The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
My rating: 2/5 cats
nope. i do not like marguerite duras.
janet flanner, in the new yorker claims that her writing has a “shine like crystal.” and that’s probably true, if one is observing that it is as pointy and depthless as crystal, as chill and remote, as something that refracts emptily. ooooh duras BURN!!
if this is a literary bodice ripper, i gotta say i prefer the crappy contemporary ones. this one isn’t even intense with the taut tingling of repression, which also has its place and is something i can appreciate—it doesn’t all have to be desperate passions and rending of garments, but this zombie vacuity does nothing for me—nothing nothing nothing. there is nothing at stake here, just people blinking emptily at each other, speaking words with no momentum behind them, frequently non sequiturs so it seems as though they are involved in separate conversations. lack of quotation marks so that when one character will reluctantly, languidly plop out a sentence, you sometimes don’t even know which one is speaking, unless there is a back-and-forth, and then you can use context or whatever. but the one isolated word or phrase in a scene when two people are just sitting around existing, who knows who is speaking? who cares?
and i am not just pouting because no one but me wanted to read zola for the literary smut portion of our rippings, i swear. i did not like The Lover when i read it, but i had hope nonetheless. this one sounded like it could be interesting. but the french have this habit of creating highly stylized works of art that leave me cold. why do they do that? very infuriating, frenchies…
i know all the other rippers will have informed and intelligent things to say about this, and my frazzled and sweaty frustration will be coolly counteracted by more reasonable ladies (and a dude or two) with elegant and refined responses examining the psychology of characters such as these, and what duras is trying to accomplish by portraying them in this way, but i am a monster and i bust down the door and say “boring boring boring boring!!!”
also, “boring!!”
now i will go hide.
♥
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