2015: The Year of Reading Women discussion
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Marguerite Duras
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oh i would love a discussion on Duras! i've read The Lover, Malady of Death, and The Ravishing of Lol Stein. the first two books mean so much to me but i haven't had time to really explore how or why. not sure how this works yet, still getting used to navigating but i'll keep my eye on this thread!
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Hence, I'd welcome any group reads related to Duras!
Oooh, I've been rather devouring her this last year (and her films as well!) so I'll definitely be continuing into this year. Duras went through a couple relentlessly productive periods, it seems, so many more I need to get to. The Ravishing of Lol Stein next...
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Duras's books tend to be very short and quick reads. Who else wants to read her in 2015, beyond The Lover (which I actually think is her weakest, not sure why that's her most beloved one)?
I'm definitely in! Need to find/order her other titles (her films too). Had already planned to do a close re-read Malady of Death next month or Feb. Oh I'd love to check out your exploration of Duras's works, Proustitute! And anyone else's -- I'm intrigued, bordering on needing-to-know. I like The Lover for personal reasons (parallels between language in book and experiences) but it was also my first Duras so there's that sentimentality factor too. How does this work, do we figure out a starting date/timeline for a Duras group read or wait till more people get interested?
I just discovered that I have The Malady of Death, which I've also been meaning to read, in an old issue of Grove Press' The Evergreen Review. But it's only around 20 (admittedly pretty large) pages. It's not an excerpt or anything, but is that possibly the entire text, or an earlier shorter form, I wonder?
I'd love to join a Marguerite Duras group read! Not having read anything by her previously I'd be up for any book.
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Same edition I have: pretty huge font; very short.
Thanks P. I was afraid I had an earlier pre-book-length version or some such, but now I'll be happy to read this soon!
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Read Malady of Death the other day: it takes all of half an hour.
Interesting segue piece toward her more cinematic style with these hermetic and claustrophobic relationships between men and women - often in just small room settings.
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Perhaps yours is an excerpt? I'm not sure... Or maybe the font in that one is even smaller than the Grove edition I have. That was some HUGE font...
My copy is actually contained within an issue of Grove's Evergreen Review, so pretty big pages and tiny font -- it may be quite complete. I'll find out soon, I think.
Incidentally, it seems that several of you are already familiar with it, but The Ravishing of Lol Stein is pretty intense and great. I can't stop re-reading this passage: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.
I have read two novels by her and they are " The Lover" and "Malady of Death" and I loved both of them . I am a huge fan of her films like India Song. "My Dinner with André," a film I hated, is a rip-off of a much smarter, deeper film by Marguerite Duras, "Le Camion," which I highly recommend. The film industry is full of plagiarists and outright thieves.
I'm actually still reading it, slowly, aloud with my wife. So I can't answer that yet. But I wouldn't say that Duras write histrionic characters, exactly, more just wildly stylized ones enacting conceptual arcs outside any ordinary melodrama.
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margueri...