I invent:

خانم مارگاریت عزیز؛
دیشب کتاب شیدایی لل اشتاین تان را خواندم. با همه ی احترامی که برای رمان هاتان قایلم نمی توانم از این بگذرم که چندان چیزی از درونیات مردها نمی دانید. قبول دارم؛ ما مردها از شما پیچ و تاب کمتری داریم. اما دیگر نه آن قدر که سبک سرانه با شخصیت های مردتان برخورد کنید. نه این قدر که شخصیت مردتان توی روز روشن رفتارها و واکنش های بی ربط داشته باشد. کجای دنیا مرد از به هم خوردن آرایش صورت و موی زن این قدر دقیق حرف می زند. کجای دنیا مردها این قدر منفعل و بی خاصیت هستند که دوتاشان اصلا نباشند، یکی شان اصلا توی دور نباشد، آن یکی هم که هست بیشتر یک زن باشد تا مرد. حیف این داستان خوب و تغییر پیاپی و معرکه ی راوی ها نبود؟ نمی شد مردها را با همان ضعف های خودشان، که کم هم نیستند روایت می کردید؟ خاطرخواه نوشته هاتان هستم، خودتان هم می دانید؛ اما دیگر گند نزنید به خاطره ها.

The displacement brought on by conjecture and uncertainty -- what does any other person truly think or feel? how can we know? -- moves this smoothly out of the actual and into the metaphysical. Beautifully, destroyingly. Duras' prose is a tension system of concepts in deadly suspension, but this one seems to occur at a pivot-point. Five years later, of Destroy, She Said, Duras would say something like "I'm so sick of plots, all the telling what happened, I can't stand it anymore" and proceed to continuously strip away and refine her systems into gleaming singularities. Many of them, at least. Not that she didn't apply a rigorous minimalism to plenty of earlier works as well, but there were also clear actions and plot movements in stories like 10:30 on a Summer's Night, and here, where scenes repeat with the full force of any of her constructions, while interacting in a larger, more elaborate system. The early chapters create an inciting conflagration and then analyze it into obscurity and shadow, an obscurity amplified by distance of interpretation. Then time and perspective shift into a greater immediacy (with its own ambiguities) and a series of mounting aftershocks that never bring a release from the tightening tension-coils that grip every word.

Here, just listen:

What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. She has no memory, not even an imaginary one, she has not the faintest notion of this unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she has to do, that it would always have meant, for her mind as well as her body, both their greatest pain and their greatest joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe--since I love her--that if Lol is silent in daily life, it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would have been hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. It would have been impossible to utter, it would have been made to reverberate. Enormous, endless, an empty gong, it would have held back anyone who wanted to leave, it would have convinced them of the impossible, it would have made them deaf to any other word save that one, in one fell swoop it would have defined the moment and the future themselves. By its absence this word ruins all the others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh. How were other words found? Hand-me-downs from God knows how many love affairs like Lol Stein's, affairs nipped in the bud, trampled upon, and from massacres, oh! you've no idea how many their are, how many blood-stained failures are strewn along the horizon, piled up there, and, among them, this word, which does not exist, is nonetheless there: it awaits you just around the corner of language, it defies you--never having been used--to raise it, to make it arise from its kingdom, which is pierced on every side and through which flows the sea, the sand, the eternity of the ball in the cinema of Lol Stein.

“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?”

“‘I don’t understand what’s happening.’
‘ it wouldn’t change anything.’”

a couple of beautiful moments but i wish they weren’t so rare.

Certes, c'est joliment écrit mais je n'ai absolument rien compris à cette histoire...

Avorrit de l’hòstia. Doneu-me Dubliners de James Joyce o qualssevol de l’Esith Wharton.

Marguerite Duras more like Marguerite Dur-à-lire am i right ladies

It’s always kind of disheartening when you find yourself really not enjoying a book that, on paper, you know you should love. All of the thematic significance of projecting personality and history onto an empty vessel, the enigma and inaccessibility of the title character, the cool perspective shift once you realize who’s narrating... these are all great elements to a book that is ostensibly about all these things. But much like the character of Lol V. Stein herself, I find that this book is an impenetrable nothing box that looks good from the outside and any interpretations of its inner life reflect more on the interpreter than the novel itself. This is a book that I can only enjoy in metatext - I like reading about the book, but the book itself was a horrendously boring slog that only contained trace elements of the themes I had read verbose thinkpieces on. There is no narrative substance, only ethereal navel gazing of the most mind numbing quality. I feel like there is some stylistic or artistic genius under all of these layers of tedium but either I’m not smart enough to access it or I was so put off by the wafer thin plot and pretentious, overly moody prose that I didnt bother to go looking for anything below the surface.

This is the third Duras book I’ve read and it is easily, far and away my least favorite. I wasn’t too hot on The Lover either, but I loved La Vie Matérielle- i think her style of writing is really better suited to fragmented memoirs than to narrative fiction.

مهمترین مزیت کتاب سبک و قالب نوشتاری آن است.
ترکیب ظریف واقعیت و خیال ، جابجایی راوی‌ها و زاویه دید باعث پیچیدگی در خواندن و فهم داستان میشود .
کسانی که به این سبک نوشته‌ها و مسایل روانشناختی علاقمند باشند این کتاب را دوست خواهند داشت.
نکته عجیب و آزاردهنده اسم شخصیت اصلی است که اکثرا (لول بعضا، لولا گاها، لولا والری اشتاین و ... گفته می‌شود که در کنار نوع روایت کمی باعث تشتت و سردرگمی کتاب و خواننده خواهد بود.

Le livre est court mais j’ai ramé…
C’était en même temps très beau et en même temps j’avais l’impression que c’était pas du tout fluide ??
Il ne se passe pas grand chose et je pense qu’il faut apprécier la contemplation du personnage ( j’étais pas dans ce mindset malheureusement)

Young Lol Stein is jilted by her fiancé for an older woman and the whole book is formed around this idea of how an impactful event can change the course of a life and how the memory of a single moment can be carried around for years, eroding and enslaving the mind. The story is cleverly written and heavy on ambiguity and the eponymous character, made up of retellings, rumours and biased narratorial observations, remains distant and uncertain. On the line between sinister and heartbreaking, just how I like it.
3.5

I didn't manage to get into this book, it was just too opaque. I never understand what is that exactly that happen to this young woman then and what exactly is going on many years after, at the time of narration. The language is one thing that really saves this book. If you completely forget about the actual story, it is a beautiful exercise in using the words for a wonderful meditative description of characters, situation and landscapes. However, that wonderful exquisite sketches never worked to get into the whole picture for me. The characters are half written, some details are sharp and well defined, while the rest is a blur of half guesses and broad strokes generalities. Same with the events of the story, it is as if you are looking at some time flashes, completely missing the whole thing. This sometime can create the prefect layout for the mystery or thriller, but in this case it just too frustrating. i quickly lost interest in Lol Stein or her love life or her emotional inner turmoil.

به گمانم من هم قصد ندارم علیه پیش‌پا‌افتاده‌گی‌ی مرگ‌زای خاطره‌ی لُل.و.اشتاین مقابله کنم. می‌خوابم.