adds to the strange, sorta elusive beauty of it all. Nobody writes more gorgeous, devastating prose than Marguerite!!!

so there's this chick Lol Stein, a real blank broad, gets ditched by her cougar-lovin' fiance. bitch goes crazy, but the quiet kinda crazy, the kinda crazy you keep to yourself. girl gets married to some musician type. years later, she's a mother of three, living in her old town, and she gets wrapped up in her hottie best friend's life. the best friend is busy giving it up to this prick, a dapper don who works with her husband at the local hospital. Lol gets obsessed with the douchebag. some boring get-togethers happen. Lol spends some time watching the hotel room where the two are busy banging it out. mr douche spends some time wondering what is up with Lol. finally Lol and the ever-curious prick take a long-assed train trip to the place where Lol was first ditched years ago. they sit on the beach a while and talk some bullshit. finally, they bone. the end.

so there is an empty vessel. her name is Lol Stein. some say her mind became bent when she was betrayed by her lover; others say her mind was always a blank. Lol is a being who has let form define meaning; she has built her life around ideas such as what should a house and home look like? and how should a wife act, how should a scorned lover feel? Lol begins to be obsessed with her friend's affair... she wants to watch where the two lovers go, she wants to be a silent witness to their acts, she wants to find meaning in the forms of their passion. she wants their passion to fill her. in turn, her friend's lover becomes obsessed with her... he wants to understand what lies beneath that glassy surface, he wants to see his passion reflected upon it. is the nature of their different obsessions simply to be obsessed with the idea of an obsession? is that the nature of passion, of obsession... form eventually becoming meaning?

so there is a french writer, Marguerite Duras. her novels are not written in the classic literary form; her works are a part of the Nouveau roman - they are anti-tradition. her novels reject such standbys as narrative, characterization. her novels take the details of the world, the form of her characters' actions, and centralizes them so that these details, these descriptions of form, become the meaning itself. in her focus on these physical details, on the physicality of actions, she could possibly be considered a sensual writer. and yet this distance, this separation of incident from emotion, this focus on dividing intellectual contemplation from emotional reaction, makes her works an often clinical, alienating experience. ironically enough, her novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein is ostensibly about passion and voyeurism and the nature of love, the meaning of obsession, the traps and tricks of perspective and point of view. it is a passionless rendering of the various forms of passion.

so there is a reviewer, mark monday, a shallow kind of guy, one with an automatic bias against the intellectualization of sensuality. he finds it distasteful, hollow, unreal. even worse, he finds it to be Not Hot. perhaps he is merely symptomatic of gender essentialism at its most prosaic - a man who responds to visual, sensory outputs like all men supposedly do - the kind of guy who wants visceral activity, sensual description, the kind of dude who is intimately familiar with the pornographic appeal of the extreme close-up detail. he wants it to be real. and so he rejects Duras' frosty attempt to deconstruct the nature of passion and obsession. it leaves him cold.

so there is this guy, Mark M_____, he's rather an intellectual sort. he is a thinker. one of his favorite films is Hiroshima Mon Amour, written by Marguerite Duras. he admires the film's ability to position two living, breathing characters as - eventually - something both less and more than human... as archetypes for all lovers, for all individuals seeking meaning in escape, in passion, in the forms that meaning takes, within the at-times obliterating, all-encompassing physicality of each other's arms. he admires Duras' distance. he enjoys her lack of reliance on traditional narrative, plot, and characterization. in particular, he appreciates how, in books like The Ravishing of Lol Stein, the reader can literally pick any random page and, reading that page, understand the meaning of the entire work. each detail is symptomatic of the whole. he loves that.

so there was this bookish kid, Mark, who worked in the a/v department (of course) while going to school at ucsd. one evening he was in charge of a special screening of the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, for a class that he was in. unfortunately, Mark was high as a kite and got the reels mixed up... so the viewing audience saw the first part of the film first, the third part of the film second, the second part of the film last. there was not a single complaint from the audience. in class the next day, the students discussed the film - and there was no mention of a narrative breakdown, of a mix-up in reels. the purpose of the film remained clear for the students. each detail within the film distilled the meaning intended by the filmmakers. the narrative order was inconsequential. content did not drive form. characterization was unnecessary. plot was meaningless. meaning was present in each part of the film. each part was a whole.

so there was this book, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. it dealt with passion and obsession, and the forms they take, and the meaning of those forms. it dealt with those subjects intellectually, objectively, without heat or emotion. it showed no interest in rendering its characters so that they could be understood empathetically. it left me cold. Duras began to seem rather heartless, rather cruel. but after some time, i began to recall Hiroshima Mon Amour, and what i loved about that film. i began to consider the novel again. i contemplated Duras' challenging themes. i started to admire the novel's distance, its alienation from its own topic. and so i grew to understand its frigid appeal, its sensual lack of earthy sensuality.

well, what can i say: sometimes i dig a cold, smart bitch.

