Long piece on Duras being mulled over at present.

En determinado punto de la historia me he perdido. Al comienzo pensé que el libro quizá podría gustarme, pero me equivoqué.

Dobro opisano ludilo, ali me nije zaokupilo (što možda nije loše), pa zato 3⭐️!

In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?

This novel strangely struck me as Australian. It is certainly comfortable and entitled. There are open spaces, contemporary convenience and a dearth of worry. What whirls in the wake is narrative. A middle class teen is abandoned by her fiancé. The psychic damage is absolute--yet politely understated. A decade later she has a suburban triumph of sorts. She's married well, has three children and seemingly every available advantage. Yet the fissures in her soul clamor for attention, if not redemption. A surrogacy of sorts ensues. One that was likely shocking for readers of the last century. It is all too complacent in its indolent destruction for my taste. Everything is muted, save for her husband's practicing the violin and the sound of voices from the next room. The rye fields outside the hotel are placed without emotion nor the unruly. Nature appears to have passed on this destination. There are passages which practically beg for empathy and yet reliance on artful dialogue didn't allow for either elevation or immanence. One of the protagonist admit to being indifferent to nearly everyone, I can relate, given the white drone of my reading. There was little to be found in terms of color or music.

Marguerite Duras a la capacité de faire 192 pages pour ce qui n'en mériterait qu'une trentaine. Outre la longueur inutile de cet ouvrage, sa prose (sans doute validée et même acclamée universitairement) au-delà d'être simplement perturbante pour le lecteur, ennuie celui-ci qui peine à continuer et finir sa lecture. Oui il y a un style, et oui c'est probablement avant-gardiste (et avec pas mal d'exemples sur la question de la narration et de l'altérité), mais c'est un livre plus à étudier qu'à lire (et malheureusement pour nous, on ne peut pas faire l'un sans l'autre).

لُل زنی است که رنج را از یاد برده است، خود را هم از یاد برده است… نسیان همین است؛ مثل آب که در دمای زیر صفر و در نسیانِ آب بودن یخ می زند. یخ می زند لل از سکون و سرما.
لُل.و.اشتاین در هم شکسته است از مجلس رقصِ اس.تالا؛ نیز ساخته از همین مجلس رقص است.
تمام زنهای کتابهای من، در هر سنّی که باشند، سرشته از گِل لُل اند، یا شاید هم به نوعی خود از یاد بردگانند؛ موجب شوربختیِ زندگیشانند؛ از کوچه و بازار هراسانند؛ به سعادت هم چشم ندوخته اند. در بین اشخاصِ کتابهای من، سرآمد است لُل – لُلِ کتاب، کتابِ لُل، خیلی خواهان دارد. شوریده عقلی لُل را به گوش همۀ عالم می رسانم.
قصۀ لُل والری اشتاین دقیقاً از وقتی شروع می شود که آخرین مشتریهای کازینوی ت.ییچ قدم به تالار رقص می گذارند. دنبالۀ ماجرا به سپیده دم می انجامد، به دگرگونی لُل.و.اشتاین. مجلس رقص که به پایان می رسد، با فرجام شب، در خواب و خاموشی، قصه هم تمام می شود؛ انگار ده سال گذشته است.
لُل.و.اشتاین شوهر می کند، شهر زادگاهش -اس.تالا- را ترک می کند، صاحب اولاد می شود، زن باوفای عرصۀ زندگی می شود، خود را خرسند و خوشبخت نشان می دهد. بعد هم از پس ده سال جدایی بین او و آن مجلس رقصِ شبانه، بازمی گردد به اس.تالا که زندگی کند. دوست از یاد رفتۀ دوران کودکیش را در همین شهر پیدا می کند، تاتیانا کارل را، همان زنی که تمام شب در مجلسِ رقصِ ت.ییچ همراهش مانده بود، ولی لُل این را هم از یاد برده است. سالدیده است وقتی از کازینو می آید بیرون، روی چرخ معلولین، یا شاید بر تابوتی روی دوش مردان چینی.

Struggled through this early Duras because my experience was tainted by my having read and loved late Duras, when she managed to whittle her prose down to its barest essentials and refined her austere minimalism to its sharpest edge. The violence of late Duras appears here in brilliant flashes, but mostly this felt like a transitional work with a conventional narrative structure, as if Duras was working out how to get where she was meant to be. I loved that the novel revolves around the character Lol Stein as an empty vessel, into which the narrator and the other characters pour their devotion and obsession, shaping her into the forms of their desires. Eventually Duras would strip away all signs of characterisation and plot, to let emptiness take its own form.

Reading this book is like sitting beside a sleepy tranquil lake on one lazy Sunday afternoon. You appreciate the serene surroundings, the chirping birds, the blowing gentle breeze, the scent of the trees mixed with the water. You then see a small boat docked by the lake side and decide to have do some rowing. Unknown to you, there is a lake “loch” monster silently stirring below the lake and at anytime will pop out the water and will eat you alive.

