An intriguing read, difficult to review because the story doesn't really follow narrative rules about plot progression or character motivations. I think this is deliberate on the part of the author because the subject is so intimate, so passionate and mysterious. Duras doesn't explain and doesn't analyze the love life of Lola V Stein, who may or may not be crazy. I suspect she is normal, as normal as anyone can be who has been deeply wounded in the first enthusiasm of young love and has chosen to retreat back inside the shell. Also, the title may be a little misleading, there's no actual rape in the novel, other than an emotional one. I think I prefer the "rapture" translation for "ravissement" over the one in the title.

The defining moment of the heroine takes place at a seaside casino, where she witnesses her fiancee come under the spell of another woman, dancing in her arms until sunrise, lost to the outside world. We get a brief glimpse of Lol before this event - as a self sufficient and taciturn highschooler - and a longer story of the aftermath, with Lol as a good wife and mother returning ten years later to the place of her youth. She roams the streets of her hometown, a closed book, absorbing the images of houses and gardens and people until a stranger catches her attention and leads her back to her best friend from school days : Natalie, a witness to her defining night at the casino.

From here the storyline gets mixed, switching madly in point of view from one character to another, with fragments of unfinished dialogue, silences and meaningful looks - illustrating the impulsive nature of our passions, escaping rational analysis and logical explanations. The couples come together and drift apart in a dreamy haze, dancing to an unknown tune, like in a memorable serata where :

sentiment is rife everywhere, people are slipping on that greasy substance

I checked a bit on the wikipedia about Marguerite Duras, and I found out she wrote the script for "Hiroshima Mon Amour" . The book reminds me a little of that movie, of two people from different planets trying to use words and their bodies to communicate, to reach an understanding. I am even more reminded of another film - L'annee derniere a Marienbad - a surrreal experience that defies meaning, that simply exists. I think The Ravishing of Lol Stein is the kind of book that will be different with each re-read, and probably every reader will pick something else from the story, depending on what his / her emotional baggage is.

You can read my review here:
https://burninghousepress.com/2017/07...

“That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.”

Remember that guy who wronged you when you were, like, 17? & you swore to yourself you'd never get over it in a very miss havisham-esque manner? But time passes & you sort of do get over it even if you won't admit it to yourself but you build your identity or lack of identity off that one exact moment of betrayal and everything now is a repercussion of that moment.

To me this is what The Ravishing of Lol Stein is about & the more I think about the book, the more I'm drawn to it.

I can feel a Marguerite Duras fixation coming on.

While fairly impressed with her late novel n  L'amant de la Chine du nordn, I wasn't completely drawn into Duras's milieu until David and I watched Hiroshima mon amour, the 1959 Alain Resnais film for which she wrote the screenplay. To put it bluntly, Hiroshima mon amour blew. me. away. The opening sequence reduced me to sobs, overlaying Emmanuelle Riva's and Eiji Okada's stark, dreamlike narration (a stylized argument, which at times seems almost to veer into poetic verse, about whether or not Riva's character has or has not "seen" the devastation of Hiroshima) with footage of said devastation and of the hospital and museum Riva's character mentions. And the film as a whole raised fascinating questions about authenticity, storytelling, trauma, and the ability of humans to connect and empathize. Since Duras' 1964 novella Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein shares many of these same preoccupations, I thought I would attempt to write about them together, even though I know that I will be overwhelmed with material!

Both Hiroshima and Ravissement, then, are deeply concerned with the extent to which it is (im)possible to step inside another person's experience. In the opening scene of the film, Riva's character (known simply as "elle" or "her") makes a repeated claim to have witnessed the events of nuclear devastation in Hiroshima, not at first hand but through visits to bomb victims in the hospital, trips to the museum, and viewings of the newsreels. As she amplifies on her experiences, speaking in mesmerizing circuits of repeated words, Eiji Okada's character "lui"/"him" occasionally interrupts her to deny her authority: "Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima." ("You saw nothing at Hiroshima.") So did she? It's a complicated question. On one hand, some of her claims are quite radical:

J'ai eu chaud, Place de la Paix. Dix mille degrés sur la Place de la Paix. Je le sais. La temperature du soleil sur la Place de la Paix - comment l'ignorer?