The only thing I know anything about is the immobility of life. Therefore, when the immobility is destroyed, I know it.
—Lol Stein

Everybody moved on
I, I stayed there
Dust collected on my pinned-up hair
They expected me to find somewhere
Some perspective, but I sat and stared
right where you left me. Taylor Swift

This is my first encounter with Marguerite Duras and surely it won’t be the last. Much as the protagonist of this story, who by the end of the novel still remains indecipherable, I can’t pinpoint exactly the allurement her prose conveys. The style felt unique and somewhat experimental, though it might be my lack of familiarity with her work. The masterful use of the language is infused in every description and thought.

Lol Stein is a delightful character. Her descend to madness is attributed to a traumatic experience, where she was abandoned by her fiancé; but I would argue this event was more of a detonator of something that was ever-present: there was already something lacking in Lol, something which kept her from being(...)"there."

Upon losing the affection of her loved one, it seems like Lol is cursed to re-live the same scene over and over, it doesn’t just feel like a latent memory, but something that keeps happening for her. She is hoping for some interruption in the endless repetition of her life

The moment her hand was dropped while dancing, she accepted it blatantly. Her madness presents itself differently, than that of other famous mad women, such as Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre, who is defined by rage. Lol is the opposite, she is anesthetized, banned from existence, devoid of thoughts.

Thoughts, a welter of thoughts, all rendered equally sterile the moment her walk was over—none of these thoughts had ever crossed the threshold with her into her house—occur to Lol as she walks

This book has haunted me since I first read it three years ago. I remembered so well the feeling I had while reading this the first time, lethargic and removed from reality, as if a veil had fallen between myself and the rest of the world, the edges of everything having gone soft and blurry, and that same sensation came flooding back as I read a second time. Additionally, this second reading made me slightly restless, not from boredom but from a subtle anxiety emanating from the pages, growing more substantial as the story moves inexorably to its conclusion. The multiple layers disguised by the apparent simplicity of the writing, Duras' lyrical style, and the dreamlike quality that infuses the very pages are part of what makes this so memorable for me. Something about it touches oh so very lightly some dark, inner place while you read, just brushes it enough to remind you what's hidden in the recesses of the mind, passions, and body.

While some have complained that very little happens within The Ravishing of Lol Stein, I vehemently disagree. While there are plenty of "things" that happen - the first meeting, the dinner party, the nights at the hotel, and Lol and Jack's trip at the end - those things all feel as if they aren't even really happening, there's such a dream quality to them. The events have been pared down to almost an outline of a scene, with all the empty spaces filled with the muted, warped inner workings of the characters as presented by the unreliable narration. It's quite easy to look back over the story and have those things slip the readers mind. The true action is in the characters themselves, their stilted interactions and personal motives, the fluid way they react to one another, slipping and sliding past as each changes and responds. That's Duras' focus, what she's presenting to the reader as important. Plenty happens there, more than can be picked up in a single reading, but it's so understated it might be easy to miss.

I love this book so much, and I can't even explain why, not in any satisfactory way. It's simply my response to it, so base and visceral, the twisting in my gut and the way my breathing would break as I read. One of my all-time favorites.

conclusion lol v la folle que tout le monde prend pour une folle mais si la folle est entourée de fous qui sont les vrais fous la folle ou les fous qui la pensent folle ?¿?

ps d’après ma prof: lola est lol n’est pas là donc a c’est lola donc lol c’est lola pas là