My first book by Marguerite Duras (1914-1996), a French writer and film director. Definitely not to be my last. Her writing is captivating not because of the usual lyrical prose but the short staccato phrases give you that feeling of immediacy and danger. That feeling will make you continuously leaf the pages till the end of the book. You want to know the end and make sure that you are out of the water when the loch monster pops out.

This is a story of Lol V. Stein who at 19 is engaged to marry 22-y/o Michael Richardson, only heir of a rich couple. One night in a ball, Michael meets an older widower, Anne-Marie Stretter. Michael ditched Lol. Hurt and with her heart broken, Lol goes to another town and meets musician Jean Bedford. They get married and bear children. After 10 years, Lol and her family return to the town. Lol meets her former friend Tatiana Karl who now has a lover Jacques Hold but childless. Jacques is the narrator of the story.

The story reminded me of a woman in our island-town who was said to be ditched by her fiancé few days before they were supposed to get married. Since the day she was ditched, she did not get outside the house. She did get down to the lower floor only to bring up water from their water pump. The island-town, even up to now, has no water system. Our family had a well but it is not suitable for drinking. So, me and my brothers were the ones who fetched water from their pump that is located across the back of our house.

I was still very young, or maybe not born yet, when the ditching happened. I only heard the story from my mother (as usual, she knows all the lives of people in the island). As a young boy, whenever I saw the old lady by the stairs or the pump, I used to marvel at her feet: so white, so clean, delicate-looking and thought that maybe that was how my dirty boy feet would look like if I did not go outside the house for the rest of my life. I never had the courage to talk to her, my being a shy provincial boy. However, that old woman sort of became a legend among us boys: a woman who was betrayed by her lover and chose not to show her face to the world for the rest of her life.

We went through all that: we all had our unrequited love or simply ditched by someone who used to love us. How did we react? This novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein has another title depending on the edition: The Rapture of Lol Stein. Yes, she has been hurt that much that she leads an dull but seemingly painless life. The pain of being ditched is inside her but she has, or chooses not to have, no outlet to express the pain. The trauma of losing her lover is something that stays with her forever. Funny thing is that, at first, I thought that "rapture" is the same as "rupture" so I thought that the voyeurism that Lol Stein does in the story is her rupture because of the bottled pain in her heart or her "pocketbook" (if I may borrow the term of Mary Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing)

But that old woman with white clean feet? When half of the town got burned in 1984, she had no choice but to come out because the house with the pump where she lived and where we used to get clean drinking water? It got burned. Unfortunately, I was not there because I was in college in the city so I did not see how she managed to walk on the street with many people seeing her scared face for the first time.

And all day long during the trip this situation remained unchanged, she was beside me and separated from me by a great distance, abyss and sister. Since I know—have I ever been so completely convinced of anything?—that I can never really know her, it is impossible for anyone to be closer to another human being than I am to her, closer to her than she is to herself, she who so constantly takes wing away from her living life. If there are others who come after me who know her as well, I will accept their coming.
[...]
Who is there now, so near and yet so far, what marauding thoughts and ideas prowl through her mind, again and again, by day, by night, in every light? even right this minute? At this very moment when, holding her in my arms in this train, I might be tempted to think she was no different from any other woman? Around us, the walls: I try to scale them, catch hold, slip back, start over again, perhaps, perhaps, but my reason remains the same, undismayed, and I fall.

Un roman assez déroutant, qui va au fond des sentiments des personnages sans qu'on ne les comprenne jamais vraiment. Jusqu'à la fin je n'aurai rien compris aux désirs et aux agissements de Lol. Il ne se passe pas vraiment grand chose, on essaie seulement de suivre l'intériorité des personnages. Normalement j'adore ces livres qui creusent les sentiments, les pensées des personnages mais j'ai été ici tellement incapable de les comprendre que je me suis finalement ennuyé. J'ai trouvé le livre très long, bien qu'il ne fasse que 200 pages.

Där satt den. Känns stundtals lite Kafka-likt när Duras rör sig i cirklar.

3.5 stars. A novel about the impossibility of grappling with painful memories, of knowing another person, of loving another person, or of knowing and loving oneself. We read the events through the eyes of a narrator whose identity is unclear until around 100 pages into the novel. He is Jack Hold, the lover of a woman named Tatiana, who was once friends with a teenage girl named Lol Stein, infamously spurned by her fiancé in public a decade previously.

Jack's perspective is disturbing and deceptive: he casually mentions how he follows (stalks?) Lol, and how he invents conversations that he did not witness. We are unsure how much of the narrator’s voice is reliable (much like a fiction writer, of course…), either in his description of Lol's past or in his current obsession with her. He encounters Lol (through Tatiana) and begins to pursue her. Or is Lol pursuing him? She claims, quite inexplicably, that SHE was following HIM. But this conversation comes only through the perspective of Jack, so how much can we really believe?

The “ravishing” of the title is not in reference to a physical encounter but a psychological one: the memories and people that seize control of us, and the events that leave us wondering just who we are. To whom do we primarily owe the construction of our own identity: ourselves, or those we encounter who forever leave their stamp on us?