n  I was hot in Peace Square. Ten thousand degrees in Peace Square. I know it. The temperature of the sun in Peace Square - how could you not know it?n

Obviously, this Frenchwoman can only "know" that the temperature in Peace Square reached ten thousand degrees in the way one knows a fact from a history textbook: with her brain rather than her body. Likewise there is a world of difference between visiting an interpretive museum exhibit, even an extremely well-constructed one, and "knowing" an event through first-hand knowledge either personal or cultural. On the other hand, her empathy just as obviously exceeds the theoretical: watching those newsreels and museum exhibits really has imbued her with some part of the horror of the situation. In fact, as a viewer watching the scenes of devastation ourselves, we are in the exact same situation. Resnais and Duras make us question Elle's claims to understanding, even as they put us in an extreme position of identification with her. After all, if I am sobbing as I watch this film (which I was), how can I fully dismiss the power of simulacrums to convey experience? As she herself acknowledges later on, we as outside observers are limited in our ability to both feel and act: "On peut toujours se moquer. Mais que peut faire d'autre un touriste, que justement pleurer?" / "You can always scoff. But what else can a tourist do, but weep?" Later on in the film, Riva's character is possessive about her own traumatic war-time experience; her Japanese lover can listen and feel pain, but he can't truly understand.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, too, questions the ability of any person to tell the story of another's trauma—or even to claim absolute certainty about what that trauma was in the first place. Lola Valerie Stein (self-styled Lol V.) remains a cypher throughout the novella, which is narrated by her eventual lover, Jacques Hold. Jacques meets Lol through another lover of his, Tatiana Karl, an old school friend of Lol's who was present on the night, ten years before, which directly preceded Lol's mental breakdown. Exactly what precipitated this breakdown remains a subject of contention throughout the novella: while it's clear that Lol and her fiancé both met an older woman that night, and that the fiancé left with said woman as dawn was breaking, Lol's emotions at each step of the evening are puzzling, as is her present relationship to the past. For example, Tatiana recalls that for most of the dance Lol didn't seem to mind her fiancé being enamored of another woman, sitting calmly throughout the evening until the couple left the ballroom without her. Was she ever in love with her fiancé? Was she in love with the woman who replaced her in his affections? Was she in love with some mental image of the couple together, and herself as an observer of their love? Was she teetering on the brink of mental disaster the whole time, and this night was merely the straw that broke the camel's back of her mind?

Tatiana is invested in one version of past events, and Lol—uncommunicative, shocky, and prone to telling bizarre, easily-detectable lies—is of little use as a witness. Jacques himself is all too aware of his inability to fathom Lol's inner world; not only was he not present on the famous night of the ball, but Tatiana, who was there, disagrees about whether it's even the crucial event in Lol's past. She feels that Lol has always been missing some crucial component, that her "self" has always been somehow absent, and that the seeds of her breakdown were present since long before the night at T. Beach.

     Je lui ai demandé si la crise de Lol, plus tard, ne lui avait pas apporté la preuve qu'elle se trompait. Elle m'a répeté que non, qu'elle, elle croyait que cette crise et Lol ne faisaient qu'un depuis toujours.

     Je ne crois plus à rien de ce que dit Tatiana, je ne suis convaincu de rien.

n  
n       I asked her if Lol's breakdown, later on, didn't prove to her that she had been wrong. She repeated that no, that she, she believed that this attack and Lol had always been one.

     I no longer believe in anything Tatiana says, I'm not convinced of anything.n

Thus not only do we have competing accounts of what happened inside Lol while she watched her fiancé fall for another woman, we have a debate about whether it even matters. Tatiana and Jacques are also unsure of the degree to which Lol has recovered from her breakdown: the slick surfaces of her immaculately-maintained home and marriage seem to indicate "recovery," yet Tatiana at least is invested in the idea of Lol's continuing malady. And what is that malady in the first place? It becomes clear that Lol is, for some reason and in some way, obsessed with her past, but what is she remembering and experiencing when she thinks of it?

