Le Navire Night / Cesarée, Cesarea / Les Mains négatives / Aurélia Steiner

by Marguerite Duras

"J'ai commencé le tournage du Navire Night le lundi 31 juillet 1978. J'avais fait un découpage. Pendant le lundi et le mardi qui a suivi, du 1ᵉʳ août, j'ai tourné les plans prévus dans le découpage. Le mardi soir, j'ai vu les rushes du lundi. Sur mon agenda, ce jour-là, j'ai écrit : film raté."

Genres: France, Fiction

192 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

I actually felt sorry for this book. There was a lot of good will here, some very promising parts but in the end Duras goes overboard (as usual, I dare say) with her minimal stylistics and depersonalization. Presented in this book are six texts by Marguerite Duras, which are supposed to be related with each other but the link isn't entirely clear as far as I'm concerned.

'Le Navire Night' is surprisingly relevant in contemporary society. It's a love story that is the equivalent of online dating - a game of secrecy, incertitude and most of all, important platonic relevance. The nameless protagonist gets entangled in a love story with an unknown woman who keeps calling him over a long period of time. He never gets to know her name, to see her face or hold her in his arms. The two photo's she sends him are a cause of great grief, because they shatter the illusion he has constructed around the voice that enchanted him over the telephone. A nice little story, but Duras can't help herself and intervenes with some very puzzling and, frankly, ridiculous passages about a man who is screaming at cats (?) and a man who talks about a very, very dull experience he once had (or didn't have, Duras is always in the dark) in Athens. A shame.

Aurélia Steiner was more interesting, although I'm not sure I really understood it. The first question is - who is Aurélia Steiner? There are three consecutive texts that bear the same name, the only difference being that the different (?) Aurélias are living in other towns (Vancouver, Melbourne and Paris). My best guess it that they are the stories of different generations of the Steiner family. There's a feint hint towards a mother-daughter relationship, some Holocaust stories, some Oedipal frustrations (I want to sleep with my daddy), in short, it's kind of fascinating but also falls flat because it lacks a real significance.

I won't even bother to talk about Cesarée or Les Mains négatives, as I felt these two texts didn't contribute in any way to the reading experience. Why are they there? Hell, I don't know. As far as I'm concerned, the book is better off without these two (short) interruptions. All in all, this wasn't really memorable. It could have been, maybe. But 'coulda', 'woulda'. It doesn't add up to much.

[Ariane Brosseau · Rating 4 out of 5]

***Seulement le Navire Night***

«Et qui tout à coup se serait arrêtée...ou qui aurait été arrêtée par la mort par exemple...
- C'est ça, oui...ou par un doute tout à coup...d'ordre général.» (p.79)

Un. doute. d'ordre. général. J'aurais embrassé Marguerite. Comme pour tous ses livres, j'ai de la difficulté à produire une critique décente. Parce que je ne les comprends pas. Ils ne me laissent qu'une forte impression qui me fait les aimer. Mais celui-ci...il est spécial.

Je crois que je l'ai aimé parce que j'y ai retrouvé une part de moi que j'avais perdue depuis longtemps. L'amoureuse. Celle qui a lu trop de romans et qui invente des histoires et qui fait une montagne avec des petits riens pour pimenter (compliquer) sa propre histoire d'amour, espérant ainsi la hisser à la hauteur de ce qu'elle croit qu'elle doit être. La fille qu'on ne suit plus et qui ne se suit plus elle-même. La fille qui fait des secrets. La fille qui disparaît sans laisser de trace. J'ai reconnu en F. l'adolescente que j'étais. Et ça m'a fait sourire.

***Je lirai les autres parties plus tard. Peut-être que j'aurai une vision plus globale et que Le Navire Night prendra une autre signification. Pour l'instant, il n'y a que celle-ci.***

[Arie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"des autres comme toi qui écoutent (écartent?) et aiment en même temps"
et il ne resta que l'encre et le silence

[vio qstr · Rating 5 out of 5]

subjuguée, Duras à cette faculté à toucher là où il le faut.

[Zowie]

ça se note pas du Duras, au même titre que ça se comprend pas, ça se rumine, ça s’expérimente, ça se savoure

[enrique lópez · Rating 5 out of 5]

“-¿Has visto esas manos?
-Las vi, nunca las he olvidado. Hace mucho tiempo. No están lejos de Altamira. Son azules.
Pero de un azul grisáceo, casi como el Océano.”

[Mikael Kuoppala · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intense, beautiful but somewhat flat text from Duras, "Le Navire Night" is the French author at her truest. A story of a passionate affair between a man and a woman who never meet each other and only communicate by phone, the novel is more current than ever in a world of internet dating and social media.

There is a touching theme of reaching out from loneliness and despair in the story, even if Duras again presents love as a damaging and neurotic force, a fundamentally primitive obsession that eats her characters alive.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

No he acabado de conectar con el libro y aún asi le doy un 2/5 porque me ha gustado el primer relato (Navire Night) y el último relato de Aurelia Steiner.

Creo que los relatos, si se les puede llamar así, de Cesaree cesarea y les mains négatives sobraban bastante.