کتاب داستان دختری به لُل را روایت می‌کند که در شبی همراه با نامزدش به کازینویی می‌روند. در آن شب نامزدش به زنی مسن‌تر از خودش علاقه پیدا می‌کند و فردایش همراه با آن زن می‌رود و عملا چند هفته مانده به عروسی، نامزدی به هم می‌خورد.
در واقع این داستان روایت‌گر زنی است که بعد از آن فاجعه‌ای که برایش رخ می‌دهد به زندگی بر می‌گردد اما خب طبعات آن فاجعه همچنان بر روح او باقی می‌ماند و وقتی که بعد از ۱۰ سال همراه با همسرش به زادگاهش باز می‌گردد به طور عجیب و مرموزی به فاسق دوستش علاقه‌مند می‌شود.
از نظر داستانی، داستان جالبی داشت اما باید بگم نحوه‌ی نوشتاری داستان و ترجمه‌ی آن، خوندن صفحه به صفحه‌ی این کتاب رو عذاب‌آور می‌کرد تا جایی که نه تنها مکالمات بین شخصیت‌ها و احساساتی که شخصیت‌ها در طول رمان دست‌خوش آن می‌شدند تا حد زیادی غیر قابل فهم بود که حتی پیچش‌هایی که در رمان اتفاق می‌افتاد هم غیر قابل درک بود. به باور من، هم نحوه‌ی نوشتار کتاب و هم ترجمه‌ی آن باعث شده بود که این مشکلات بزرگ در این داستان وجود داشته باشه.
در حالت کلی خوندن این کتاب رو به کسی پیشنهاد نمی‌کنم و بالطبع کتاب‌های خوب زیادی وجود دارند که ارزش وقت گذاشتن برای خوندن دارند.

half of my annotations for this are just circling phrases with question marks. sort of the exact book you'd think you'd read when you take class on duras. some romantic whirlwind drama turns a woman 10 years later (an actual mother) into a full-on voyeurist. classic! this book was far less interesting in terms of its narrative than the little things she weaves in - the fact that the entire novel is this woman's life, narrated by someone who actually barely knows her, for one. also wills' 5-part definition on what "ravissement" really entails. and the "mot-trou" and the dead dog at high noon on the beach is one of the most brilliant subtle clicks in literature, though the feeling it evokes is somehow inexplicable. wtf does it actually mean? no idea! the entire book is inexplicable, and largely just odd. (weird rape? not rape? scene at the end?) the most interesting bits are only scattered here and there, the narrator is so off-putting and lowkey just creepy, and the structure/writing so jarring that this is far far far less pleasant to read than to discuss. the discussion is rather interesting, however.

Tur att bokklubben finns för jag fattade väldigt lite när jag läste

Does anyone write like Marguerite Duras anymore? With her daring? Would they be published if they did? There's no one-line marketing pitch for what she does. But what she does is - to me - mesmerizing, embracing the risk that the reader might not comprehend her leaps of understanding, and finding fresh language for her discoveries. I adore her sentence by sentence, even in translation. On page 6 a woman is described as having, "... a dazzling pessimism, a smiling indolence as light as a hint, as ashes." We're in Marguerite's world now, charged with insight and mystery, where the plot is a working out in life, over time, of an instance of trauma. Not by conventional analysis, of course, but by the currents of erotic passion. This is not like other worlds, and is only slightly affected by the nuts and bolts of our days, but it is going somewhere, arriving somewhere. The end is satisfying, its truth both strange and recognizable. And along the way, the language is all Duras'; the world it lit differently.

The Ravishing of Lol Stein is a Nouveau Roman love story, and those who are familiar with her work will know she writes in a stark, minimal style, with short sentencing, but done in a most profound way. There are three main viewpoints, looking in from the outside: yes it's a tale of love, but also a voyeuristic mystery, and a nostalgic trip down memory lane.
Who is the person behind the mystery voice that’s narrating The Ravishing of Lol Stein? That's one of the first things I asked myself, as the story focuses almost entirely on the passions of the central characters and on the narrator’s attempts to understand the history of the enigmatic Lol. Stripped of climax and denouement, the story elevates memory and sexual tension over physical action.
Lol Stein, is a reserved young woman, engaged to wed but at a ball, her love abandons Lol for a mysterious older woman, Lol is left in the hands of friend Tatiana to help comfort her. Later in a state of depression Lol meets a man, John Bedford, who is immediately intrigued by her, hence, they fall in love, start a family and move away. After ten years they return, but yearning for past sorrows grips Lol, who takes to meandering long walks to ponder on her heartbroken youth and reminisce about that tragic night when all was lost. After time she would take to following a woman she recognized, which would lead her to another man whist spying in a hotel window; but as Lol takes to voyeurism, unknown to her, the narrator is also following.
With a deft and slender touch each page feels like you are in the presence of a wondering ghost, and with some hauntingly beautiful sentences. I've read most of her fiction, and this one I feel the most affection for.