This brings up another commonality between Ravissement and Hiroshima, which is a preoccupation with memory and forgetting, and the pain involved in inevitably forgetting something one had sworn to remember. In the film, Riva's character gestures at this idea with the statement

De même que dans l'amour, cette illusion existe, cette illusion de pouvoir jamais oublier, de même j'ai eu l'illusion devant Hiroshima, que jamais je n'oublierai. De même que dans l'amour.

n  Just as in love, this illusion exists, this illusion of never being able to forget, I had the illusion when confronted with Hiroshima, that I would never forget it. Just as in love.n

But the inability to forget—or more accurately, the ability to never forget, to remember forever, is just that: an illusion. Even as these characters are haunted by an inescapable relationship to their past traumas (to the point where several people identify each other as synonymous with those traumas), what dwells inside them is not precisely "memory" but an ever-changing set of reference points combining past, present, potential and imaginary. When Lol moves back to the town of S. Tahla after ten years away, for example, her memories of the town seem to start out sharp, not having been added to much in the intervening years, but soon they become eroded through frequent applications of new experience.

[E]lle commença à reconnaître moins, puis différement, elle commença à retourner jour après jour, pas à pas vers son ignorance de S. Tahla.

      Cet endroit du monde où on croit qu'elle a vécu sa douleur passée, cette prétendue douleur, s'efface peu à peu de sa mémoire dans sa matérialité. Pourquoi ces lieux plutôt que d'autres? En quelque point qu'elle s'y trouve Lol y est comment une première fois. De la distance invariable du souvenir elle de dispose plus: elle est là. Sa présence fait la ville pure, méconnaissable. Elle commence à marcher dans le palais fastueux de l'oubli de S. Tahla.

n  
She began to recognize less, then differently, she began to return day after day, step by step towards her ignorance of S. Tahla.

      This spot in the world where they say she lived her past grief, this alleged grief, is little by little erased from her memory by her corporeality. Why these places rather than others? Wherever Lol finds herself, it is as though she is there for the first time. She no longer positions herself at the unvarying remove of memory: she is there. Her presence renders the city pure, unknowable. She begins to walk in the sumptuous palace of forgetting S. Tahla.n

Thus being back in her home town erodes Lol's past knowledge of it, just as she seems unable to see again the shapes of her past self and her former fiancé when she revisits T. Beach at the end of the novel. Her attempts to reenact the past with a new cast of characters, and force it to provide her with something that was missing the first time around, are dream-like and fascinating, asking similar questions and evoking a similar mood to the relationship between "Elle" and "Lui" in Hiroshima mon amour. I am eager to read more Duras from this period; where should I start? Moderato Cantabile? L'après-midi de M. Andesmas? Recommendations very much welcome. In the meantime, both Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein and Hiroshima mon amour come very highly recommended.

J’ai pas compris

I really don’t know. I have to reread it. I want to reread it right now, even, but I don’t think I have the energy. The writing in this is very cold and sometimes punishing, in a way? Like it’s short but when you’re done you feel just as tired as the characters are.

n  That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.n
.
3.5

Este libro me sorprendió un montón. La primera mitad me aburrió y me pareció que no tenía verdadera potencia, pero una vez que se deja atrás el pasado de Lol y vamos al presente con Jacques y Tatiana??? Sublime. La narración, la psicología de los personajes, el juego entre lo dicho y lo no dicho (más lo segundo que lo primero). Me encantaría seguir leyendo a Marguerite Duras, y en lo posible en una mejor traducción porque, si bien pude apreciar la lectura, a veces se me dificultaba un poco.
En fin, that's all.

Quand j’ai commencé à lire ce livre la première fois, je n’ai pas pu le terminer. La narration me rendait complètement mal à l’aise. Celle-ci passe régulièrement du ‘il’ au ‘je’ presqu’indiféremment, sans qu’on sache au début qui est ce ‘je’ et qui est ce ‘il’. Au quart du livre environ, on apprend qui est le narrateur. On situe alors un peu mieux les choses, mais comme la folie est toujours au centre de l’histoire, on continue de douter de la réalité du narrateur.

Une fois prévenue de cette particularité du roman, on s’y abandonne peut-être plus facilement. Peut-être encore plus si on a déjà vu un des films de Duras. Parce que tout est vraiment pensé sous formes d’images. On fait des espèces de ‘close-up’ sur les personnages les uns après les autres, on y déconstruit le présent et les pensées de chacun, et on finit par entrer dans cette atmosphère de fin du monde liée au personnage principal Lol V. Stein. Ça vous sort complètement de la réalité banale des choses et vous force à entrevoir d’autres dimensions de la réalité.
J’ai failli donner seulement 3 étoiles, à cause du malaise que j'ai eu à sa lecture. Mais comme il est pour moi une sorte d'exploit littéraire, je donne 4 étoiles au livre.

this book almost killed me 57 times!

De toutes mes lectures des romans de Duras, il me semble que Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein a toujours tenu une place à part.
Narrateur et lecteur se confondent dans une même fascination pour comprendre le personnage de Lol, sa solitude et sa "difficulté d'être" au monde. Le roman résonne sur plusieurs aspects avec Le Vice-consul et cette relecture trois ans plus tard me prouve à quel point les deux récits sont liés. J'admire la capacité de Duras à construire l'univers de ce "cycle indien" aux toponymes incomplets, aux paysages à peine distincts... et bien sûr le magnétisme d'Anne-Marie Stretter, personnage à l'inexplicable penchant vers le légendaire.

Marguerite Duras is talented as all hell, and her approach to literature-- intimate to the point of discomfort, hushed, and filled with muted sunlight-- should be an inspiration to us all.

I will say that this is the least appealing work of Ms. Duras' that I've read thusfar. It's not that it's a bad book-- it's gorgeously written, filled with memorable imagery straight out of a Truffaut film-- but it somehow left me colder than both Moderato Cantabile and The Lover.

Duras’ writing is like taking a slow drug—something woozy and disorienting, a little foggy yet intensifying, slowing down time here, speeding it up there. Her style is fluid and incantatory; a hypnotic movement of memory and breath, a watercolor swirl of feelings on the surface of a lake that at first glance appears calm and neutral, but underneath something bubbles up, the premonition of a storm, and while reading I am waiting and waiting for that storm to break, for all the silt being churned up in the depths to come spewing out, for something real and undeniable to emerge. And does it? Does one true feeling ever burst through the overriding numbness, does Duras make good on all her romantic-obsessive meandering to show us what or who has been driving the boat, do we ever get a chance to see the characters unveil themselves completely, do we know anything or anyone by the end?
Hm.
Duras is masterful at creating tension, setting the stage for drama with a playwright’s deft hand at direction, except she is describing the inner stage, the invisible feelings and motivations playing out in each character, which our narrator intuits or invents. In many ways this narrator seemed to be incidental, a figment of everyone’s imagination, including the reader’s, there only to physically inhabit the landscape, to serve as a grounding “I/eye,” but amorphous and permeable as a phantom, occupying other characters and turning a third-person view on himself with a kind of eerie remove. I admire the confidence with which Duras sweeps her reader along, never stopping to check in and see how windblown the reader is, just coaxing and continuing, single-pointed through the fog.
The narrator wants Lol to “consume and crush me with the rest…to be bent to her will” (97), but WHY I kept asking myself, Why Why WHY? Here is where my reactions started getting personal. I recalled in my own writing how tempting it was to write myself into a tragic, numbed-out yet obsessively compelling woman character, enigmatic and evasive, beautiful in her absolute impenetrability. The term that kept coming up for me related to this portrait was “self-indulgent.” Duras’ characters talk about love, but I don’t see any of them actually feeling it. I didn’t get any real sense of the link between Tatiana and Lol—I got that Lol played out the projected madness and alienation the other characters (Jack and Tatiana) felt within, but I didn’t ever fully buy into the melodramatic intensity under which these characters lived. Perhaps I would have done better with more of a social context, something bigger to draw from than just this triadic world of disconnect and yearning and repression…And yet I also get that this was the intent, to show the self-absorption of these lives, independent of any greater story arc or historical context, just these roiling, voyeuristic, emotional beings captured and liberated by Lol’s tragic stoicism. I kept feeling myself drawn along the thread of some mystery, the answer to which (the cause of Lol’s madness, the truth behind the breakdown at the ball, etc) would be revealed at the end. But it wasn’t, really. And maybe this too was the point. But by the last line I realized I didn’t really care about any of them. They all seemed to me like actors, entertaining themselves with shows of dramatic intensity fit for the stage. And viewed from the audience, it’s intriguing—but, as it struck me, egotistical. Obviously struck a chord for me to look at more closely in my own work…